Posted on 05/27/2016 10:00:33 PM PDT by detective
Today, President Obama visited Hiroshima. It was the first time a sitting president has done so. Of course, we’ve entered another arena of liberal debate: were the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ethical/justified/moral? The answer is yes to all three. First, let’s delve into something a bit disconcerting, which is that an increasing number of Americans feel that the bombing was wrong (via WaPo):
In the first Gallup poll from 1945 just after the bombings, a huge 85 percent of Americans approved the bombings. However, figures from 2005 show a significant decline to 57 percent. Meanwhile, another poll conducted by the Detroit Free Press in the United States and Japan in 1991 found that 63 percent of Americans thought that the bombings were justified in a bid to end the war, while just 29 percent of Japanese did.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
Pardon me, I am coming in late to this discussion.
It may pay to ask when do Civilians/ Non-combatants become combatants. In particular Japan,in WW2.
! was born 1935 and saw the war from Miami, Fl., which became a quasi military town. I saw Blue Star Flags in neighbors windows changed to Gold Star Flags. We did many sacrifices for the war effort, as did the Japanese.
To clarify my feelings about the debate, should we have dropped the A-Bomb. To paraphrase the late Justice Anthony Scalia “ It was a long time ago, people forget…It was a 7-2 decision. It wasn’t even close,”
The reasoning and answer is here, below!
I read this at link:
http://www.fgcu.edu/events/ic/5705.asp
Erik Carlson, Florida Gulf Coast University
Two Kinds of Civilians: American Encounters with Civilians on Kerama Retto and Ie Shima
In April of 1945, the U.S. 77th Infantry Division stormed the small, satellite island of Ie Shima off the coast of Okinawa. The purpose of this amphibious assault was to capture the island to build airfields to use in the main phase of Operation ICEBERG — the invasion of Okinawa. During the fight for Ie Shima, American soldiers met fierce resistance from several thousand Japanese soldiers. After the six day battle was over, American forces found that nearly 1,500 civilians, men and women, had fought along with professional Japanese soldiers in the fight for Ie Shima.
The brief, but bitter battle for Ie Shima has been forgotten by military historians because of the deadlier battle on Okinawa, and overshadowed by the fact that well-known American war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed on the island during the first days of the battle.
The discovery of civilian dead mixed with Japanese soldiers killed in battle sent a chilling message to American commanders preparing for Operation DOWNFALL. Would the Japanese military employ civilian paramilitary forces during the proposed November 1945 invasion of Japan? What would be the Allied response? How does this fact exemplify the determined nature of Japanese preparations for homeland defense and the nation’s unwillingness to surrender in 1945? And does this explain the use of the atomic bomb?
The author will try to fit the use of Japanese civilians as combatants into the new post-revisionist view of unconditional surrender and the use of atomic bombs based upon the release of top-secret ULTRA documents in the late 1990s. This paper will use archival sources from the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the U.S. Army Center for Military History, among other primary sources.
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.
Yes, now it’s the South China sea.
China wants a choke hold on the entrance to the Indian Ocean.
If you want a good, detailed description in fiction of the proposed invasion the Japanese Islands and you can find a copy; read David Westheimer’s novel Death Is Lighter than a Feather.
The alternative was a full attack of the starving country including nightly attacks by hundreds of B-29s carrying firebombs.
Bottom photo at night is of Yokohama, not Hiroshima.
‘Glad you’re here...!
Your arguments were convincing, until you got self-indulgent and accused me of wanting to wave a magic wand to win the war.
My problem is with the facile consequentialism of most “conservatives.”
Considering the state of Total War that existed, I do not consider Truman a criminal.
It is clear that FDR and his Communist-riddled administration wanted WWII from 1933 on.
If Dr. Jim Garrow is to be believed, Soetoro already tried to murder 300 million Americans with an EMP, and was thwarted by three patriots, whom he immediately purged.
That comment is beneath contempt. If a moral discussion is over your head, have the humility to remain silent.
The best battle plan never survives the first shot, hindsight is 20/20.
There were many ways to look at the pressures to drop the bomb.
1. It was total war. You use the weapons you have.
2. The financial cost to invade Japan would have left us bankrupt.
3. If we hadn’t done it, and we invaded there would have been a revolution once the American people found out we had it, and did not use it.
4. The personnel cost to invade would have been huge.
5. The Japanese race would have been practically erased from the face of the earth if we invaded.
6. If we continued the blockade, millions of Japanese would have starved to death.
7. Had we not dropped the bomb, the war would have lasted several more months. The balance of power in the Far East would be very different. The Soviet Union would have controlled Korea, half of Japan and a good chunk of China.
8. The direct deaths of the two bombs were much smaller than the firebombing in the previous several months.
When you compare what would have happened to the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese civilians, we did them a favor by dropping the bomb.
Yep...we have not had a world war since.
I could not agree more with your assessment of Soetoro. The most demoralizing part of Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012 was his constant display of total cowardice, shown by his describing Soetoro as “a nice guy” who was “in over his head.” Romney was pretending to run for president. He had no interest in awakening anyone to the evil that put Soetoro in the White House.
My major concern about Trump is that he will sincerely try to do “good things” but does not have the spiritual depth and insight to make war on the evil that is abroad.
In an age when the Pope—THE POPE—is a sock puppet of the most evil forces in the world, we need a President equipped with more than conventional, bourgeois good intentions.
There was no morality by that time. The firebombings were more of a “crime” than dropping the bombs.
The Japanese battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa showed those in command what was coming.
Spoken like a true Nazi: “First, solve the Jewish Problem. Debate morality later.”
An attitude totally unworthy of a thinking being, let alone an American.
Is a farmer whose crops feed the army a civilian? Is the truck driver bringing that food to a port a civilian? Is the owner of a small machine shop in the midst of a residential neighborhood, one who performs one operation on a critical component of an important instrument of war a "civilian?"
Merchant seamen? Logistics officers? Nurses? Anyone whose efforts support the ability of the "combatants" to wage war?
And then what of those forced to fight? Those who, if it weren't for the political officer at his back, would go back to his home or desert to the other side?
If they were willing or not, the experiences of Okinawa and Saipan revealed that there would be no "non-combatants" in any invasion of the home islands.
Then there is the idea of a blockade. Is starving non-combatants to the point that they overturn the military leadership to end the war attacking "civilians?"
It was a good thing then and it still is today, and that fact will not ever change.
Screw Obama.
” ... Are you listening to yourselves? Do you know what you are even saying?”
Claud, amihow, Arthur McGowan et al certainly don’t have the first notion of what their critics are saying.
I’m clear on what I’m saying, but it appears baby steps are needed:
If you are fighting a war, you must win the war first.
Why?
Because if you lose the war, all talk of morality stops. If you win the war, you may talk about anything you like. Including morality.
To reverse that sequence is not a demonstration of superior morals. It is flippancy and heedlessness of the most odious sort: if you lose the war while congratulating yourselves on your lofty moral stature, the innocents and noncombatants who perish along with you will not thank you. They will curse your memory.
Their survival means more than your sense of moral fitness.
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