A point that is often brushed aside by the "Japan was ready to surrender without the Atom Bomb being used" crowd.
It took a second hit before they were willing to surrender.
It was not the destruction that caused it. The firebombing of Tokyo caused far more destruction then then the two bombs. It was that we caused so much destruction with so little effort.
The firebombing was carried out by thousands of planes and required hundreds of thousands of people working together to pull off.
But the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima required no such effort. One plane,The Enola Gay, one crew of twelve, one bomb, Little Boy.
Being able to do so much with so little brought home to Japan that when you ran the numbers there was no way to win, no way to wear down your enemy with losses of men and equipment. No way to win.
And the Japanese still didn't surrender.
A point that is often brushed aside by the "Japan was ready to surrender without the Atom Bomb being used" crowd.<<
Lost in the "NO NUKES" crowd was the Japanese involvement in bio warfare in China.
>>Biological Weapons Program
Between 1932 and 1945 Japan experiments included testing biological weapons on humans, and attacked 11 Chinese cities with biological weapons. The Japanese, as the US learned at the end of World War II, had been making significant progress learning about traditional biological warfare agents like botulism and anthrax.
The US Army sent several investigators to Japan after the war to interrogate captured Japanese scientists. Leading the team was Dr. Norbert Fell and Lt. Col. Arvo Thompson. Working with Gen. Douglas MacArthur's intelligence team at Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP), Dr. Fell and Thompson learned the full extent of the Japanese program headed by Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii.
From 1938-1945 Ishii carried on experiments against POW's, including US forces at the Mukden POW Camp in northeast China. He directed Unit 731, the secret Japanese unit engaged in human experimentation. Ishii was initially given command of the "Togo Unit" of 300 men, which rapidly grew and acquired additional "cover" identities. The first major BW facility was built at Beiyinhe, some 70km outside Harbin, known locally as the "Zhong Ma Prison Camp. Open air testing on prisoners was conducted at the the officially named "Water Purification Unit 731" at Pingfan near Harbin, a remote, desolate area on the Manchurian Peninsula. Pingfan's 6 square kilometers housed more than 150 buildings, including administrative buildings, laboratories, workers dormitories, and barracks. By 1945, the Japanese program had stockpiled 400 kilograms of anthrax to be used in a specially designed fragmentation bomb. Studies continued there until 1945, when the Unit 731 complex was leveled by burning it. <<
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/japan/bw/
Japan needed a severe wake up call. They killed millions of Chinese people.
DK
****The firebombing was carried out by thousands of planes ...
But the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima required no such effort. One plane,The Enola Gay, one crew of twelve, one bomb, Little Boy.***
And this is the REAL reason liberals and handwringers bewail the A-bomb. No one cries about the firebombing of Tokyo because many planes carrying many bombs were used whereas Hiroshima had one plane carrying one bomb.
Kind of like the bewailment of the current Isralei response to Hezbullah.
That's a VERY interesting assessment!I always felt it was the bombs!!You are undoubtedly CORRECT!!!
Let us not forget that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets. They were both shipbuilding and industrial cities which were a direct part of the Japanese war machine and would have been attacked by conventional means anyway, if there had been an invasion.
There's a reason we talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and not Tokyo and Osaka.