Posted on 05/25/2010 3:52:48 PM PDT by Repeal The 17th
Theodore Van Kirk is sitting at his desk in a detached bungalow in the gated community outside Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives. The room is cluttered with boxes, trinkets, shelves full of books on wartime history and photographs of planes on the walls...
(Excerpt) Read more at express.co.uk ...
time and effort AREN’T wasted
Duh
lol :)
[info on supply of A-Bombs] Thanks. Interesting stuff. Guess I’ll have to read up on Groves. I know some, but not enough about him.
Those who regularly advocate the U.S. should have dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki often cite casualty avoidance. People generally extrapolate from 48,000 American and 230,000 Japanese losses at Okinawa to 500,000 American and millions of Japanese casualties for mainland invasions.
Those estimates could have vastly understated causalities. Japan at 374,000 mountainous square miles mathematically enables over 500 defensives redoubts comparable to that General Ushijima’s constructed to inflict most losses for the Okinawa campaign. Also, the Japanese planned as stubborn defense of their cities as the Russians had maintained in Stalingrad and Leningrad. The siege of Leningrad went on for 872 days with German and Russian casualties exceeding the 2 million of combined losses at Stalingrad.
The “War Faction” adopted the motto of “100 million Japanese deaths” for planning the final mainland battles. The Japanese had lost their island empire and their fleet was at the bottom of the ocean. Yet many resources remained. Besides kamikazes, redeployed Kwantung divisions from China, and bamboo spears for civilians, the allies faced biological warfare. Occupation searchers uncovered large stockpiles of viruses, spirochetes, and fungus spores throughout rural Japan. The Japanese had spent years field testing the effectiveness of biological warfare in China. One delivery plan directed Japanese to infect themselves then surrender.
The “Greatest Generation” and their parents would have been enraged to discover a cabal indulged a personal moral orthodoxy by condemning over 500,000 Americans who might otherwise have been saved.
In terms of understanding the Japanese character, I have not seen mentioned the critical role Kokutai played in surrender. Any prominent Japanese lived out this spiritual combination of Emperor, citizen, land, ancestral spirits, government, and Shinto religion. When Emperor Hirohito in January 1944 formally endorsed forming a “Peace Faction” among politicians, he initiated an elaborate national theater. He and advisors then debated through twenty months of continuous defeats, fire bombings of over 60 cities, and 1.3 million additional Japanese deaths. The atomic bombs removed the “Final Battles” argument, allowing the “War Faction” to relent, Hirohito to assume his unprecedented roll, and no one to lose face. They remained within the fabric of Japanese from all eras who had sacrificed for Emperor and Empire.
People often say Japan was in the process of surrendering. However, if one examines Japanese negotiation initiatives in early August 1945, they are simply too vacuous to make dropping the atomic bombs unnecessary. These supposed negotiations cite proposals Foreign Minister Togo directed Ambassador Sato to offer Molotov, the Russian foreign minister. Japan intended ensuring Russian neutrality with incentives including offers of conquered Chinese territory. In exchange Russia was to mediate talks with the allies for settlement according to a Japanese vision of “peace with honor”. The first June 29 contacts ignored allies surrender demands with proposals the Russians considered too vague to answer or pass to the allies. The August 2 Japanese proposals accepted the Potsdam Declaration as one basis for further study regarding terms. Again Russia saw no reason to inform the allies. When Ambassador Sato finally saw Molotov on August 8, two days after Hiroshima, he received a war declaration instead of answers to his latest proposals. U.S. cryptologists continuously reading the Japanese diplomatic code titled “Magic” confirmed even Sato considered Togo’s Russian contacts ineffectual. The several other contacts like those by Admiral Fujimura and Kojimo Kitamura with Allen Dulles in Switzerland were ad hoc and lacked even informal endorsement by the Japanese Cabinet.
In spite of the Hiroshima atomic bomb and the Russian declaration of war the Japanese Cabinet debated “Final Battles” arguments into utter physical and mental exhaustion for eleven hours following Nagasaki on August 9. The war faction still contended just 20 million Japanese dead in vigorous, protracted operations would force a decayed, war weary America into stalemate leaving the Home Islands intact. In the final meeting of Hirohito and his Cabinet, Barron Hiranuma reproved Foreign Minister Togo for never making concrete proposals to the Russians. Minister Togo had no answer.
At impasse Hirohito, the god-king, spoke the “Voice of the Crane” in the 30’ by 18’ sweltering, underground bunker. He would bear the unbearable, conclude the war, and transform the nation. Only then did Japan contact Swiss and Swedish foreign offices to commence negotiations with allied belligerents.
As one final point, critics say the atomic bombs accomplished little. Supposedly Roosevelt’s decree of unconditional surrender was compromised away by allowing Japan to keep their Emperor. However, Imperial Japan abandoned its heritage by accepting the Potsdam Declaration provisions demanding the Emperor’s and government’s authority be subject to the Supreme Allied Commander. The Japanese people’s free expression would determine ultimate government, eradicating multi-millennial Imperial characteristics. An approximate Western historical disruption would be displaying the bones of Jesus at the Vatican.
I seem to remember a show on the History channel. It stated that even as the emperor was sending the message for surrender, that elements of the Japanese military were attempting a coup to prevent the surrender. This was after the two bombs. A conventional strike by B29’s broke it up. The two nukes were the only way to prevent more blood shed.
Interesting. Thanks for the post.
>> The Japanese people’s free expression would determine ultimate government, eradicating multi-millennial Imperial characteristics.
All in all — and compared to what might have been — I don’t think things turned out too badly for the Japanese people.
“The crew of the Enola Gay very well might have saved his life — and countless hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of other lives — Japanese as well as Americans.”
I was teaching my students about this today. The battle of Okinawa indicated that the Japanese would have to be completely destroyed, and the War Department estimated at the time that an invasion of Honshu (where Tokyo was located) would result in a million dead US soldiers. The decision to drop the bomb was a humane one.
Wow - that is a ***fascinating*** post. I’ve read it once, and as time permits I plan to read it again. I am learning so much on this thread! Freepers are some of the most intelligent, smartest and well educated people on earth - with enough common sense to float a battle ship. ;)
Very, VERY interesting! There is so much more to all this than I realized. I learned next to nothing about it in school, but I tried my best to educate myself ~three years ago. But facts and details such as the ones that are popping up all over this thread are hard to come by. What a blessing this has turned out to be!
I had the pleasure of working with a man who was in a similar circustance when the bomb was dropped, training for the landing that was expected to cost a million lives. Interestingly enough, we were working at the factory in Oak Ridge where the uranium for Little Boy was separated. After being discharged and going to school, he said that was the only place he wanted to work. He was certain the bomb saved his life. Being raised locally to Oak Ridge, he said we was quite a celebrity in his unit... one of the few folks who knew where Oak Ridge was.
Just adding a bit of interesting anecdotal history to the 509th thas all. The Merchant Marine provided invaluable help for the war effort. My hat is off to all of our Merchant Marine. They were brave souls indeed and were unsung heros and rarely got the recognition they deserved.
Here is something for Freepers to use...
The main Forum page is called “Latest Articles” and has this URL...
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/*/index
Just replace the asterisk in that URL with a Keyword that you want to search on (such as Hiroshima), and you’ll get a list of articles posted on Free Republic to which that Keyword has been added.
Where are the Keywords? ...they are just above Reply #1 above. Anyone can (and should) add relevant keywords to the articles posted on FR. Click on a Keyword above and you’ll get a list of articles posted on Free Republic to which that Keyword has been added.
If you have a chance look into the Japanese secret weapons programs from the war. They were not too far from having a number of jet aircraft which would have turned our bombers into Swiss cheese.
I often wonder just how far back the infiltration goes..
Easily back to the end of WWI, probably back to 1900 or before as the European "intellectuals" started arriving on our shores. History will most likely show that the damage they wreaked was far worse than what we have seen (so far) from Mexican illegals.
Then there's the populist/JBS theory that the American Establishment (the Rockefellers, Morgans, Whitneys, Mellons, Carnegies, Fords, etc.) are actually the bosses of Communism and secretly ran Russia from the US (which would seem to make Russian spies unnecessary) Basically it's a Jeffersonian vision of the Hamiltonian political tradition as The Source Of All Evil.
He didn’t actually die in the traffic accident. He was hospitalized with his injuries, but survived until the ‘experts’ arrived from DC to treat him.
Also keep in mind that it was the Japanese attitude towards surrender in the first place which was foremost in the minds of the people who decided to use the Atomic weapons.
Every island the Americans took was ghastly with practically zero Japanese survivors. The fighting got worse the closer they got to the Japanese homeland itself. Even with impossible odds, impossible numbers against them, no supplies to speak of, no air force, no fleet - the Japanese defenders fight to the death - every time. Now imagine you are planning on the invasion of Japan itself? What do you think the Japanese defense would have been like? I'll tell you: it would have been beyond anything ever seen in that war.
The Japanese themselves should be grateful a full Allied ground invasion never took place. Their country would not exist today as they know it.
I studied Japanese and really learned to love the Japanese people -- once I got away from the ones who were jaded by being near the US military bases. I also loved to explore and photograph the picturesque and peaceful countryside.
In my wanderings, I discovered that any sizeable hill had a Shinto/Buddhist temple or shrine atop it -- many of them serene jewels of photogenic beauty. So -- I climbed lots of hills...
BUT, I also discovered that the sides of those hills were riddled with WWII caves, tunnels, bunkers and gun emplacements. Taking Japan would have been far more dangerous and bloody than Okinawa or Iwo Jima -- where we fought for every foot of ground, and often had to burn or blast the Japanese out of their caves.
Of course, the Japanese islands are much larger than Iwo, and the Japanese would have been fighting fanatically for their own homes. The slaughter would have been horrific -- and, like Afghanistan, it could have gone on for many years.
The unconditional surrender of Japan shortened the war by several years and saved untold millions of lives (on both sides).
~~~~~~~~~~
In the 70s, I had the privilege and honor of having lunch at a small inn in Osaka with one of Japan's preeminent materials scientists. During lunch, he shared with me that, when I was a young schoolchild, he had the experience of being one of the very first Japanese Army officers to enter Hiroshima after the bombing.
He told of hiking miles back along the railway to find a working telegraph so he could tell headquarters that the US had deployed a "totally undefeatable weapon", and that they should end the war. He said he was overjoyed when the Nagasaki bomb "finally made our leaders see the truth" and surrender.
After lunch, he put his hand on my shoulder and said,
"You were only an 'aka-chan' in 1945, but, if it had not been for those two bombs, you would probably still be over here with a rifle, now, fighting to get my children out of their caves.""You can thank the Atomic Bomb that we both surived to share and enjoy this lunch together today as colleagues and friends..."
Thanks again - that is a very powerful post. I am so, SO glad I posed my question/request on this thread. The response has been beyond anything I could have hoped for. These are some insights and perspectives I doubt I could have gotten anywhere else. I still need to distill it down into a single email, but at least I have all my material now. Thanks!!
One of them. I agree.
Wouldn’t defeating Germany and Japan also be one of the highest points? How much devastation and brutality would have happened if they had not been stopped?
What a story! (Are you a writer?) That is an amazing tale. Pity I can’t simply direct my friend to this thread, but it’s out as an option. He got called a few choice names (not undeservedly so ;) so I’ll have to use it as a resource only. That’s for the best anyway, no doubt.
Btw, TXnMA, you might be interested to know that I spent an almost identical period of exile in MA. Native of FL, and now residing in GA. I can’t really say what I feel about MA for fear of offending Freepers who call it home. Suffice it to say I was really happy the day I saw it getting smaller in the rear view window. :)
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