Did Obama send an apology?
Never forget they asked us to the dance
Don’t start a war if you don’t want to finish it.
Residents in the Japanese city of Hiroshima are commemorating the 70th anniversary of the first atomic bomb being dropped by a US aircraft.
THAT BY THE WAY.... saved projected millions of american service mens lives... not to speak of many Japanese lives..
that bomb was a LIFE SAVER... compared to the FEW lives it took..
It was Shock and Awe.. completely..
Shocked the japanese military and awed the idiot they had as an Emperor..
“It should have been Tokyo , not Hiroshima”
Hiroshima was a better strategic military target. Tokyo had already been subject to heavy conventional bombing but Hiroshima remained untouched, and needed to be targeted.
I went to Hiroshima as a Marine in the early 70s. Civilian clothes and rang the bell. No problems except we drank to much warm sake and had to return to our base drunk!
The thing is that we needed him to live so we could easily pacify, after surrender, what had become one big national death cult, obedient only the emperor.
Hey, Japan, you started it. Get over it!
Perhaps, instead of helping you become a post-war economic powerhouse, the US should have treated Japan the way Japan treated people it conquered.
I remember the day well. I was 13 years old and we all cheered.
Now I feel ashamed that I did that, but the adults were happy that the end was near.
War is hell.
.
We’re coming up on the 70th anniversary (August 6 and 9, 1945) of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, consequently I’ve been reading up on those horrendous (but necessary) events. I always thought Truman was a bit unfeeling about his decision. However, in moments of candor he would shake his head and mutter, “all those women and children!” He also suffered from severe migraines as a result of the decision. It was a simple decision; either the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki must die or the flower of American youth would die in an invasion of Japan scheduled for later that year. Re: Fat Man (plutonium implosion bomb, Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima was a gun barrel U-235 bomb), dropped on Nagasaki August 9, 1945 - 20 kiloton, or 20,000 tons of TNT. The temperature at its core was 60 million degrees centigrade, ten thousand times hotter than the surface of the sun, and its blinding flash was far brighter. It created a pressure of 100 billion atmospheres (atmospheric pressure at sea level is 14.7 p.s.i.). That’s a tremendous blast from the destruction of mere .7 grams of matter. The amount of plutonium actually undergoing fission was lighter than the weight of a dollar bill. Grasp that and you can fathom E=MC^2. All told probably 340,000 Japanese died as a result of those two bombs, more than all American deaths in WW II.
One such casualty is referenced below. The photograph below was taken by an American photojournalist, Joe O’Donnell, in Nagasaki in 1945. He informed a Japanese interviewer about this picture:
“I saw a boy about ten years old walking by. He was carrying a baby on his back. In those days in Japan, we often saw children playing with their little brothers or sisters on their backs, but this boy was clearly different. I could see that he had come to this place for a serious reason. He was wearing no shoes. His face was hard. The little head was tipped back as if the baby were fast asleep.
The boy stood there for five or ten minutes. The men in white masks walked over to him and quietly began to take off the rope that was holding the baby. That is when I saw that the baby was already dead. The men held the body by the hands and feet and placed it on the fire. The boy stood there straight without moving, watching the flames. He was biting his lower lip so hard that it shone with blood. The flame burned low like the sun going down. The boy turned around and walked silently away.”
Yes, I know that those bombs were necessary but these photos are heart rending. I would have done the same thing. Unfortunately, in all out total war the innocent must die.
http://kenpro-kobe.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/nagasaki1945boy.jpg
The three children were orphaned by the bombing of Nagasaki:
https://tokyo5.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/nagasaki-orphans.jpg
Meanwhile the rest of Asia wishes we’d dropped more on Japan, especially, the Chinese.
These Rapatronic camera images are always fascinating to me, There’s something other worldly and primordial about them:
Remember Pearl Harbor !
“I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant.” (The words of one of the Japanese officers onboard one of the ships that participated in taking the Jap planes & launching them to attack Pearl Harbor. He was correct in the foreboding he had.)
Back in ‘41, after Pearl Harbor, the US public was willing to get behind a war effort to bring about total victory. Modern-day America would lose interest after a couple weeks. Meanwhile, the dems would be “reaching out” to Tojo to “come to the negotiating table,” with an offer to hand over half the Hawaiian islands as a “good-faith” gesture.
From that last source ...
"Banzai rushOn July 7, the battle to secure the Japanese-occupied island of Saipan crested in one of the largest banzai charges of the Pacific War. That charge — which lasted more than 15 hours — brought the total combined Japanese and American casualties for the bloody campaign to more than 30,000.
"Suddenly there is what sounded like a thousand people screaming all at once, as a hoard of 'mad men' broke out of the darkness before us. Screams of 'Banzai' fill the air, Japanese officers leading the 'devils from hell,' their swords drawn and swishing in circles over their heads. Jap soldiers were following their leaders, firing their weapons at us and screaming 'Banzai' as they charged toward us.
Our weapons opened up, our mortars and machine guns fired continually. No longer did they fire in bursts of three or five. Belt after belt of ammunition went through that gun, the gunner swinging the barrel left and right. Even though Jap bodies built up in front of us, they still charged us, running over their comrades' fallen bodies. The mortar tubes became so hot from the rapid fire, as did the machine gun barrels, that they could no longer be used." - First Lieutenant John C. Chapin
July 8th quickly became the beginning of the end. The Japanese had spent the last of their unit manpower in the banzai charge; now it was time for the final American "mop-up." LVTs rescued men of the 105th Infantry who had waded out from the shore to the reef to escape the Japanese. Holland Smith then moved most of the 27th Infantry into reserve, and put the Second Marines back on the line of attack, with the 105th Infantry attached. Together with the Fourth Marines, they swept north toward the end of the island.
By the time the Americans reached the northern end of Saipan on July 9, thousands of the island's men, women, and children were at the top of the cliffs overlooking the shark-infested waters. And because of pre-invasion propaganda that had been distributed by the Japanese to citizens of the island, many natives were horrified of being tortured and maimed if captured by the Americans.
Despite loud speaker efforts of Americans attempting to persuade the enemy away from the cliffs, reason would not come to be. Hundreds of natives and soldiers jumped from the cliffs of northern Saipan (some were thrown by Japanese soldiers), while others committed suicide by holding onto grenades in caves. All but 1,000 of the Japanese military soldiers were dead, along with 22,000 civilians."
There was a lot of nasty revisionist propaganda in American newspapers beginning in the fifties stating the A-Bombings were cruel and un-necessary. I remember reading these stoopid letters-to-the-editor from domestic traitors ignoring that at least one million U.S. troops were being prepared for invasion and hundreds of thousands would be lost. The Japanese losses would easily be in the millions. And that's before considering the trouble that would be caused by Stalin with further Communist expansion.
