Posted on 05/27/2016 7:57:54 PM PDT by Rockitz
It’s an incontrovertible fact that millions of lives were saved because President Harry Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. I know because I’m one of them. My father enlisted in the U.S. Navy the day he turned 18 in 1945. He finished his basic training as the Allies were preparing for “Operation Downfall” – the code name for the invasion of the Japanese mainland.
Experts predicted it would be ten times bloodier than Iwo Jima. Casualty estimates ran into the millions – for both sides.
Lest we forget, Imperial Japan was a ruthless warrior culture whose war crimes rivaled the Nazis. Surrender was not in their cultural vocabulary. At Iwo Jima, the Japanese fought to the death – literally committing suicide – rather than surrender.
Now imagine how they would have fought for their mainland. It would have been the bloodiest invasion in a long and bloody war.
The War Department had no illusions about this. They ordered the creation of 500,000 Purple Heart medals in anticipation of the casualties.
My dad would have been part of that massive invasion force. God only knows if he would have made it out alive.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Same here. My Father was in the Navy serving on a Navy Tug when we were Island hopping towards Japan.
Their Job was to tow stranded Landing Craft off the Beaches during Amphibious Island Invasions while under fire.
He told me it was petty hairy but the closest call was when his CO got a little cocky and ordered them in without the Blessing of the Fleet Commander.
One of our Destroyer’s threatened to blow them out of water if they didn’t get out of the way of the incoming Landing Craft.
Closest call he had in the War as far as I know, but he did survive the Killer Typhoon that killed a lot of our Sailors.
Did I mention that Obama is a POS?
The simple fact is, had Japan not started the War, there would have been no Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tokyo wouldn’t have been Firebombed by us either.
And my dad, too. He didn’t expect to come back alive if we had to invade. I wouldn’t have had him or my younger sister. And yes, bless Harry Truman.
Also the atom bombs of that era were quite weak compared to what we know today. Kilotons, not megatons. I saw a chart that compared the Hiroshima blasted area to LA International Airport. The airport is larger. It’s because so many people were living densely packed there, that the bomb killed as many as it did. AND, to top it off, that area had been leafleted days back with warnings about bombs, which were targeted to known military production sites.
And, if we had simply blockaded for a decade or so , the Japanese navy and air force being completely destroyed, many millions of Japanese would simply have slowly starved to death, pretty gruesome that.
“No Pearl Harbor, no Hiroshima”.
Yeah, it looks like this whole issue has been the political class playing to a public that has no genuine idea of how serious war really is.
No Justice, No Peace.
Truman administered Justice and we attained Peace.
Mine too. My dad was Engineering Battalion so would have been first to land. No way he’d have made it back.
The Atomic bombs (along with Russian attacks)did save
millions of Japanese.
“Gas attacks of the size and intensity recommended on these 250 square miles of urban population,” the US Army report declared, “might easily kill 5,000,000 people and injure that many more.” In the first attack, which would be launched 15 days before the Kyushu landings, American bombers would drench much of Tokyo and other cities in an early morning attack with 54,000 tons of lethal phosgene gas. Tokyo would be the largest poison gas target, because an “attack of this size against an urban city of large population should be used to initiate gas warfare.”
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p12_weber.html
...Allen, T.B. and N. Polmar, “Poisonous invasion prelude,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Aug. 4, 1995 [New York Times special features].)
Some sources say only tactical use had been approved.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/pacific-online-forum/
“Politics” told Truman that if one American life could have been saved by the use of the Atomic bombs...it must be done...
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/no-other-choice-why-truman-dropped-the-atomic-bomb-japan-13504
& agreed...without the Atomic Bombs there would be fewer of us Baby Boomers.
After visiting several interesting countries of Europe my Father was on a cruise ( ; ) ship to Japan when the Atomic Bombs were used.
Rumor Doctor blog archive
Are Purple Hearts from 1945 still being awarded?
In 1945, the U.S. military expected up to 1 million casualties in the invasion of Japan, so the services stocked up on Purple Hearts.
But Japan surrendered after the atomic bombings and Soviet invasion of Manchuria, leaving the services with
hundreds of thousands of Purple Hearts that were no longer needed.
...Purple Hearts from World War II had different ribbons than medals built nowadays, but the refurbished Purple Hearts have been given new
ribbons to put them in line with current requirements, making the old and new awards look almost identical, Giangreco said.
THE RUMOR DOCTOR’S DIAGNOSIS: It sounds like Purple Hearts from World War II are still ready to be awarded to troops wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan. We can only hope the services will need as few of them as possible.
E-mail The Rumor Doctor at:
jeffrey.schogol@stripes.osd.mil
Mine too! Training in Calif. when we vaporized their azzes.
It's no coincidence that he did this as we prepare to observe Memorial Day. I wonder what type of speech he has planned for the Fourth of July.
There’s a good chance Obama knows nothing about Truman at all, but would Truman have been an Obama-ite had he been living in 2008. He died in 1972.
I too will rejoice when the traitor in chief is gone. Unfortunately, the traitors and idiots that put him in office are still around. It is those who need to be reckoned with HARSELY ... or we will wind up with another Zero like traitor in the White House.
Obama would have let 250,000 GIs get killed, 500,000 get wounded, and 10 million more Japanese get killed just so that he could feel morally superior. Obama said that people’s morality had to evolve as fast as technology evolved. In other words, he thinks that dropping the bombs was immoral. So he wouldn’t have done it. He would have let all of those needless deaths occur, so that he could feel superior to the GIs and everyone else. All of those lives get sacrificed for his ego.
MacArthur understood the first order of business was to get supplies to the starving and dying. People like my Dad took their mission seriously. They were so bad off that, in come areas, they were even eating commercial fertilizer mixed with water to stay alive.
Years later, I had the opportunity to go to Japan and work. Our landlord told me that the atomic bomb saved his life and those of others as well. He had just turned 20, had avoided the draft because he was such a good student but could avoid it no more. When the college term ended for the summer in late July, he was given home leave and was due to train as a kamikaze pilot when the bomb ended the war.
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