quote:

Originally posted by bendable:
The powers should have listened to the science guys and should have never detonated any of the 2000 nuclear bombs .

If it had not been for “science” guys, there would have been no bombs at all.
What are you referring to? What was said to the “powers” that was ignored?

One of the truly remarkable things about the development of nuclear weapons, IMO, was that it was all based on theory. Among countless other examples of what they were able to figure out in advance with no prior experience to go on was that the “Little Boy” uranium bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima wasn’t even tested in advance: “Yeah, we know it’s going to work; no sense in wasting any of our U235.” There were some early concerns that there could be unforeseen results such as setting the atmosphere on fire, but they were dismissed—and correctly so.

This subject has always had some controversy but as the general knowledge of history fades, it seems to be increasing.

Without the understanding of all the other related events, it's easy to say that nuking a few hundred thousand people is a bad thing (few know anything about the firebombing that killed even more).

The public today has no idea of the scale of death and destruction in WW2 or the Communist regimes that came shortly after that and killed tens of millions of their own citizens without nukes.

Without that foundation of knowledge, it's hard to get through. People seem to have a short memory today and that's at least partly because they didn't care to know the facts to begin with.

That’s why you have a ‘Commander in Chief’, make those hard decisions. To many are happy on the fence, unable to make sensible, and difficult decisions.

I watched a documentary about this. A commenter posted the he was scheduled for the invasion force assembling for Japan. He said it was a relief that the bombs brought Japan to its knees. The US was literally running out of troops and they were preparing to draft older men etc. those were desperate times. To sit back decades later and criticize from a safe position is arrogant and myopic.

There was also discussion of staging a demonstration somewhere in the Pacific and inviting Japanese military and government officials to witness it.

It was decided that the Japanese would have assumed it was a staged blast and not the result of a singe bomb. So that idea was shelved.

I think the stories that there were many people having reservations back in 1945 are largely incorrect.

The Japanese were hated for a number of reasons. Way beyond just for Pearl Harbor. War weary troops that were in Europe but without enough points were headed to the Pacific to participate in the invasion, scheduled to start in November 1945.
The troops already there and battered, were training for the invasion. They did not believe the Japanese would ever surrender or until almost all would be dead.

As already mentioned, the Japanese in Asia were killing a large number of civilians each week. Tens of thousands. They had just slaughtered 100,000 in Manila, just for spite. Waiting wasn't a good option.

My father-in law had just graduated from the military academy in June and was headed over, my dad had been there for over a year and a half and was training for the invasion. They both said these stories were B/S and there was a tremendous sense of relief when the Japs surrendered. They both believed they would not have survived the invasion, had it taken place. They saw the preparations that included the women and children. They were still suspicious of what the reaction would be when they entered Japan in September (fortunately unfounded). Both agree that the Soviet threat was overstated because at the time most weren't aware and Stalin did it mostly as he was required under their agreements.

Also, NOBODY talks about the 2 MILLION Japanese troops in China at war's end.

Those guys were not going to surrender without a direct order from the emperor. . .

Who was gonna kill all those guys? And if we had to invade China, too, they would have gone scorched earth and murdered millions of Chinese civilians.

Put simply, the atomic raids were the quickest and most humane way to end the war. For the Allies AND the Japanese.

The real issue here is revisionist Americans still have mixed feelings re our use of nukes in WW2.

It's just that simple.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
[FLASH_VIDEO]<iframe frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fK-3DdB1QPE" title="VDH | Revisionists Get It Wrong: Why the Atomic Bombings Ended WWII" width="640"></iframe>[/FLASH_VIDEO]

This eight minute segment of the daily signal explains it well, but he went into to even greater depth on his own podcast.
By comparison, there was a raid on March 9/10th of 1945 that killed 100,000 Japanese. I don’t recall if it was just bomb ordinance, or if they napalmed the hell out of them as well.

I drove to Ohio and back on Tuesday, and downloaded "Ghost Soldiers" by Hampton Sides for the trip, which made me recall this thread.

The book is about a raid by US Army Rangers and Filipino guerillas after the US landed back on Luzon to go out ahead of the army behind enemy lines and liberate a prison camp full of allied POWs. This was necessary because the Japanese high command had issued orders to exterminate all POWs rather than allow them to be liberated. The Japanese had already done this at Palawan, and they didn't just shoot them...they tried to burn them alive.

The book has many first hand accounts with graphic detail of the Palawan massacre, as well as during the Bataan death march, at Camp O'Donnel, Cabatuan, and even in transit to Japan, which is where they sent most of the able-bodied prisoners as the allies started closing in. The things that they did to our men, as well as Filipino civilians, were absolutely horrific. And they would have executed thousands more POWs if we had to fight our way through the home islands of Japan. From a practical perspective, it was absolutely worth it simply to save the lives of our POWs and the soldiers who would have died fighting on the islands. No question.

The loss of civilian life was regrettable, but they also bore some guilt by association. Total war is total war. When your nation is committing horrific atrocities across the globe and killing millions of innocent people, doing anything other than resisting them at home makes you complicit. But they didn't do that...by and large the Japanese population supported their government. Also, if we'd had to fight a conventional war in the islands, a lot more civilians would have died than were killed by the bombs.

As to the Japanese military and government, they deserved every bit of it and then some. We were a lot more lenient than we probably ought to have been after the war in the interest of reconciliation, and quite a few shitbags who deserved execution got to go home alive.

quote:

Originally posted by FrankMoses:
This eight minute segment of the daily signal explains it well, but he went into to even greater depth on his own podcast.
By comparison, there was a raid on March 9/10th of 1945 that killed 100,000 Japanese. I don’t recall if it was just bomb ordinance, or if they napalmed the hell out of them as well.

Almost certainly, this is a reference to the firebombing of Tokyo, using hundreds of B-29s. None of the pissing apologists are aware of this raid and its toll. Hell on Earth.

All they know is "The Bomb".

quote:

Originally posted by 92fstech:
The loss of civilian life was regrettable, but they also bore some guilt by association. Total war is total war.

I've observed that during WWII, my mother-in-law (working for RCA in Camden, NJ, making fuses for aerial bombs) was building bombs to drop on my mother (a schoolgirl in Munich).

You know who doesn't-- and didn't-- harbor ill feelings about that? My mom, who lost her father in the war, or grandmother, who lost a husband. Neither did my great-grandmother, who lost all three sons during the war, or my two aunts, who along with the other women in the family saw their home, schools, and family business leveled, with virtually all of the men in the family dead or missing on the Eastern front.

Because, as you point out, total war means total war and ordinary people sometimes suffer for the acts of their government.

I don't see this as a difficult concept, and anyone with "mixed feelings" probably doesn't understand the underlying facts. Either somebody grasps that the bombs saved millions or American AND Japanese lives or they don't. I see this as completely binary.

quote:

Originally posted by DennisM:

You know who doesn't-- and didn't-- harbor ill feelings about that?

When I was a child, my grandmother denounced buying anything with a "Made In Japan" stamp on it. (And, all our junk had that stamp.) I asked her why she said that and she looked at me with that "I can't believe you asked that" look and said, "Why, because of Pearl Harbor."

I like to ask the anti-bomb types if any proposal of theirs would end the war in SEVEN days.

Ridiculous title for this video. The first 38 minutes is about the rationale for dropping the A-bombs, the latter half of the video is about current events in American politics. It's a British news agency. so maybe the title is an SOS. At any rate, the first half is well worth the time of anyone interested in the subject at hand.

quote:

Originally posted by SgtGold:
The real issue here is revisionist Americans still have mixed feelings re our use of nukes in WW2.

It's just that simple.

Ignorance is bliss.

People nowadays are way too clueless and uneducated to understand that we were going to HAVE to invade the Japanese mainland and estimates were 1 million casualties.

Meaning they very well may not have existed to spout such stupidity as their father may have been killed in this invasion which would have been long and brutal.

The video Victory in the Pacific in the link is pretty informative.