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Originally posted by LoboGunLeather:....The Purple Heart medal I was awarded in 1970 is one of those originally planned for the 800,000 US servicemen expected to be killed or wounded during the planned invasion of Japan in 1945.

I stand and salute you sir (even though you were a Sgt), thank you for your service.

You mentioned a Purple Heart in 1970. 1970 was the year I entered US Army Basic Training. I was a reservist, never activated. But all of my training sgt's and officers in Basic and AIT were Vietnam combat veterans. I got a very different picture of what war is like than I had before.

So again, I salute you.

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Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
Yes, Truman undoubtedly made the correct call in dropping the bombs.

Yet the Howard Zinns of the word want to keep teaching our kids that America was evil and wrong to nuke Imperial Japan; that Japan was close to surrendering anyway. Complete bull. Shame on anyone perpetuating that garbage.

This and countless other hidden examples of subvesion and distortion are why we have generations of individuals who hate this nation when they should and love what they should be ashamed....even terrified of.

There was more destruction and more loss of life from conventional bombing, than from both the nuclear bombs combined. Nobody got excited about the conventional bombing because it was...conventional.

The bomb that hit Nagasaki actually missed (by two miles) due to cloud cover. Had it been on target, there would have been considerably more damage.

The reality was that the dropping of the atomic bombs were a bluff that worked; end this or we'll drop another...which we didn't have to drop, and didn't intend. The bombs did what they were intended to do: end the fight.

It should be remembered that the US didn't choose to go to war, and in fact, stayed out of it as long as possible. The fight, and what it took to end the fight, was on the Japanese. Their choice. They chose not to end the war, until incentivized. Bottom line is that it worked.

The Japanese had no way to determine if we had the capacity to mass produce the new weapon. They really had no choice unless they wanted to entertain the possibility of actual national suicide. It was absolutely a brilliant bluff that saved countless lives on both sides. You can't pay any attention at all to leftist, their self loathing clouds their world view.

Well, the Nagasaki bomb was the last atomic bomb on Tinian, ready to drop. Another would have been available later in the month. Then, more and more as production increased.

Had the war lasted into 1947, as the Japanese hoped, there would have been dozens dropped on Japan as the war raged on and casualties on both sides mounted.

There is NO WAY the US would have possessed a 'wonder weapon' of such power and not use it. The 'moral debate' about the use of atomic weapons is a creation of the Cold War, when the entire world became afraid of them. In 1945, there was very little of this concern in the military. Some scientists had qualms, but they were the ones that built the bomb in the first place.

This really amuses me. Today, so many people talk about the purity of scientific achievement, vs the 'brute force' mentality of the military. Yet, it was the scientists who made the atomic bombings possible. Reading Richard Rhode's book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," I came away with the impression (to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park) "Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." The scientists were at the forefront of their field, doing things that had only been dreamt of, with practically unlimited resources and budget, doing work that would only have been possible during a major war, and did not really seem to think about the logical outcome of their research. Then, they tried to grow a conscience and lobby against using it. What nation, during a desperate world war, spends a significant chunk of its national resources on developing a super weapon, and then shrinks back from using it?

The atomic weapons were always going to be used. I find the 'debate' over whether or not Truman should have used them to be foolish, based on a later Cold-War mentality that did not exist in 1945. . .

As a couple of others have mentioned here there is the very personal side to the issue.

My story starts in 1945, my father had fought on Guadalcanal, The Soloman's New Georgia etc. and rotated home with malaria.

Sometime in early 1945 he got orders to the 6th Marine Division then in formation for the invasion of Japan. I was born in March and he didn't go back to the Pacific. So I would have been a census item but I have two sisters and a brother that didn't make the early muster.

Think of the 800,000 to a 1,000,000 American dead that would not father and the generational implications of that tid-bit. No children who might have fathered children that would be peers of many here, or not so many here. America would look very, very different and of course the probability of an American defeat was not 0.

I'm good with the bomb and the outcome.

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Originally posted by egregore:

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Meanwhile, the Soviet Union (which declared war on Japan on Aug. 8, 1945) was prepared to invade the Japanese northern islands from Manchuria. That would almost certainly have led to a Japan divided between a free South and a communist North. The Berlin Wall might have had a twin in Tokyo. The people of North Japan would have suffered for decades, like the people of East Germany and North Korea.

Now that is something I've never read before and had not occurred to me.

Exactly, Russia declared war against Japan at the last minute... on Aug. 8, 1945 in a bid to do exactly what they did in Europe. They wanted to occupy part of Japan to expand their communist occupied territory and were fortunately stopped from doing that.

Yes, the bomb kept the Soviets away from Japan and it also gave them something to think about for a few years until they stole the necessary technology and designs to make their own.
Both sides and their citizens got to see a demonstration of what the next major powers conflict would look like if things got out of hand and have managed to keep things under control ever since.

It's so refreshing to see people who know what I do about the nuclear weapons used on Japan and what the planned alternatives were to using them. The Japanese scientists knew as soon as they got into the ruins in Hiroshima what we had created. Both they and the Nazis were trying to create atomic bombs, so I feel zero sympathy towards them, as they had already used bio-weapons on non-combatants.

It wasn't a bluff that we would drop more atomic bombs on Japan if they didn't surrender. They would have lost a city or more a month to atomic bombs, with more than that to firebombing. Couple that with cutting off supplies from overseas and we might not have had as much resistance when we finally invaded. But President Truman really had no choice in using them. If it was ever found out we had a weapon that could end the war in days and didn't use it, he not only would have been impeached, he might have been brought up on charges of treason. Plus I doubt he could have lived with himself considering the loss of life had we not used it.

My father in law (now deceased) was one of the sailors that was placed on ships to watch atomic testing in the pacific, after he served in the pacific during the war. He witnessed the blasts from on board ships.

He later died of cancer, but given the time interval, I'm unconvinced it had anything to do with the nuclear testing.

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Originally posted by sns3guppy:
My father in law (now deceased) was one of the sailors that was placed on ships to watch atomic testing in the pacific, after he served in the pacific during the war. He witnessed the blasts from on board ships.

He later died of cancer, but given the time interval, I'm unconvinced it had anything to do with the nuclear testing.

My Scoutmaster (and next door neighbor when growing up) was an Ensign on the deck of the USS Shangri-La, assigned to observe the atomic testing. He passed away earlier this year.

My brother who was drafted late in 44 to the 69th division sent to Europe late December. The unit had over 4000 casualties by the end the war in Europe. They were told they would probably be sent to the Pacific to invade Japan since they were conciderd a relative (fresh)unit. The bomb probably saved his life also.

From a WWII vet, it's a very long essay. Here are the first three pages, link is at the bottom:

“Thank God for the Atom Bomb”

The New Republic - August 1981
by Paul Fussell

Many years ago in New York I saw on the side of a bus a whiskey ad I’ve remembered all this time. It’s been for me a model of the short poem, and indeed I’ve come upon few short poems subsequently that exhibited more poetic talent. The ad consisted of two eleven-syllable lines of “verse,” thus:

In life, experience is the great teacher.
In Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience.

For present purposes we must jettison the second line (licking our lips, to be sure, as it disappears), leaving the first to register a principle whose banality suggests that it enshrines a most useful truth. I bring up the matter because, writing on the forty-second anniversary of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I want to consider something suggested by the long debate about the ethics, if any, of that ghastly affair. Namely, the importance of experience, sheer, vulgar experience, in influencing, if not determining, one’s views about that use of the atom bomb.

The experience I’m talking about is having to come to grips, face to face, with an enemy who designs your death. The experience is common to thosein the marines and the infantry and even the line navy, to those, in short, who fought the Second World War mindful always that their mission was, as they were repeatedly assured, “to close with the enemy and destroy him.”

Destroy, notice: not hurt, frighten, drive away, or capture. I think there’s something to be learned about that war, as well as about the tendency of historical memory unwittingly to resolve ambiguity and generally clean up the premises, by considering the way testimonies emanating from real war experience tend to complicate attitudes about the most cruel ending of that most cruel war.

“What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?” The recruiting poster deserves ridicule and contempt, of course, but here its question is embarrassingly relevant, and the problem is one that touches on the dirty little secret of social class in America. Arthur T. Hadley said recently that those for whom the use of the A-bomb was “wrong” seem to be implying “that it would have been better to allow thousands on thousands of American and Japanese infantrymen to die in honest hand-to-hand combat on the beaches than to drop those two bombs.” People holding such views, he notes, “do not come from the ranks of society that produce infantrymen or pilots.” And there’s an eloquence problem: most of those with firsthand experience of the war at its worst were not elaborately educated people. Relatively inarticulate, most have remained silent about what they know. That is, few of those destined to be blown to pieces if the main Japanese islands had been invaded went on to become our most effective men of letters or impressive ethical theorists or professors of contemporary history or of international law. The testimony of experience has tended to come from rough diamonds--James Jones’ is an example--who went through the war as enlisted men in the infantry or the Marine Corps.

Anticipating objections from those without such experience, in his book WWII Jones carefully prepares for his chapter on the A-bombs by detailing the plans already in motion for the infantry assaults on the home islands of Kyushu (thirteen divisions scheduled to land in November 1945) and ultimately Honshu (sixteen divisions scheduled for March 1946). Planners of the invasion assumed that it would require a full year, to November 1946, for the Japanese to be sufficiently worn down by land-combat attrition to surrender. By that time, one million American casualties was the expected price. Jones observes that the forthcoming invasion of Kyushu “was well into its collecting and stockpiling stages before the war ended.” (The island of Saipan was designated a main ammunition and supply base for the invasion, and if you go there today you can see some of the assembled stuff still sitting there.) “The assault troops were chosen and already in training,” Jones reminds his readers, and he illuminates by the light of experience what this meant:

What it must have been like to some old-timer buck sergeant or staff sergeant who had been through Guadalcanal or Bougainville or the Philippines, to stand on some beach and watch this huge war machine beginning to stir and move all around him and know that he very likely had survived this far only to fall dead on the dirt of Japan’s home islands, hardly bears thinking about.

Another bright enlisted man, this one an experienced marine destined for the assault on Honshu, adds his testimony. Former Pfc. E. B. Sledge, author of the splendid memoir With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, noticed at the time that the fighting grew “more vicious the closer we got to Japan,” with the carnage of Iwo Jima and Okinawa worse than what had gone before. He points out that

what we had experienced [my emphasis] in fighting the Japs (pardon the expression) on Peleliu and Okinawa caused us to formulate some very definite opinions that the invasion . . . would be a ghastly bloodletting. It would shock the American public and the world. [Every Japanese] soldier, civilian, woman, and child would fight to the death with whatever weapons they had, ride, grenade, or bamboo spear.

The Japanese pre-invasion patriotic song, “One Hundred Million Souls for the Emperor,” says Sledge, “meant just that.” Universal national kamikaze was the point. One kamikaze pilot, discouraged by his unit’s failure to impede the Americans very much despite the bizarre casualties it caused, wrote before diving his plane onto an American ship “I see the war situation becoming more desperate. All Japanese must become soldiers and die for the Emperor.”

Sledge’s First Marine Division was to land close to the Yokosuka Naval Base, “one of the most heavily defended sectors of the island.” The marines were told, he recalls, that

due to the strong beach defenses, caves, tunnels, and numerous Jap suicide torpedo boats and manned mines, few Marines in the first five assault waves would get ashore alive—my company was scheduled to be in the first and second waves. The veterans in the outfit felt we had already run out of luck anyway.... We viewed the invasion with complete resignation that we would be killed—either on the beach or inland.

And the invasion was going to take place: there’s no question about that. It was not theoretical or merely rumored in order to scare the Japanese. By July 10, 1945, the pre-landing naval and aerial bombardment of the coast had begun, and the battleships Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, and King George V were steaming up and down the coast, softening it up with their sixteen-inch shells.

On the other hand, John Kenneth Galbraith is persuaded that the Japanese would have surrendered surely by November without an invasion. He thinks the A-bombs were unnecessary and unjustified because the war was ending anyway. The A-bombs meant, he says, “a difference, at most, of two or three weeks.” But at the time, with no indication that surrender was on the way, the kamikazes were sinking American vessels, the Indianapolis was sunk (880 men killed), and Allied casualties were running to over 7,000 per week.

“Two or three weeks,” says Galbraith.

Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed and wounded, three weeks more, 21,000. Those weeks mean the world if you’re one of those thousands or related to one of them. During the time between the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb on August 9 and the actual surrender on the fifteenth, the war pursued its accustomed course: on the twelfth of August eight captured American fliers were executed (heads chopped off); the fifty-first United States submarine, Bonefish, was sunk (all aboard drowned); the destroyer Callaghan went down, the seventieth to be sunk, and the Destroyer Escort Underhill was lost. That’s a bit of what happened in six days of the two or three weeks posited by Galbraith. What did he do in the war? He worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington. I don’t demand that he experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn’t…


All 14 pages:

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

Different times, different place, different values! Was it wrong, was it right, only the folks who were in that time can justify the response. Think of the 'millions of lives' lost over the centuries fighting wars for 'who'? A tally of lives lost or saved is not quantifiable in the world of political power pursuits! It was a very Nationalistic world back then!

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Originally posted by trebor44:
Was it wrong, was it right, only the folks who were in that time can justify the response.

Wrong. There's no doubt dropping those bombs was the right thing to do. the war would have been lengthened, resulting in the loss of countless more lives, both American and Japanese. Russia would have invaded Japan, resulting in a split Japan, half democratic, half communist. Sound familiar? How's that working out for what is now North and South Korea?

Japan should thank us every day- every day- for bringing the war to a close with those two bombs. Those Americans who think we owe Japan an apology and those Japanese who think we owe them an apology are stunningly ignorant and shortsighted and they can go fuck themselves.

The United States rebuilt Japan after the war, unlike the brutal and barbaric way the Japanese treated their defeated enemies. The United States was benevolent and generous to Japan and made Japan an economic superpower. You're welcome, Japan.

Every Goddamned year in August, this shit comes up. The whiners need to get over it and actually study history.

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Originally posted by parabellum:. . . The United States rebuilt Japan after the war, unlike the brutal and barbaric way the Japanese treated their defeated enemies. The United States was benevolent and generous to Japan and made Japan an economic superpower. You're welcome, Japan. . .

I think that's a very important matter re WWII and Japan.

Actually the more information about WWII is revealed (unclassified) the more complicated it becomes and the more I question. Roosevelt's sentiment about "Uncle Joe" along with Churchill's support set us up to enjoy the cold war. It all could have been so much different. I just gave away a stack of WWII books that stood about 2 feet high, much of it was not included in the history we thought we knew.

^^^^^^^^^^^
Roosevelt was intellectually compromised. It made a huge difference.

You are absolutely correct, so were Grew and Hull.

After the war was over our military found out thAt Japan Had as many 5000 planes they could use in Kamakasi attacks on our ships, almost twice the number used before.