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 ...
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.
“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.
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.
The old adage is STILL true:
“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
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.
I wonder how many FReepers would not have even been born had we had to invade the home islands?
Harry S Tubman shouldn’t have dropped the atomic bomb even if it did end civil war I...
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?
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.
It started long before then; even before my own preferred villain, LBJ
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.
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.
We should be able to dust off another for that trip.
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.
At the "1 million US dead" mark, the US sentiment would have been for the complete extermination of the Japanese race. Carthage writ large.
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