I am not 2nd guessing history and I’ve heard all the arguments for and reasons why we dropped the bomb. Yet, even so, I think of the children happily playing in the streets, the moms reading books to thier children, and all those kinds of things as a bomb comes falling down from the sky. Rather than fight army to army, we chose to drop hellacious bombs on civilians, it just doesn’t sit well with me, and I hope it never happens again. I’m proud to be an American and greatful to the Good Lord that I was born here, and my children, nonetheless, when I think of those bombs, I think of those things.
While hear what you are saying, we are losing/have lost the idea of what war is. There are no civilians in war.
I believe this is why such things as the Flight 93 Memorial and Ground Zero mosque are not splitting hairs when discussing conquest. The objective IS conquest, not fighting army to army.
We are and have been in G-war for a long time. There are no lines, even if some people wear skirts.
There are millions of AMERICAN kids who would never enjoy the love of a grandfather.
We finished it. (And saved countless lives in the process.)
We need to finish the mess with the muslims now.
I think we need to look back at what would have happened if we hadn’t used the bomb. President Truman had the X Plan. This plan, if used, would have totally wiped out the Japanese Nation. Millions of people would have died in Japan. Americans, at that time, had had enough of the Japanese war machine and they knew that they would have never quit fighting. The X Plan was designed to wipe the Japanese off the face of the earth. None of it is good, just as war is hell I guess.
Pal? It was world war. Their leaders were continuing to fight . Even after the first bomb, they refused to quit.
The lobbing of those bombs is what brought peace and closure to that war.
Since then we rebuilt their economy and have been paid back many fold in goods , services and friendship.
Its too bad that Obama chooses to go on to frustrate/ destroy yet another American relationship with its allies. For him? Its all about dhiminishing and marginalizing America. Shame on him, shame on us for allowing it.
Hiroshima was a major port, army facility and storage area (but not a fortress itself), and was one of the few Japanese cities not burned out by firestorms - Several of which killed more of your “peaceful” civilians than either of the two A-bombs did. ALL Japanese “civilians” at that time were in the war effort building arms and support hardware in in-home machine shops and assembly areas. Few factories were in place as in the US.
WITHOUT the A-bombs to convince the Emporor to demand the general end the war, an estimated 3-5 million Japanese “civilians” would have killed themselves in kamikaze-style suicide (armed mass charges) attacks during the invasion the next months by the US and Soviet armies.
Your attitude doesn’t reflect the facts.
In WWII Germans bombed civilian targets and allies replied in kind. Likewise, we regularly bombed civilian targets in Japan. More Japanese civilians dies from conventional bombs that the nuclear bombs.
Now if we have a bomb that accidentally kills a dozen or so civilians, it makes the front page of the newspapers (at least it did when Bush was president).
Of course, our enemy regularly kills civilians and there is little outcry from anyone.
Goodle Operation Downfall, the umbrealla plan for Operations Coronet and Olympic. These spell out in detail the U.S. Order of Battle and what the human cost would’ve been had we opted for the invasion of the Home Islands rather than use the atom bomb. HST did the right thing.
We have reached a point in modern history when our own citizens would rather sacrifice the life of their neighbor, coworker, or the father and mother of their children's friends instead of the murdering enemy.
Those bombs saved the lives of 5 to 10 million Japanese.
Creating peace with Japan while leaving the military in control would’ve cost the lives of many more Japanese, Koreans, Chinese and others.
Your OUT of your freaken mind!!
Hieroshima was chosen because it was a military target, not to incinerate civilians.
We killed MORE civilians in the fire-bombing of Dresden, and THAT was not a civilian target.
After the suicidal attacks and losses on Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the U.S. RIGHTLY decided that a landing of military forces in Japan would have incurred unacceptable casualties in the lives of American boys - TOO MANY of whom had ALREADY died to kill the racist bastards who ran the Japanese Empire. It would ALSO have incurred HIGHER civilian losses in Japan - NOT THAT IS THE SLIGHTEST CONCERN TO ME.
ADDITIONALLY, even AFTER the bombing of Nagasaki, the Japanese Imperial Command was STILL bent on fighting. We had a THIRD nuclear bomb on the way. Only AFTER massive conventional bombing of Tokyo did they FINALLY decide to surrender.
BY THE WAY, the Germans were WORKING on a nuclear bomb before we defeated them. THEY would have had NO scruples about bombing New York with it.
Your misplaced social concerns are the DIRECT result of cultural equivalence and the failure to assess WHY we fighting the Japs.
Ask the people of Korea and citizens of China, and the survivors of Nanking, Bataan and other victims of Imperial Japanese Racism what THEY would have thought about agonizing over dropping the bomb on these bastards.
WE WERE RIGHT - VERY RIGHT and the JAPS were WRONG - VERY WRONG!!!
You ARE second-guessing history!If you had taken the requisite amount of time to study the War in The Pacific,you wouldn’t make such foolishly quaint references such as”children playing in the streets”etc.,etc.,The Japanese believed in TOTAL WAR.Those children would been armed to the teeth(as would every other japanese)had we chosen to invade.It was estimated that we might very well have suffered a million casualties(dead and wounded),and the japanese millions more!!!
the Japanese had no such reservations about their killing of civilians during their brutal butchery throughg China prior to our entry. Sure Fat Man and Little Boy took out many civilians in a single blast but tha Japanese probably killed just as many during their tour of China.
Personally, I had nothing to do with World War Two but I admire and applaud Harry Truman for doing what he did. He looked at the alternatives and didn’t like them. The shortest way to win the war was to send the Enola Gay and Bock’s Car to do what they had to do. Well done President Truman, 65 years on.
My Dad was on Okinawa awaiting the invasion of Japan. So, pardon me if I take your statement above and have the luxury of being able to remember those things for myself.
WWII was total war. At least as many people - including “children happily playing in the streets, the moms reading books to thier children, and all those kinds of things” - were killed during the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo.
War is H#ll
If the A-bombs hadn’t been used, even more of those people - FAR more - would have suffered and died just as horribly.
Perhaps you should think of the young men that had been plucked off the streets of the United States to fight in far away lands who would never get the chance to father young children or to return to the wife and children they had.
I’m rather certain they would have rather been watching their children play in the streets at home, rather than suffer the brutality and indignity of having their body parts strewn across the ground of some South Pacific atol.
We can all think of an idyllic setting with a nuke going off overhead, and mourn the loss of life. We can also face what happened knowing that other life was preserved by this act.
How many U. S. citizens are alive today because their dads returned home to father them? How many of their offspring are out there?
I’d venture to say we’re talking about tens of millions of people in all. Focus on them. Focus on them playing in the front yard, or carrying on their activities in idyllic settings.
And mourn for the tens of millions who do not play in these idyllic settings, because an empire decided to conquer other nations, and be as brutal as it could be in the process.
Cry for our own tens of millions who do not exist, before you cry for their hundreds of thousands who ceased to exist.
“I am not 2nd guessing history and I’ve heard all the arguments for and reasons why we dropped the bomb. Yet, even so, I think of the children happily playing in the streets, the moms reading books to thier children, and all those kinds of things as a bomb comes falling down from the sky. Rather than fight army to army, we chose to drop hellacious bombs on civilians, it just doesn’t sit well with me, and I hope it never happens again. I’m proud to be an American and greatful to the Good Lord that I was born here, and my children, nonetheless, when I think of those bombs, I think of those things.”
It’s okay to feel that way, any life lost in war is a tragedy. But remember, too, our citizens, military and civilian, who were bombed and killed one sunny morning in Pearl Harbor, when no state of war existed. We had to drop those bombs, because hundreds of thousands of more lives would be lost trying to invade the island of the nation that would never surrender. It was probably one of the hardest decisions to make, to drop those bombs, in the history of the world.
I was behind a car yesterday with the “survivor of Pearl Harbor” plate on it. Ask them, if we did the right thing. Ask them if your feelings are okay - and I think you’ll find that they agree with you, but also know from being there, why we had to do it.
It’s something that will never reconcile itself for anyone. We didn’t start the war, but we HAD to end it, to stop the killing of millions of our people, and theirs.