Posted on 08/05/2015 1:34:09 PM PDT by DFG
Here we are, 70 years after the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I’m wondering if we’ve come even one step closer to a moral reckoning with our status as the world’s only country to use atomic weapons to slaughter human beings. Will an American president ever offer a formal apology? Will our country ever regret the dropping of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” those two bombs that burned hotter than the sun? Will it absorb the way they instantly vaporized thousands of victims, incinerated tens of thousands more, and created unimaginably powerful shockwaves and firestorms that ravaged everything for miles beyond ground zero? Will it finally come to grips with the “black rain” that spread radiation and killed even more people — slowly and painfully — leading in the end to a death toll for the two cities conservatively estimated at more than 250,000?
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
Funny you should mention that. Just out of OTS (and intel school) in the mid-80s, I was assigned to an F-4 wing. My boss was a Capt who had just returned a tour at Osan AB, Korea. She mentioned going shopping off-base one day in early August, and noticed some of the older Koreans wearing formal clothing and displaying ceremonial lanterns outside their homes.
Back on base, she asked a Korean Colonel if there was a ROK holiday in early August. He smiled and shook his head, then asked: “Don’t you know what happened today? This is the day you dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima?” He went on to explain that Koreans who lived through the Japanese occupation and World War II regarded the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as two of the greatest events in human history.
Like many other groups in Asia, the Koreans suffered horribly at the hands of the Japanese. When I was there, the only Japanese-made consumer goods were motorcycles, and all of the Japanese manufacturers had Korean partners. They knew ROK consumers would not buy a bike with a “purely Japanese” name.
Most historians agree that the use of nuclear weapons on Japan saved lives on both sides. What’s the problem with that.
The lesson to the world was don't mess with the U.S....at least back in the 1940s.
A family member was aboard an American ship, bound for Japan. His commanding officer lined them up single file. He said, “Look to your right & to your left. Of the three of you, two of you will be killed in the landing on Japan.” They were very sober; then that same day Truman used the bomb on Japan. Then the ship carrying the American soldiers turned around and came HOME. He was a little younger than my father, who was a hardened combat veteran of N. Africa, Sicily, Italy & Germany. He would have been sent to Japan IF Truman hadn’t used the weapon at his disposal. - It was a different time; but will repeat itself if all who would choose war over peace have their way.
I don't think nut cases like this chump, ever considered the ramifications of an invasion of the home islands. It seems to me, those were the only two choices. I am pretty sure the Germans and Japanese were trying to develop nucs. Does anyone with an ounce of brains think they wouldn't have used them?
Yes ... it was very convenient ... throughout the war, USSR loudly maintained neutrality. USSR merchant ships sailed around like there wasn't a war on. US bomber crews that diverted to USSR were interned, their aircraft seized. When Japan was obviously defeated, the damned commies declared war hoping to pick up some swag.
Stalin was a nasty piece of work.
Too bad there isn’t some way to get these smug, revisionist bastages into the first wave of the invasion 70 years ago for not using ‘the bomb.’
The Germans were trying to develop nukes. That’s why the Allies took out some heavy water facility or other to slow them down. I don’t think the Japs were that far along, if at all. Hell, we probably wouldn’t have got the Bomb when we did if it wasn’t for OUR German scientists.
Japan started a war with us with a surprise attack on us without declaring war. They were vicious and inhumane to civilians and prisoners.
Whatever happened to the Japanese afterwards is manifestly THEIR fault. They’re lucky we didn’t deliver on Halsey’s promise that, after the war, the only place Japanese would be spoken was in Hell.
While these “SMALL BRAINED” pecker heads continue to spill buckets of “CROCODILE TEARS” on the “VICTIMS” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not one of them seem to realize the atrocities these monsters committed in the countries they conquered. No one wants to talk about the millions of people they tortured and killed in CHINA, PHILIPPINES, FRENCH INDO CHINA, MALAYSIA, BURMA, INDONESIA. The way these bastards treated their POWS. I was a 7 year old POW in the Philippines. And thank GOD for the president these monsters appointed, who wrote a release for all my family, and we spent the next 3 years in the jungle. I, along with the people that are still alive, were witnesses to their brutality. What about us? Don’t we count?
Yes. They weren't very far along, though, for a variety of reasons. They lacked material resources, and lacked personnel. Germany, in particular, had driven out the best of their physicists.
Many of them were Jewish, you see ...
They ended up in America, working for Leslie Groves.
I just related this to another Freeper...
I knew an interesting guy one time, who was in his mid to late 80s, and he was an officer assigned to the prospective occupation of Japan once the war was over. He was supposed to be the Provost Marshal of the Hiroshima prefecture (if that’s the right word) but the way things turned out, he never went there.
They sent him instead to Korea, where he was assigned to get the Japanese troops out of the country and back to Japan as quickly as possible… As he said, before the Koreans killed all of them.
I said something once that was relatively complementary about the Japanese, and he nearly spit on the ground. I asked his friend later, and he told me that he absolutely detested the Japanese, even after all these years.
He said that some of the things his friend had told him would make your hair curl, and he wasn’t surprised that his friend felt that way.
Let me guess, christian appy is 21 yrs old, a democrat/leftist/progressive and a homosexual.
5.56mm
Funny you should mention that. Just out of OTS (and intel school) in the mid-80s, I was assigned to an F-4 wing. My boss was a Capt who had just returned a tour at Osan AB, Korea. She mentioned going shopping off-base one day in early August, and noticed some of the older Koreans wearing formal clothing and displaying ceremonial lanterns outside their homes.
Back on base, she asked a Korean Colonel if there was a ROK holiday in early August. He smiled and shook his head, then asked: “Don’t you know what happened today? This is the day you dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima?” He went on to explain that Koreans who lived through the Japanese occupation and World War II regarded the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as two of the greatest events in human history.
Like many other groups in Asia, the Koreans suffered horribly at the hands of the Japanese. When I was there, the only Japanese-made consumer goods were motorcycles, and all of the Japanese manufacturers had Korean partners. They knew ROK consumers would not buy a bike with a “purely Japanese” name.
Never count on your enemy being a bunch of genocidal, racist idiots ... just be grateful when it happens.
You miss one interesting fact.
Even AFTER we nuked Nagasaki, part of the Japanese Army attempted a coup. They tried to seize the emperor on the pretext that he was a dupe of “evil advisors” and prevent him from trasmitting the surrender message to the Japanese People. It just BARELY failed.
The nukes were necessary, unless, of course, you wanted to take the million plus casualties necessary to subdue the Japanese in ground combat (and a LOT more casualties than that for the Japanese...).
It took TWO demonstrations on occupied cities to persuade the Japs. Since they were unconvinced by the destruction of Hiroshima, I comclude that wilderness demonstrations would be similarly ineffective at persuading them.
“In May 1945 General George C. Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the Army, revived the idea of using poison gas against bypassed Japanese defenses during the invasion of Japan. He intended to use poison gas on a relatively limited scale against individual bunkers, caves and the like housing detachments of Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender. Marshall apparently did not envision spraying over a wide area. This proposal reached President Harry Truman in June. He vetoed it on the basis that it violated the policy of “no first use” set by President Roosevelt. What might have happened if the U.S. became embroiled in a lengthy and very costly struggle in the Japanese Home Islands is hard to say.”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/pacific-online-forum/
President Truman used the weapons needed to limit the number of American casualties (which allowed me to be born and be a part of the “baby boom” after the war.)
The fact that the war was scheduled to last into 1948...
(why we had surplus 18” barrel liners for our Battleships to use in Vietnam, Korea, and Ourraq...and surplus .45 ammo on the market until a few years ago...)
Lucky for Japan that we did drop the bombs and that the Ruskies wanted their share of Japan.PERIOD
“Diplomacy is saying nice dogie...
until you find a Big rock.” -Will Rogers
The heroes of Telemark?
I guess the libnt forgot Truman warned the Emperor as well as dropped 5 million leaflets on Japanese cities including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I guess the libnut forgot Japan didn’t warn the US before Pearl Harbor
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