... The United States of America dropped the first of the two atomic bombs used in combat to date on the city of Hiroshima, Japan.



Hiroshima had been spared the fire raids of March 9-10, 1945 that did more damage to Tokyo in one night (16.1 sq mi, the most destructive aerial bombing attack in history) than the two atomic bombs dropped months later (total of about 12 sq mi).

People have hand wrung since about the necessity of using atomic weapons against Japan.

I am not one of them.

You need look no farther than the archival footage, firsthand accounts, and military history of the fighting on Okinawa to understand the terrible necessity of using atomic weapons as opposed to invading the Japanese Home Islands. I recently read Marine Lance Corporal Eugene B. Sledge's account of fighting on Okinawa in his book With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, perhaps the best source and firsthand account of the savagery of the fighting on that comparatively tiny island.

The Allied casualties (primarily Americans) totaled over 82,000 killed, wounded, or missing. At sea, 368 Allied ships—including 120 amphibious craft—were damaged while another 36—including 15 amphibious ships and 12 destroyers—were sunk during the Okinawa campaign. The US Navy's dead exceeded its wounded, with 4,907 killed and 4,874 wounded, primarily from kamikaze attacks.

The Japanese losses were even more terrible. Japanese estimates are over 100,000 civilians killed, wounded, or missing, plus another 110,000 military killed, wounded, and missing. The US Army count for the 82-day campaign is a total of 142,058 civilian casualties, including those killed by artillery fire, air attacks, and those pressed into service by the Imperial Japanese Army. Ninety percent of the buildings on the island were destroyed.

Had the Allies invaded the Japanese Home Islands, it is estimated that more than 1,000,000 Allied personnel would be casualties, along with an estimated 3,000,000 to 6,000,000 Japanese. I also believe that the Japanese would have used their arsenals of biological and chemical warfare agents (if you've got an especially strong stomach, watch this video about Japan's Unit 731 and its biological and chemical warfare experimentation on Chinese civilians), which would have killed untold numbers more.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Sig2340,

I am SO sick of Japan playing the perpetual victims in regards to WWII. THEY started the war. THEY continued to carry on the war even though they knew in 1943 that they could never win. THEY perpetuated acts of brutality that today seem unbelievable. THEY violated human rights on an industrial scale. THEY murdered millions of innocent civilians in acts that had nothing to do with the military conduct of the war (as one small example, they murdered 250,000 innocent Chinese because they helped the Doolittle Raid crews to escape, and let's not even talk about the Rape of Nanking). THEY could have ended the war at ANY time, especially before dropping the bombs became necessary.

Japan should thank us for nuking them into seeing common sense and admitting that defeat was preferable to the virtual annihilation of the Japanese race. Had we invaded Japan, millions of innocent Japanese civilians would have been killed, along with hundreds of thousands of allied POWs still in Japanese hands.

We did them a favor.

What's more, THEY still refuse to admit to any atrocities, take responsibility for their part in the war, or apologize for anything.

Sledge's book is among the best to give you an idea of what the war was really like. Nothing pretty about it. "The Pacific" HBO series has several episodes based on "With The Old Breed".
My dad was in the Army 32nd Division in northern Philippines at the time recovering from the Villa Verde Trail and they were starting to train and get prepared for the invasion, scheduled for the next year. He always said the nukes saved his life. He was also thankful that MacArthur chose to bypass many Japanese strongholds, unlike the Marines.
After the surrender they went to Japan to help disarm the country and passed near both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. His memory is that not much survived downtown except the bank vaults.

It was not among the criteria of the decision-making process, but it is interesting to consider that dropping those two bombs probably saved more Japanese lives than anything else in history.

quote:

Originally posted by Hound Dog:
as one small example, they murdered 250,000 innocent Chinese because they helped the Doolittle Raid crews to escape

I had never read this before. It is beyond my comprehension that any one on earth could do these things to others.

This is a difficult read:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com...ttle-raid-180955001/

Total crew casualties: 3 KIA: 2 off the coast of China, 1 in China; 8 POW: 3 executed, 1 died in captivity, 4 repatriated.[44][45][46][50] In addition, seven crew members (including all five members of Lawson's crew) received injuries serious enough to require medical treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid

Bill Whittle puts to rest the idiotic notions the Left promotes about this subject:

This message has been edited. Last edited by: synthplayer,

Right on "Hound Dog".

I was listening right after work and when he got to the part where he was taking a picture, our local Emergency Alert System came on for a severe thunderstorm warning..kinda weird.

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06...ut-bombing-hiroshima

Bill Whittle, brilliant as usual. That was a very persuasive argument. And your response, Jon Stewart? (Crickets).

quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:
What's more, THEY still refuse to admit to any atrocities, take responsibility for their part in the war, or apologize for anything.

As summarized by Iris Chang, the author of The Rape of Nanking:

“What baffled and saddened me during the writing of this book was the persistent Japanese refusal to come to terms with its own past. It is not just that Japan has doled out less than 1 percent of the amount that Germany has paid in war reparations to its victims. It is not just that, unlike most Nazis, who, if not incarcerated for their crimes were at least forced from public life, many Japanese war criminals continued to occupy powerful positions in industry and government after the war. And it is not just the fact that while Germans have made repeated apologies to their Holocaust victims, the Japanese have enshrined their war criminals in Tokyo—an act that one American wartime victim of the Japanese has labeled politically equivalent to ‘erecting a cathedral for Hitler in the middle of Berlin.’”

A friend who married a Japanese man and who studied in Japan told me about sitting through the viewing of a movie about the bombing Hiroshima and having her classmates turn to her afterwards with silent condemnation as if she, as an American, was somehow responsible for a great crime against humanity. There were, of course, no movies about the Japanese actions in Korea, China, Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Bataan, Singapore, or any of the countless other places where they behaved with savage barbarity. I don’t condemn the modern Japanese for the acts of their grandfathers, but they can be condemned for their aggressive refusal to acknowledge them.

Thanks for that Truman clip, BTW. It’s startling to see such a change from then to now in how a President would address the nation. Obviously reading from a script in a notebook with office clutter in the background. Harry S. Truman isn’t my favorite President of all time, but I can fantasize about his being in the office today and responding to the idiocy that the incumbent must endure.

sigfreund, since you seem to know a lot about this, am I am safe in assuming responsibility for war crimes during WWII is taught in German public schools but not in Japanese public schools?

My college room mate's father flew B-29's in the 509th at the end of the war, though he wasn't part of either A-Bomb raids.

I told his son some years back that I wish his father had dropped a few more bombs on Tokyo!

The Japanese committed atrocities, no doubt. But it was FDR that put Japan’s back against the wall in July 1941 with an oil embargo and forced them to later attack us.

quote:

Originally posted by PowerSurge:
The Japanese committed atrocities, no doubt. But it was FDR that put Japan’s back against the wall in July 1941 with an oil embargo and forced them to later attack us.

That's a strong statement I've never heard voiced in such words before. I'd like to know more, if you're willing to educate us.

quote:

Originally posted by deepocean:
sigfreund, since you seem to know a lot about this, am I am safe in assuming responsibility for war crimes during WWII is taught in German public schools but not in Japanese public schools?

Given what I've read, encountered, and talked about with various folks, yes, this is the case. Much of their learning about the war apparently centers on the nuclear bombings. We had a Hiroshima survivor visit our class in second grade, and she had nothing to say about what her Imperial Army did during the war, only what she suffered as a result of us nuking them. At the time, I felt horrible and apologized for what my grandfathers did to her people. Now? I feel bad for apologizing.

quote:

Originally posted by deepocean:
sigfreund, since you seem to know a lot about this, am I am safe in assuming responsibility for war crimes during WWII is taught in German public schools but not in Japanese public schools?

I’m hardly an authority, but there can be no doubt that the Germans in general have denounced what happened during the Nazi era far more than the Japanese have criticized their own past. This comes through even in recent histories such as one I just finished, Blitzed, the English title of a book written in German by Norman Ohler. The book is about the use of drugs such as methamphetamines and opiates during the war, but like many historians of the period, the author cannot resist telling us such startling facts that mistreating concentration camp inmates and murdering Jews was bad, mmmkay? It’s as if they don’t realize that anyone who would read such works would hardly be ignorant of the atrocities committed by the regime, and that it must be repeated at every opportunity to the point of tediousness.

That’s not to say that all Germans who lived through the Nazi era agreed with demonizing Hitler and the regime because I know from personal insights that that’s not true. Those people, however, keep (or more accurately, kept) their heads down and their personal opinions to themselves because of the official governmental policies and positions. As I understood it, for example, it was illegal to sell products with the National Socialist party swastika on them—at least during the 1980s when I was there.

As for the Japanese being “forced” to go to war with the U.S., it’s hard to conceive of a more ridiculous statement. One of the things I point out about World War II is that it didn’t start with Pearl Harbor or even the German invasion of Poland. In the broad picture, it started when Japan invaded China in 1931. Did the U.S.’s refusal to sell Japan strategic materials “force” them to do that? Ludicrous!

Paul Fussell was a liberal English professor at the University of Pennsylvania who stunned his colleagues when he wrote an essay entitled "Thank God for the Atom Bomb." He was an infantry LT in the ETO and was scheduled to be one of the guys who would have invaded Japan.

His essay can be read here:

https://www.uio.no/studier/emn...he%20atom%20bomb.pdf

"Harry Truman . . . knew war, and he knew better than some of his critics then and now what he was doing and why he was doing it. “Having found the bomb,” he said, “we have used it. ... We have used it to shorten the agony of young Americans.”

The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask to be imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.

-Tom

Ask an elder in Korea, Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, etc about the Japanese wartime atrocities. They will likely cry when explaining/ describing family members raped and/ or butchered.

War is never pretty bit there are such things as crimes against humanity when at war.

quote:

Originally posted by PowerSurge:
The Japanese committed atrocities, no doubt. But it was FDR that put Japan’s back against the wall in July 1941 with an oil embargo and forced them to later attack us.

What have you been smoking?

I understand the events but nobody forced Japan to attack us - those are revisionist history apologizist words. They were already waging war on China and other countries. We were under no commitment to sell them anything.

They rolled the dice and awoke the sleeping giant. They lost and lost hard. And the best thing about the atomic bomb was we gave it to them a second time.

I hope that if they had held out longer, we would have continued to wipe their cities from the map in an organized fashion with more A-bombs.

Here endith the lesson.

quote:

Originally posted by RHINOWSO:

quote:

Originally posted by PowerSurge:
The Japanese committed atrocities, no doubt. But it was FDR that put Japan’s back against the wall in July 1941 with an oil embargo and forced them to later attack us.

What have you been smoking?

I understand the events but nobody forced Japan to attack us - those are revisionist history apologizist words. They were already waging war on China and other countries. We were under no commitment to sell them anything.

They rolled the dice and awoke the sleeping giant. They lost and lost hard. And the best thing about the atomic bomb was we gave it to them a second time.

I hope that if they had held out longer, we would have continued to wipe their cities from the map in an organized fashion with more A-bombs.

Here endith the lesson.

Do you really think that the United States would not attack someone else if we suddenly lost about 80% of our oil? No economy can survive with that type of damage. To think otherwise is risible.