Posted on 08/02/2014 8:08:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
This week Major Theodore Van Kirk, the last surviving Veteran of the Enola Gay that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, joined the rest of his comrades. His passing is a reminder of why using the atomic bomb was the right thing.
In August 1945 the Allied Powers, led by the United States, were at war with Imperial Japan in the latter days of World War II. Japan would not give up. For every ten thousand Japanese soldiers that were killed by the Allies only a minuscule amount gave up; usually in the single digits.
We were at war because Japan launched war, first against China in 1931, then with another sneak attack against China in 1937, and finally in December 1941 with sneak Japanese attacks against the US at Pearl Harbor and sneak attacks against the United Kingdom and the Netherlands in other areas of the Pacific.
It was during the war that the United States began to develop an atomic bomb, largely in response to the urging of Albert Einstein who warned President Roosevelt, in 1939, about Germany’s attempts to make an atomic weapon.
Japan was a tough enemy. Surrender was seen as more than even disgrace; it was a dishonor to the Japanese Emperor, who was the Japanese God. The Japanese were allies of the Nazis. Comparing the two, the Nazis were evil but also methodical. The Nazis were fanatical about only one thing; the elimination of the Jews, a practice they kept up to the literal ending of the war in Europe in May of 1945. The Germans were a tough enemy but they were, by World War II standards, in their military operations, somewhat practical especially when Hitler was ignored. Germans did surrender by the hundreds of thousands years before the war ended. This was not the case of Imperial Japan and in fact Japanese non surrender got worse the closer we got to the shores of Japan. The Japanese soldier was fighting not just for their buddy, their family, or their homeland; they were fighting for their God.
The United States was inching closer to Japan in early and mid-1945. The island campaigns of Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the latter an island of mere miles, resulted in tens of thousands of casualties. The Japanese began going beyond even fanatical resistance to suicidal resistance by crashing their planes into American ships. Even then there was no hope for Japan. American submarines had nearly run out of targets, having surrounded Japan, and were reduced to shelling fishing boats and even targets on land. American planes were firebombing Japanese cities into oblivion. Japan was alone and starvation was a realistic possibility but they would not give up. Japan would have to be invaded.
Operation Downfall was the code name for the invasion of Japan. It was to be the largest and deadliest military operation of all time. If you saw Saving Private Ryan, the first stage of the invasion of Japan, Operation Olympic, was projected to be twice as large and twice as bloody as the invasion of Europe on D Day. The second stage of the invasion of Japan, Operation Coronet, was to be almost three times as large as D day and with even greater casualties than the first phase of the invasion of Japan.
Unlike D Day, the topographic composition of Japan made the landing locations obvious. Japan knew where we were going to land and they were ready for this last stand. Even children were taught in the ways of the sword and the spear so they could kill at least one American before they too would die for their Emperor. This happened with Japanese children in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and throughout Japan.
To save American and Japanese lives and end the war, President Truman ordered the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Tens of thousands were instantly killed by the bomb dropped from the Enola Gay, the plane navigated by Maj. Van Kirk. The Japanese still did not surrender. Their military council was divided on surrendering. Three days later another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki also killing tens of thousands. More would die of radiation poisoning in years ahead.
The war council still was divided on surrendering but some Japanese officers looked to end the war and asked the Emperor to use his divine authority to stop the killing. The Soviet Union had entered the war against Japan, American planes were destroying what little was left of other Japanese cities, and an American POW told his captors that the next atomic bomb would be dropped on Tokyo.
It took the personal intervention of the Emperor to end the war. Even after their God had intervened and said to the Army that the war must end, some Japanese were not ready to give up. A group of Army officers launched a failed coup against the Emperor, ostensibly to save their God from shame. After the coup failed the Emperor spoke on radio to tell his people to surrender. It was the first time the Japanese people had ever heard his voice. Many of the Japanese soldiers who did not get the word from the Emperor continued to fight in isolated Pacific pockets until the mid-1970’s, almost 30 years after the end of the war.
Any argument from leftist leadership that we should not have used the bombs, against this fanatical an enemy, shows why leftist leadership is not fit to teach our students.
The leftists are fools when it comes to the atomic bomb debate. They argue that the bomb was dropped because of Soviet entry into the war on Japan on August 9, the day Nagasaki was bombed. What the leftists conveniently leave out is that the bomb was shipped to the Pacific before the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan and that the United States asked the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan.
Another common leftist argument is the bombs were dropped in quick succession in order to stop the Soviet Union from invading Northern Japan. This argument is laughable because the bombs were dropped three days apart and then Truman put a halt on further usage after August 9, leaving five days between the dropping of the second bomb and the end of the war.
Finally, leftists say how could you kill so many people? This is a typical argument from those who have never had to make such a decision as Truman did or other decisions of life and death. Truman was faced with kill now and hopefully end the war or have even more killed on both sides by not using the bomb. (Leftists apparently forget that even their beloved Soviet Union entered the war against Japan. Soviet lives were saved too by Truman.)
This is what leftism does; it plants seeds in people leading them to believe that America is somehow responsible for all the evils in the world, even when America has achieved victory and done well. They will even do it even with World War II, which no sane person can argue with our participation in. They are shameful and are a disgrace to the generation that made it through the Depression and fought, and won, World War II.
Knowing leftist emotion, if the bomb had not been used on Japan, and millions of American casualties occurred, along with tens of millions of Japanese casualties, the leftists would say that we should have used the bomb to alleviate the suffering of the war. Such as the argument of those who were protected by the Enola Gay.
Ask any living soldier from the Pacific, and those were ready to be shipped there from Europe and the USA, who is still alive whether they were happy the bomb was dropped they will respond with “Thank God the bomb was dropped.”
President Truman was an independent thinker and not a man to be pushed around. His desegregation of the armed forces and recognition of the new State of Israel were evidence of that. He was also a combat veteran. He knew the carnage of war and understood that hard decisions need to be made in war.
It will be interesting to see where the history books, backed by their common core allies and government employee teachers, go with teaching the atomic bomb in years ahead. Before all the Veterans of World War II had even begun to die in large numbers, the leftist jargon against usage of the bomb began. They have spared not even Truman, though Truman was a democrat, for their blind rage knows no bounds. It will get worse once all of the generation that made it through the Depression, and won the war, have passed away.
This is why we should, loudly and boldly, teach that it was right to drop the bomb and why. This is why we should honor the military service of Theodore Van Kirk and those who dropped the atomic bombs. They saved the lives of many of our readers, in America, Japan, and elsewhere.
To Major Theodore Van Kirk we say thank you. It was a tough mission, but you can rest well. You saved countless lives. Welcome home from your final mission. Your comrades are waiting.
And Curtis Lemay isn't even appropriate to include in a list like that. He openly admitted that he would probably be prosecuted for war crimes if the U.S. lost the war, because of the heinous nature of his war strategy ... so I'll let him stand as his own judge an jury on that one.
I'll even go so far as to suggest that Lemay -- and probably the others as well -- weren't even planning their war strategy around the defeat of the Japanese. More likely, they were fighting the next war to defend America's new global empire from the Soviets.
Oh, stop the theatrics, dude. With all due respect, I find it hard to believe that firebombings and atomic bombings of Japanese cities in the 1940s are the only thing that keeps me from being an enslaved man right now.
The passage in question was from the movie rendition of a court-martial trial during the Boer War in which the government and military leaders were the ones carrying out an outrageous prosecution of their own soldiers.
It's kind of disingenuous for anyone to use a quote from a military lawyer defending court-martialed soldiers for their actions in the heat of battle, to defend government and military leaders in Washington D.C. who weren't making any decisions in the heat of battle back in 1945.
Like you say,”...I find it hard to believe...”. By the by, you are enslaved.
?? The President is CIC and directs the overall war strategy at the highest level.
Generals follow orders.
FDR and all his advisors were from the old-money “Eastern Establishment”, they were all Rockefeller/wall street/harvard/yale/etc. men, starting with Sect’y of War Stimson.
“The story is that an Allied bomb hit the barn of some farm near a German factory. That gave Hitler the excuse to send his V2 to London, as we had started attacking “civilians”. Not sure how true it is.”
Fiction.
“Some of us grew up surrounded by the vets of WWII and we tend to take the events of that war as common knowledge. But someone now in college would have been born around the time of the first Gulf War and they weren’t glued to a black and white television watching Victory at Sea.”
Perfect.
Funny how those of us who are one generation separated from those who fought and read or were alive while it was going on have one concept, and those two and three generations later drink the kool-aid.
At any rate, high altitude bombing didn't get the job done. LeMay had the go low to get effects. I don't doubt that the two weeks before the bomb were easy on the B-29 crews, the Japs were shepherding their resources for the invasion they knew was coming.
On another note, combat losses were dwarfed by training losses and non-combat losses overseas. So while the thought of 5000 dive bombers a day sounds good, it isn't remotely feasible given the resources available. With no intel, there wouldn't be any targets.
It was invasion or the bomb, anything else is a pipe dream. Again, how many flyers or other military personnel would you sacrifice to avoid using the bomb?
The Japanese soldier certainly wouldn't, for the civilian population wouldn't want to be them. Most certainly, the US POWs would have starved.
And he ignored the fact that even after the bomb was dropped on one of their cities they did not surrender. And after the second they still had to be forced into it.
So what would Stewart's little plan done? Wasted the third bomb, which was the last one we would have for a few months.
Explains why he is a third rate comedian rather then anyone of value.
Atomic weapons were the least of our worries with Japan. They were working on a weaponized version of the Bubonic Plague and were very close to perfecting it.
Can you imagine the carnage that would have caused in Asia and Europe?
How? By soliloquy?
And we promptly brought the researchers doing the plague development into the USA to work for us in developing those weaponized plagues.
The Japanese relied upon imports for more than rice. Much of the grain and meat came from the mainland. But more than that, it was not the actual food as much as the internal food distribution system. By July 1945, the allied blockade had become internal to home waters. The coastal shipping that Japan relied upon for domestic commerce had been savaged by air attack, mining and submarine operations. The internal rail links were fragile, and were the next items on Curtis LeMay’s interdiction schedule.
Richard Frank documented all of this in “Downfall.” The Japanese were already on starvation rations during the summer of 1945. The destruction of the internal rail links would have reduced the food consumption even more. Frank estimated that as many as 20,000,000 Japanese would not have survived the winter even without an actual invasion. And those deaths would have been predominately the old, very young, and sick. Think of Leningrad on a national scale.
In fact, the very first thing the American occupation forces realized was that the Japanese were starving, and immediately began a program of food relief. Even though such an action was not politically popular in the United States.
It’s still use of a WMD against civilians. It doesn’t matter when it is used.
” afterward we’ll smile, buy the survivors drinks and ask “Hey, can we just get along now?” And then we rebuild the place.”
Yeah, we have a history of that. People call us an “Empire”, but I don’t see it. We’ve never kept much that other countries in different times would have kept.
Typical from someone ignoring the facts of WW2 .It took until late 1944 for the Allies to have the kind of air superiority you posit and bombers of that era flying at low altitude were very vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire from the ground. Vietnam era aircraft were vulnerable to surface to air missiles;McCain got shot down flying below the altitude he was supposed to be flying!The Gulf War smart bombs ,stealth aircraft,terrain-following missiles and all that were not available to the U.S.A, or Great Britain prior to the 1980s.
AA is a valid bombing target.
Read my post from wikipedia, it describes the generally accepted fact that Japan was in decline and there was not coming back. It was all downhill. No more carriers left, fewer and few planes every day.
Planes can be destroyed far more quickly than they can be built.
And what you run out of first is skilled pilots. Once you run out of skilled pilots your air force is no match for an air force loaded up with skilled pilots. You may get some “kamakazi” hits scored, but not many if your air force receives the full brunt of attack from a well-equipped, well-trained air force.
AA guns can be photographed from 30,000 ft and targeted for desctruction.
Just imagine if all the ordnance dumped on cities randomly was aimed at AA batteries.
There should have an an AIR WAR. Air-to-air combat. If there planes don’t come up to fight, they are destroyed on the ground. Their runways should have been bombed with the massive ordnance that was instead dropped on civilians.
Every day you keep doing sorties to flush out their air defences. Every AA action is reported back, and the next sorties go and destroy what was shooting. You keep doing this until nothing flies and nothing shoots at you. Then you have air supremecy.
Rather than fight their air force and finish it off, our leadership chose to fly above them beyond their reach and do area bombing - as if a valid goal of war is to lay waste to cities.
The whole “big bomber” design is not useful for hitting individual targets. It is designed for carpet bombing from altitude. It’s a weapon with that one use, area bombing. Because they do not fly around dropping one bomb at a time, they let the whole load go at once.
Think of how many P-51’s and dive bombers could have been manufactured if we never built any B-17’s or B-29’s. The B-25 was small enough do successful low-level targeted bombing.
That’s why the in reality the “race was on” to drop the atomic bombs before they surrendered.
The goal of the elites was to actually drop atomic bombs in wartime.
This created the “atomic age” of war.
If this was never done in war, nuclear weapons would be viewed as a crazy weapon that was not practical to use, as they simply wipes out civilian populations and thus are simply weapons with which to induce terror into the minds of civilians.
“Duck and cover”.
So you do wish we had lost the war. What a stupid concept, to think that we had the intel and targeting capability to attack successfully individual targets. But what of the indiscriminate fragmentation? That could kill 'innocents' as well.
AA guns can be photographed from 30,000 ft and targeted for desctruction.
With what in WWII? Our satellites? AA was and is mobile, no ongoing intel/comm pictures a few hours old are useless considering the CEP of the weapon systems of that era.
Every day you keep doing sorties to flush out their air defences. Every AA action is reported back, and the next sorties go and destroy what was shooting. You keep doing this until nothing flies and nothing shoots at you. Then you have air supremecy.
What are you, ten? You have all this regard for the civilians of Japan, but obviously none for American airmen. No way to communicate those positions for the 'second' strike. You have no concept of what WWII was about tactically, you continue to embarrass yourself for the sake of your Just War theory. Just argue that, leave aviation, targeting, intel, communications, and any other defense related topic off the table.
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