Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

The Horrors of Hiroshima in Context
Townhall.com ^ | April 21, 2016 | Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on 04/21/2016 4:41:02 AM PDT by Kaslin

The dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains the only wartime use of nuclear weapons in history.

No one knows exactly how many Japanese citizens were killed by the two American bombs. A macabre guess is around 140,000. The atomic attacks finally shocked Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese militarists into surrendering.

John Kerry recently visited Hiroshima. He became the first Secretary of State to do so -- purportedly as a precursor to a planned visit next month by President Obama, who is rumored to be considering an apology to Japan for America's dropping of the bombs 71 years ago.

The horrific bombings are inexplicable without examining the context in which they occurred.

In 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill insisted on the unconditional surrender of Axis aggressors. The bomb was originally envisioned as a way to force the Axis leader, Nazi Germany, to cease fighting. But the Third Reich had already collapsed by July 1945 when the bomb was ready for use, leaving Imperial Japan as the sole surviving Axis target.

Japan had just demonstrated with its nihilistic defense of Okinawa -- where more than 12,000 Americans died and more than 50,000 were wounded, along with perhaps 200,000 Japanese military and civilian casualties -- that it could make the Americans pay so high a price for victory that they might negotiate an armistice rather than demand surrender.

(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Japan
KEYWORDS: apologytour; hiroshima; invasionofjapan; johnkerry; nuclearweapons; resident0bama; vdh; victordavishanson; worldwarii
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-80 ... 121-130 next last
To: katana

We don’t owe the Japs anything, period.
The object of war is to WIN, and any means that achieve that end are justified.
Sometime after WWII we seem to have lost touch with that fact.


41 posted on 04/21/2016 5:41:06 AM PDT by Little Ray (NOTHING THAT SOMEONE ELSE HAS TO PAY FOR IS A RIGHT.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 20 | View Replies]

To: jmacusa; HChampagne
They've made a few.

42 posted on 04/21/2016 5:41:56 AM PDT by TangoLimaSierra (Go Ted Cruz)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 11 | View Replies]

To: HiTech RedNeck

“Japan had the will to fight by means of brute manpower, but not this kind of technology.”

Japan, the Army and the Navy, tried to build atomic bombs to use against the United States, but failed to do so before conventional B-29 bombardment raids destroyed part of the atomic research facility at the Rikken laboratories and the later atomic bomb attacks destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with more such atomic bombardments being threatened. Japan also built some super-submarines in part to transport atomic bombs into U.S. harbors and anchorages. So, Japane did have and almost have the technology to necessary to build most of the atomic bomb, but they were stopped short of their goals when the United States delayed Japanese research with air bombardments, seized German U-boats transporting German Uranium stocks to the Japanese, and completed the atomic bombs before Japan could do so.


43 posted on 04/21/2016 5:42:38 AM PDT by WhiskeyX
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 17 | View Replies]

To: Jack Hammer
and we can continue with that list to include Wake Island, The Philippines, China, Korea, Malay Peninsula, Burma, .....
44 posted on 04/21/2016 5:44:51 AM PDT by Mouton (The insurrection laws maintain the status quo now.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin
The horrific bombings are inexplicable without examining the context in which they occurred.

Of course they are. We wanted - had to? - end the war as quickly as possible. Every day it went on, more lives were lost. Extrapolate from the Iwo Jima and Okinawa invasions to get an idea, of US military, and Japanese military and civilian lives, about what an invasion of the main islands would have been like. President Truman made the right decision.

45 posted on 04/21/2016 5:46:51 AM PDT by Rummyfan (Let us now try liberty.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Jack Hammer
... Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Guam, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

The old adage is STILL true:

Ya mess with the bull; you'll get the horn!


46 posted on 04/21/2016 5:51:12 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies]

To: Eric in the Ozarks

“If the fighting had continued into 1946 or ‘47, and had the American public found out we had a weapon that would have ended the war, I believe President Truman would have faced impeachment.”

There was a school of thought that the atomic bombs should have been saved to use tactically against Japanese forces during the upcoming invasion, mostly on the Kanto Plain and Tokyo.

Hell To Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947 by D. M. Giancreco


47 posted on 04/21/2016 5:52:09 AM PDT by PLMerite (Compromise is Surrender: The Revolution...will not be kind.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Great article but I think Hanson still understates the matter.

The last slogan of the empire was 100 million for the emperor

The emperor was God and the civilians all would have died for him had he not surrendered on radio against the will of his generals.


48 posted on 04/21/2016 5:56:08 AM PDT by lonestar67 (Trump is anti-conservative / Cruz 2016)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

I wonder how many FReepers would not have even been born had we had to invade the home islands?


49 posted on 04/21/2016 5:58:40 AM PDT by Rebelbase
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Travis McGee

Harry S Tubman shouldn’t have dropped the atomic bomb even if it did end civil war I...


50 posted on 04/21/2016 5:59:34 AM PDT by a fool in paradise (Obama is more supportive of Iran's right to defend its territorial borders than he is of the USA's.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 21 | View Replies]

To: Rebelbase

About 3,300 Future American citizens will DIE today.

Not from radiation, napalm or explosives; but for a CHOICE that has been made.


Who; in their right mind; would think that the Japanese; if they had won; would have killed ~58,000,000 Americans by now?

51 posted on 04/21/2016 6:11:25 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 49 | View Replies]

To: PLMerite

My dad had recovered from burns suffered in a plane crash in the CBI when he got a notice to return to service in July of ‘45.
The events of August in Hiroshima and Nagasaki set aside the call-up.


52 posted on 04/21/2016 6:15:50 AM PDT by Eric in the Ozarks (Baseball players, gangsters and musicians are remembered. But journalists are forgotten.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 47 | View Replies]

To: Elsie

53 posted on 04/21/2016 6:17:59 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 51 | View Replies]

To: Diogenesis

It started long before then; even before my own preferred villain, LBJ


54 posted on 04/21/2016 6:22:42 AM PDT by chesley (The right to protest is not the right to disrupt.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin
The "horrific bombings" ... Look, all bombing is "horrific" - a MK82 isn't exactly dropping daisies on someone either.

Maybe my viewpoint is skewed by a practical and pragmatic engineering mindset coupled with a 30+ year career in and around the DoD. Dead is dead. It doesn't matter if it is from a nuclear weapon, a conventional bomb, an IED, or a single aimed bullet. Dead is dead. Nuclear weapons differ only in scale and some side effects.

The horrific part of this isn't that we dropped nuclear bombs. It isn't even that we had to destroy entire cities using nuclear weapons, conventional bombs, napalm, whatever. The true horror is that we had to go to war at all - that the situation degenerated into "we have to kill enough of your people and destroy enough of your resources to make you change your ways." That's the real horror. Everything else is just implementation. Who was it that said "It is well that war is so terrible, lest we should grow too fond of it?"

Anyway, to me, there is nothing particularly more or less horrifying about nuclear weapons.

55 posted on 04/21/2016 6:23:50 AM PDT by ThunderSleeps (Stop obarma now! Stop the hussein - insane agenda!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: lonestar67

That was a rather enthusiastic claim, given that there were only about 70 million Japanese at the time.

Those two bombs probably saved the lives of Tens. Of. Millions. Of. Japanese.


56 posted on 04/21/2016 6:28:32 AM PDT by DuncanWaring (The Lord uses the good ones; the bad ones use the Lord.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 48 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

We should be able to dust off another for that trip.


57 posted on 04/21/2016 6:28:41 AM PDT by SgtHooper (If you remember the 60's, YOU WEREN'T THERE!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

58 posted on 04/21/2016 6:31:42 AM PDT by norwaypinesavage (The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Eric in the Ozarks

That book covers all of that. The transfer of troops from Europe to the Pacific, draft call-ups, expected casualties, even the procurement of Purple Hearts. The Japanese anticipated with great accuracy where we would have to land and when. They were more prepared than we thought.

It would have been a Hell of a fight. All that wild celebration when they surrendered was justified, and the people didn’t even know the half of it.


59 posted on 04/21/2016 6:35:44 AM PDT by PLMerite (Compromise is Surrender: The Revolution...will not be kind.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 52 | View Replies]

To: exit82
More like 1,000,000 American dead and wounded, and over 5 million dead Japanese, military and civilian.

At the "1 million US dead" mark, the US sentiment would have been for the complete extermination of the Japanese race. Carthage writ large.

60 posted on 04/21/2016 6:41:02 AM PDT by PapaBear3625 (Big government is attractive to those who think that THEY will be in control of it.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 34 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-80 ... 121-130 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson