[Kaslin]

Victor Davis Hanson Column

Please Freepmail me if you want to be added, or removed from the ping list

[ronnie raygun]

Making America the enemy, our schools are instructed not to teach the truth so our children believe we are the aggressor and the evil instead of the evil itself. Today it’s islam

[Diogenesis]

Obama is the evil that has transformed America
into its own enemy ... until the undocumented
Indonesian is removed.

[Jack Hammer]

Before president weenie apologizes to anyone, let him get an apology for Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Guam, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

For a start.

What an *sshole.

[HChampagne]

Has Japan apologized for Nanking?

[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.

[Samwell Tarly]

One of the most fascinating spectacles that I ever witnessed took place in a history classroom when I was in college. A fellow student and the (very liberal) instructor got into a polite, but nonetheless fierce debate about the use of the atomic bombs. And this student was HAMMERING the prof with statistics and estimates of casualties that Japan would have suffered in an invasion by American forces, so persuasively that the instructor ALMOST conceded that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a mercy for the Japanese people. "Almost", but not fully there. For some the liberalism's grasp is too much to easily escape.

The use of the bombs is nothing the United States should apologize for. It is regrettable that we had to take that step. But in all likelihood we would have regretted NOT using them far more so.

[JPJones]

“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. “

Trump 2016

[zek157]

Not to justify it, but more people died firebombing Tokyo. Many cities were equally destroyed conventionally to the extent that it was somewhat difficult to find target cities for Fat Man & Little Boy. European firebombing was minor compared to the extent Japanese cities burned. Exponentially more sq miles.

Had the war not ended in August 45, most of Japan would have been starving in winter 46. No transportation was left to move the summer rice harvest to remaining population centers.

It saved both GIs and Japanese. Also probably saved South Korea from Kim Jung Il and the Soviets.

[ArtDodger]

An interesting read is ‘Last Train From Hiroshima’. Tells about the group of people who, having survived the Hiroshima bomb, fled to safety in... Nagasaki, arriving just in time for that bomb to drop. Personal accounts of people who survived both bombs.... Rare birds, indeed.

[Lx]

John Kerry inspecting what he hopes Iran will do over Tel Aviv.

[BuffaloJack]

Look up Japanese nuclear weapons program sometime.
Japan had a nuke in Feb 1945, months before our nuke.
They just didn’t have enough fissionable material for a device they could actually use on us.

[Rummyfan]

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.

I'm sure that will change once the Iranians get a nuke. Kerry and obungo are more concerned about apologizing for the US than with preventing psycho-states from getting WMDs.

[Rummyfan]

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.

[lonestar67]

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.

[Rebelbase]

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

[ThunderSleeps]

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.

[SgtHooper]

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

[norwaypinesavage]

[SkyDancer]

Karma worked in this case. Nagasaki was the city where the torpedo’s used at Pearl Harbor were manufactured.