Did the Atomic Bomb End WW2??

[DAS (formerly BushAdmirer)]

The Hari Kari attacks and the Saipan suicides were indicative of a religious fanaticism. Today's Jahidist suicide attacks are similar.

It's one thing to die for your country while fighting in a just war. It's something else again to die because you've been conned into false beliefs by bogus religious mullahs or priests. That's what happened to those Japanese and that's what's happening in Islam today.

One point that is beyond debate is the fact that the Japanese people are much better off having lost that war than they would have been had they won it. You have to shudder at the thought of governments being commanded by militarists like Togo and Hitler.

[♫anna♫]

Jun 14, 2011 17:22:57 GMT DAS (formerly BushAdmirer) said:

And it worked - for the Japanese. They stopped being barbarians and started being civilized. They achieved more prosperity - and peace - than they ever knew, or could have achieved had they continued fighting and not been nuked. The shock of getting nuked is responsible.

We achieved this because we were determined to achieve victory. Victory without apologies. Despite perennial liberal demands we do so, America and its government has never apologized for nuking Japan ... Hopefully, American ever will.

With all due respect Das, what's wrong with apologizing for nuking innocent civilians? Sure the Japanese should condemn the Bataan death march, Pearl Harbor and the rest of their part in the madness called war.

Maybe the United States Strategic Bombing Survey's authorative 1946 report will put some doubt in your mind!



www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm#jstetw page 26 QUOTE:
There is little point in attempting precisely to impute Japan's unconditional surrender to any one of the numerous causes which jointly and cumulatively were responsible for Japan's disaster. The time lapse between military impotence and political acceptance of the inevitable might have been shorter had the political structure of Japan permitted a more rapid and decisive determination of national policies. Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

[DAS (formerly BushAdmirer)]

Anna - President Truman was receiving daily casualty reports from the US Military. The Hari Kari suicide attacks wreaked havoc with the US fleet at Okinawa.

We had the A-Bomb. He made the decision to use it on medium size Japanese cities so as to get the full attention of the Emperor and the military leaders. It worked. You can't really argue with success.

[Liberator]

Maybe Wikipedia isn't the best place but it's always a good start. Whatever the Instrument of Surrender, Hirohito's rescript to the people was so ambiguous that it needed an announcer to explain that he had actually surrendered. The phraseology quoted here is such that it almost sounds as if he was being lenient to them.

I don't think we can understand the Japanese of the time (or necessarily the Americans). "C'est payé, balayé, je me fous du passé" All the same, an apology accepting that at the time it seemed the right thing to do, would do no harm.

The main subject of the speech was to announce the surrender of Japan, that Hirohito "ordered Our Government to communicate to the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union that Our Empire accepts the provisions of their Joint Declaration."

In the speech, Hirohito notes that the war is "Our sincere desire to ensure Japan's self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia […]", but "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage".

He then cites "Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives" (Japanese: 加之敵ハ新ニ殘虐ナル爆彈ヲ使用シテ頻ニ無辜ヲ殺傷シ慘害ノ及フ所眞ニ測ルヘカラサルニ至ル); the remark is interpreted to refer to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that occurred days before the speech. He, however, never mentioned the Soviet invasion that had begun a few days before the speech. Finally, and most famously, he says: "However, it is according to the dictates of time and fate that We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is unsufferable."

[♫anna♫]

Jun 14, 2011 22:11:17 GMT DAS (formerly BushAdmirer) said:

Anna - President Truman was receiving daily casualty reports from the US Military. The Hari Kari suicide attacks wreaked havoc with the US fleet at Okinawa.

We had the A-Bomb. He made the decision to use it on medium size Japanese cities so as to get the full attention of the Emperor and the military leaders. It worked. You can't really argue with success.

Hirohito wanted to surrender in the spring of 1945! He wasn't the absolute ruler that the people on the outside considered him to be. The demand of "unconditional surrender" complicated matters for the worse.

Using the atomic bomb on civilians is a very dangerous precedent, which may boomerang someday. We'll have to agree to disagree on whether or not the atomic bombing of civilians solves problems. I disagree! It creates more problems and dangers that it could ever "solve". "Even if" it shortened the war a few weeks the danger of setting this "precedent" outweighs any possible temporary "gains".
Page p. 420 QUOTE:
The fact is that as far as the Japanese militarists were concerned, the atomic bomb was just another weapon. The two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were icing on the cake, and did not do as much damage as the firebombings of Japanese cities. The B-29 firebombing campaign had brought the destruction of 3,100,000 homes, leaving 15 million people homeless, and killing about a million of them. It was the ruthless firebombing, and Hirohito's realization that if necessary the Allies would completely destroy Japan and kill every Japanese to achieve "unconditional surrender" that persuaded him to the decision to end the war. The atomic bomb is indeed a fearsome weapon, but it was not the cause of Japan's surrender, even though the myth persists even to this day.

[DAS (formerly BushAdmirer)]

Much as I admire you Anna (and usually agree with your posts) I must disagree on this issue. Harry Truman made the right decision and the war ended a few days later. There is nothing to apologize for.

Have the Japanese apologized for Pearl Harbor? Have the Germans apologized for electing Hitler?

[♫anna♫]

Jun 14, 2011 23:54:25 GMT DAS (formerly BushAdmirer) said:

Much as I admire you Anna (and usually agree with your posts) I must disagree on this issue. Harry Truman made the right decision and the war ended a few days later. There is nothing to apologize for.

Have the Japanese apologized for Pearl Harbor? Have the Germans apologized for electing Hitler?

Dearest Das,
Hitler was never elected chancellor. He was appointed chancellor by daffy Hindenburg. The people had no voice in that decision.

I don't think anyone expects people, who weren't involved in the decision making to "apologize" for wrong, desasterous or evil decisions. Most of us weren't even born at the time of WW2.

The Japanese nowadays don't approve of the Pearl Harbor attack and contempary Germans don't approve of Hitler. We can ignore the tiny dissenting fringe elements that exist in every society here.

I'm satified with disaproval or at least the admission that something in history could have been done better.

[DAS (formerly BushAdmirer)]

-->I'm satified with disaproval or at least the admission that something in history could have been done better.

I agree with that Anna. No one I know would blame present day Germans for Hitler or present day Japanese for the militaristic leaders of WWII.

That was a sad chapter in world history. We're all happy that's in our rear view mirrors.

[♫anna♫]

Jun 15, 2011 0:55:33 GMT DAS (formerly BushAdmirer) said:

-->I'm satified with disaproval or at least the admission that something in history could have been done better.

I agree with that Anna. No one I know would blame present day Germans for Hitler or present day Japanese for the militaristic leaders of WWII.

That was a sad chapter in world history. We're all happy that's in our rear view mirrors.

AMEN Das!
My main concern here is actually not the unchangable past, but the here and now. I don't want terrorists to have any support in the belief that killing innocent civilians achieves any real goals.

[DAS (formerly BushAdmirer)]

Anna - WWII was a really terrible war in terms of civilian casualties. The bombing of London, the bombing of German cities like Dresden, the dropping of A Bombs on Hiroshima and worst of all, the Holocaust.

In the interim we've seen civilian massacres in Cambodia, Bosnia, Saddam's Iraq, Rwanda, and elsewhere.

I wish the world would never go there again but I'm afraid that's probably wishful thinking. As we're seeing today with Ghadafi, brutal dictators generally don't go quietly. For them, power is more important than civilian lives.

[♫anna♫]

Yes Das! There's no denying the unspeakable horrors of war.

If mankind only learns that terrorism and totalitarianism don't work we can move a step forward.


"The first casualty when war comes is truth!" Sen. Hiram W Johnson

[DAS (formerly BushAdmirer)]

Anna - I'm curious. Are you old enough to remember WWII or did you have parents and relatives who told you about it? Did your family live in a German city that was directly affected by the war? Just wondering.

[♫anna♫]

Jun 15, 2011 23:54:49 GMT DAS (formerly BushAdmirer) said:

Anna - I'm curious. Are you old enough to remember WWII or did you have parents and relatives who told you about it? Did your family live in a German city that was directly affected by the war? Just wondering.

Oh no Das! I was born long after the war. I have elderly relatives who were captured in East Prussia by the Russians and on the American side an elderly Grand Dad, who served in the US navy towards the end of the Pacific campagne.

I have no axe to grind, but am disturbed when any of the countless atrocities out of past wars are seen as acceptable by any sizeable percent of people today.

[mouse]

In the mind of the president of the United States were surely two reasons for using these new and, as it turned out, enormously destructive weapons. One was of course the way in which the Japanese armed forces, principally the Japanese army, had conduc ted World War II. The barbarities of the war had their beginnings in Japan's war against China, which began in 1937. That same year, when Japanese troops occupied Nanking, the human cost was extraordinary: Between 100,000 and 200,000 people were killed by the occupying troops for no reason at all except what may only be described as blood lust.

Years later, after the end of World War II, the responsible Japanese commander, General Iwane Matsui, was arraigned before a war crimes tribunal in Tokyo and subse quently sentenced and hanged. His excuse for what had happened was that he had not known what was going on; the excuse of ignorance could not, however, absolve him of the responsibility he bore. In the war crimes trials after the war, it was impossible to seize upon subordinate commanders, both for what was described as "the rape of Nanking" and other countless horrors that marked Japanese army actions in China before American entrance into the war on December 7' 1941.

And then there was the event that brought the United States into the war. The "sneak attack"-without a declaration of war-by Japanese carrier planes upon Pearl Harbor resulted in the deaths of 1,000 men on the battleship U.S.S. Arizona, which sank so rapidly that the sailors sleeping below deck could not escape, and nearly 1,500 other deaths aboard ships in the harbor, on the surrounding airfields, and among civilians caught in the machine-gun fire and exploding bombs.

Pearl Harbor was not the only instance of Japanese barbarism that Americans knew. It was followed by the Bataan death march beginning April 9, 1942, during which 72,000 exhausted Filipino and American defenders of the Bataan peninsula were marched for four days a distance of 5O miles without food and water, while Japanese soldiers shot or bayoneted hundreds of stragglers. And there were, in addition, the bestial conditions in the Japanese prison camps endured by military prisoners and interned civilians for the remainder of the war-three and one-half years. And the innumerable instances (seemingly random but nonetheless displaying the Japanese army's contempt for prisoners) of shootings and beheadings that continued until the end of World War II.

All of the above, moreover, were instances of maltreatment of only American prisoners; these instances were multiplied into the tens of thousands when one considered British, Dutch, and other Allied prisoners taken mostly in the war's first months at Hongkong, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and in Burma.

Japan's conduct of the war, in violation of the Geneva conventions drawn up in a series of international meetings but affixed most recently in international law during the mid-1920s, was akin to Nazi Germany's treatment of Soviet prisoners during the war and of the Holocaust itself, the genocides that came out of Germany's appalling racial policies under the Nazi regime.

And then, in calculating why President Truman and leading officials of his administration looked upon nuclear warfare as a positive good rather than terrible savagery, there was the very real issue in the summer of 1945 of the cost of a U.S. invasion of the Japanese home islands. Whatever the historical-one might describe them as emotional-reasons for "getting back at" Japan, there was the frightening cost of an invasion by the U.S. Army and Navy.

It might seem to an onlooker or casual observer that any calculation of an invasion at that time (an invasion that in fact never took place) was so speculative and so likely to partake of estimates and generally of unreality that it was incalculable, that the contemplated invasion was largely theory rather than actuality and that there was thereby no basis on which to make the decision that the president and his advisers did ultimately make, namely, to risk (and, in fact, this is what happened) the deaths of 100,OQO or more Japanese, including many, many civilians-men, women, and children. But the calculus was not at all theory, for there was clear evidence that an invasion would be enormously costly. In retrospect it is improper to say that Truman and his principal assistants took their momentous decision largely out of emotion, memory of Japanese bestialities, and without serious measurement of what the U.S. forces might be up against.

The two benchmarks for the possible cost of invading the home islands were the American invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the spring and early summer of 1945.

The invasion of Iwo proved extremely costly: 6,200 U.S. Marines died on that small island that was so valuable as an airbase for B-29s involved in the bombing of Japan. Some of the bombers that were unable to make their runs or upon return were crippled by antiaircraft or other damage or mechanical failures, were able to land there.

The American preponderance over the Japanese defenders at Iwo Jima was four to one. The invasion of the large island of Okinawa, which was 350 miles south of the southernmost home island of Kyushu, proved twice as costly: 13,000 died, one-third of them aboard ship as a result of the dozens of kamikaze attacks. The pilots of these outmoded planes, which often had no ability to get back to their bases, sacrificed themselves and their planes as bombs. In the single most costly kamikaze attack (on the big carrier U.S.S. Franklin), the cost in U.S. deaths was 1,000 men, and the attack turned the ship into a flaming near-wreck, useless for any further campaigns.

While this carnage was taking place, the Marine and army troops on Okinawa were fighting across the island foot by foot, encountering the defenders who battled until they died. The entire Japanese high command committed hara-kiri. The civilian populace meanwhile served as beasts of burden and frequently as cannon fodder: They were driven ahead of Japanese lines to take the initial fire of the Americans and to detonate mines along the way. American casualties-wounded, missing, and dead-totaled 35 percent of the attacking force, despite the preponderance of U.S. ground forces of two and one-half to one.

By mid-June 1945, the huge question in the minds of American commanders and members of the Truman administration was whether it was possible to persuade the Japanese government and military to surrender. The Japanese military (though clearly beaten) was not willing to surrender. If the decision could have been made by Japan's civilian leaders or even the Japanese people, the war probably would have come quickly to an end, but unfortunately the decision was not theirs: It lay in the hands of the military, and particularly in the hands of army leaders. (By this time the Japanese Navy had virtually ceased to exist, almost all its ships having become either unserviceable or having been sunk.)

Leaders of the Japanese army had decided to fight on, whatever the cost, and thereby honor the Japanese military code of bushido, that of warriors whose careers might be traced back to the distant past. That the struggle, in the early summer of 1945, could not be waged in the manner of past struggles-through man to man clashes-but had to be fought in the twentieth-century manner with weapons, did not concern the Japanese military leaders. They would fight with whatever lay at hand. And the defensive weapons they did have, which was an array of artillery pieces and about 5,000 planes that could be used as kamikazes, were bound to cost the attackers heavily, as on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

By mid-June American military leaders were becoming fearful of what their military services might be up against, and calculations of a tentative sort were made, all of them frightful in their implications. A joint war plans committee, army and navy, came up with an estimate that 25,000 men would be killed in an invasion of Kyushu on two fronts; 40,000 might die if an invasion on a single front was followed by invasion of the island of Honshu, on which Tokyo was located; and 46,000 deaths were estimated as a result of a two-front invasion of Kyushu followed by an invasion of Honshu.

[mouse]

Jun 16, 2011 0:45:08 GMT ♫anna♫ said:

I have no axe to grind, but am disturbed when any of the countless atrocities out of past wars are seen as acceptable by any sizeable percent of people today.

there are times when the ends justify the means..when the greater good has to be considered

[♫anna♫]

Jun 16, 2011 11:18:57 GMT mouse said:

Jun 16, 2011 0:45:08 GMT ♫anna♫ said:

I have no axe to grind, but am disturbed when any of the countless atrocities out of past wars are seen as acceptable by any sizeable percent of people today.

there are times when the ends justify the means..when the greater good has to be considered

The approval of using the atomic bomb on innocent non combattant Japanese civilians is a bad thing and makes this world more dangerous to live in.

Think of the possible long term consequences!

[♫anna♫]

Dearest Mouse!
You should post the link to the article, which you quote!
Introduction: Truman and the Bomb, a Documentary History
www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/ferrell_book/ferrell_book_intro.htm

Jun 16, 2011 11:14:57 GMT mouse said:

In the mind of the president of the United States were surely two reasons for using these new and, as it turned out, enormously destructive weapons. One was of course the way in which the Japanese armed forces, principally the Japanese army, had conduc ted World War II. The barbarities of the war had their beginnings in Japan's war against China, which began in 1937. That same year, when Japanese troops occupied Nanking, the human cost was extraordinary: Between 100,000 and 200,000 people were killed by the occupying troops for no reason at all except what may only be described as blood lust.

Years later, after the end of World War II, the responsible Japanese commander, General Iwane Matsui, was arraigned before a war crimes tribunal in Tokyo and subse quently sentenced and hanged. His excuse for what had happened was that he had not known what was going on; the excuse of ignorance could not, however, absolve him of the responsibility he bore. In the war crimes trials after the war, it was impossible to seize upon subordinate commanders, both for what was described as "the rape of Nanking" and other countless horrors that marked Japanese army actions in China before American entrance into the war on December 7' 1941.

And then there was the event that brought the United States into the war. The "sneak attack"-without a declaration of war-by Japanese carrier planes upon Pearl Harbor resulted in the deaths of 1,000 men on the battleship U.S.S. Arizona, which sank so rapidly that the sailors sleeping below deck could not escape, and nearly 1,500 other deaths aboard ships in the harbor, on the surrounding airfields, and among civilians caught in the machine-gun fire and exploding bombs.

Pearl Harbor was not the only instance of Japanese barbarism that Americans knew. It was followed by the Bataan death march beginning April 9, 1942, during which 72,000 exhausted Filipino and American defenders of the Bataan peninsula were marched for four days a distance of 5O miles without food and water, while Japanese soldiers shot or bayoneted hundreds of stragglers. And there were, in addition, the bestial conditions in the Japanese prison camps endured by military prisoners and interned civilians for the remainder of the war-three and one-half years. And the innumerable instances (seemingly random but nonetheless displaying the Japanese army's contempt for prisoners) of shootings and beheadings that continued until the end of World War II.

All of the above, moreover, were instances of maltreatment of only American prisoners; these instances were multiplied into the tens of thousands when one considered British, Dutch, and other Allied prisoners taken mostly in the war's first months at Hongkong, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and in Burma.

Japan's conduct of the war, in violation of the Geneva conventions drawn up in a series of international meetings but affixed most recently in international law during the mid-1920s, was akin to Nazi Germany's treatment of Soviet prisoners during the war and of the Holocaust itself, the genocides that came out of Germany's appalling racial policies under the Nazi regime.

And then, in calculating why President Truman and leading officials of his administration looked upon nuclear warfare as a positive good rather than terrible savagery, there was the very real issue in the summer of 1945 of the cost of a U.S. invasion of the Japanese home islands. Whatever the historical-one might describe them as emotional-reasons for "getting back at" Japan, there was the frightening cost of an invasion by the U.S. Army and Navy.

It might seem to an onlooker or casual observer that any calculation of an invasion at that time (an invasion that in fact never took place) was so speculative and so likely to partake of estimates and generally of unreality that it was incalculable, that the contemplated invasion was largely theory rather than actuality and that there was thereby no basis on which to make the decision that the president and his advisers did ultimately make, namely, to risk (and, in fact, this is what happened) the deaths of 100,OQO or more Japanese, including many, many civilians-men, women, and children. But the calculus was not at all theory, for there was clear evidence that an invasion would be enormously costly. In retrospect it is improper to say that Truman and his principal assistants took their momentous decision largely out of emotion, memory of Japanese bestialities, and without serious measurement of what the U.S. forces might be up against.

The two benchmarks for the possible cost of invading the home islands were the American invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the spring and early summer of 1945.

The invasion of Iwo proved extremely costly: 6,200 U.S. Marines died on that small island that was so valuable as an airbase for B-29s involved in the bombing of Japan. Some of the bombers that were unable to make their runs or upon return were crippled by antiaircraft or other damage or mechanical failures, were able to land there.

The American preponderance over the Japanese defenders at Iwo Jima was four to one. The invasion of the large island of Okinawa, which was 350 miles south of the southernmost home island of Kyushu, proved twice as costly: 13,000 died, one-third of them aboard ship as a result of the dozens of kamikaze attacks. The pilots of these outmoded planes, which often had no ability to get back to their bases, sacrificed themselves and their planes as bombs. In the single most costly kamikaze attack (on the big carrier U.S.S. Franklin), the cost in U.S. deaths was 1,000 men, and the attack turned the ship into a flaming near-wreck, useless for any further campaigns.

While this carnage was taking place, the Marine and army troops on Okinawa were fighting across the island foot by foot, encountering the defenders who battled until they died. The entire Japanese high command committed hara-kiri. The civilian populace meanwhile served as beasts of burden and frequently as cannon fodder: They were driven ahead of Japanese lines to take the initial fire of the Americans and to detonate mines along the way. American casualties-wounded, missing, and dead-totaled 35 percent of the attacking force, despite the preponderance of U.S. ground forces of two and one-half to one.

By mid-June 1945, the huge question in the minds of American commanders and members of the Truman administration was whether it was possible to persuade the Japanese government and military to surrender. The Japanese military (though clearly beaten) was not willing to surrender. If the decision could have been made by Japan's civilian leaders or even the Japanese people, the war probably would have come quickly to an end, but unfortunately the decision was not theirs: It lay in the hands of the military, and particularly in the hands of army leaders. (By this time the Japanese Navy had virtually ceased to exist, almost all its ships having become either unserviceable or having been sunk.)

Leaders of the Japanese army had decided to fight on, whatever the cost, and thereby honor the Japanese military code of bushido, that of warriors whose careers might be traced back to the distant past. That the struggle, in the early summer of 1945, could not be waged in the manner of past struggles-through man to man clashes-but had to be fought in the twentieth-century manner with weapons, did not concern the Japanese military leaders. They would fight with whatever lay at hand. And the defensive weapons they did have, which was an array of artillery pieces and about 5,000 planes that could be used as kamikazes, were bound to cost the attackers heavily, as on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

By mid-June American military leaders were becoming fearful of what their military services might be up against, and calculations of a tentative sort were made, all of them frightful in their implications. A joint war plans committee, army and navy, came up with an estimate that 25,000 men would be killed in an invasion of Kyushu on two fronts; 40,000 might die if an invasion on a single front was followed by invasion of the island of Honshu, on which Tokyo was located; and 46,000 deaths were estimated as a result of a two-front invasion of Kyushu followed by an invasion of Honshu.

[DAS (formerly BushAdmirer)]

Two of my very favorite US Presidents. Harry Truman and George W. Bush. Both led America is difficult times. Both were faced with difficult decisions which they made correctly. Harry was a Democrat. George a Republican. I admire them both.

[mouse]

Jun 16, 2011 19:04:04 GMT ♫anna♫ said:

Jun 16, 2011 11:18:57 GMT mouse said:

there are times when the ends justify the means..when the greater good has to be considered

The approval of using the atomic bomb on innocent non combattant Japanese civilians is a bad thing and makes this world more dangerous to live in.Think of the possible long term consequences""

;;
..it saved countless lives...in war a real winner takes all war ..there are no innocents there is simply the enemy and the enemy civilians .....
and as we have never had a real war since 1945 i think it rather proves my point
perhaps you should read what happened to the ""innocents in nanking when the japanese took over there...
or the innocents in and around the pacsific under the japanese boot

[♫anna♫]

Dearest Mouse!
Two wrongs don't make a right!
There are innocent non combattant civilians in all societies. It's pretty scary when someone thinks they should be killed.

[arizonavet1]

Jun 12, 2011 20:20:14 GMT ♫anna♫ said:

Jun 8, 2011 22:56:41 GMT DAS (formerly BushAdmirer) said:

President Harry Truman had a difficult decision to make. He could either order an invasion of Japan itself or he could try the Atomic bomb strategy.

Really BA! Saying that Truman only had 2 choices is ridiculous!

There were many other options. The atomic bomb could have been used on a Japanese military base or even on Mt. Fuji where no one lived just to warn the Japanese what kind of bomb the US developed.

Nuking civilians is a very bad, dangerous and evil precident to make! No one should approve of the mass killing of civilians, regardless of their nationality or the "leaders", who claim to be their rulers. The "pro nuke civilians opinion" is also a danger to US security!

Anna....

If the killing of 100,000 civilians the previously proven military installations of Hiroshima didn't have the effect of ending the war.....what makes you think that dropping the bomb on Mt. Fuji.....a TRUE civilian target would have a greater effect.

Honestly Anna you can't have it both ways....

If dropping he bomb on both cities had no effect....
if only the threat of an attack from Russia motivated them to surrender,

(coincidentally, three days after the Nagasaki bomb was dropped on that Naval target)

then how in the world, would dropping a bomb where only a few civilians were killed....have the desired effect?

MacAurthur had already publically warned Russia to leave the Japanese northern Islands alone....in no uncertain words....Russia had almost no Navy after WW2...even the decimated Japanese Navy could have sunk any Russian ships attacking any part of Japan....easily.

Truly, Truman, no war hawk himself, had no choice whatever.

They were whipped outside Japan, but very powerful within their main islands.

They had been planning for this attack.....hundreds of thousands of American & Japanese would have died.

Anna....honest question.

How could fire-bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, London & Coventry be considered a valid method of conducting war on military targets,, because they used conventional bombs, but Hiroshima & Nagasaki....."terrorism".

Terrorism isn't the killing of civilians....that is a totally unavoidable tragety of war....

It's the intentional targeting of civilians that is terrorism.

If the unavoidable deaths of cviilians were terrorism.....and no country wanted to be guilty of it.....then no country could ever defend themselvs from true terrorists, or an invading army.

[arizonavet1]

Jun 16, 2011 0:45:08 GMT ♫anna♫ said:

Jun 15, 2011 23:54:49 GMT DAS (formerly BushAdmirer) said:

Anna - I'm curious. Are you old enough to remember WWII or did you have parents and relatives who told you about it? Did your family live in a German city that was directly affected by the war? Just wondering.

Oh no Das! I was born long after the war. I have elderly relatives who were captured in East Prussia by the Russians and on the American side an elderly Grand Dad, who served in the US navy towards the end of the Pacific campagne.

I have no axe to grind, but am disturbed when any of the countless atrocities out of past wars are seen as acceptable by any sizeable percent of people today.

Interesting personal footnote Anna.

But Anna....neither Hiroshima or Nagasaki was an "atrocity" of any kind....

Within days after the attacks, we entered both cities, cared for the wounded & were instrumental in rebuilding the cities.....we spent many millions.

Just a cursory look at China, after Japan invaded would tell you that if they had defeated America, the world would have see the worst atrocities ever visited on civilians.

They worked day & night to personally execute thousands of Chinese with everything from pistols & swords.

Read "The Rape of Nanking"....horrible be headings of civilians was commonplace.

It's totally unfair to confuse atrocities, terrorism, and unavoidable collateral damage.

No one but the most ardent pacifists with "buy" that one Anna.

As horrible as the Nazi's & the Bushidoists were, we always had respect for the German & Japanese people

[DAS (formerly BushAdmirer)]

Anna - The Atomic Bomb was very new technology. It was still in the laboratory and not in production. They only had two of them.

What if they had wasted them bombing Mt Fuji and the Japanese failed to get the message?

I think that's the thinking that led to Harry Truman's decision.

[♫anna♫]

Jun 18, 2011 0:09:54 GMT DAS (formerly BushAdmirer) said:

Anna - The Atomic Bomb was very new technology. It was still in the laboratory and not in production. They only had two of them.

What if they had wasted them bombing Mt Fuji and the Japanese failed to get the message?

I think that's the thinking that led to Harry Truman's decision.

Hi Das!
I trust you agree at least that the surrender of Japan with or without the atomic bomb was imminent as confirmed by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey's authorative 1946 report ( which i posted earlier ). An invasion of Japan would have been absolutely unneccesary.

It could be speculated that a secret agreement not to prosecute emperor of his family for war crimes led to Japan's surrender too!
Why insist that the "holy atomic bomb" and it's mass killing of innocent civilians get the credit?

[♫anna♫]

Jun 17, 2011 16:31:24 GMT arizonavet1 said:

Jun 12, 2011 20:20:14 GMT ♫anna♫ said:

Really BA! Saying that Truman only had 2 choices is ridiculous!

There were many other options. The atomic bomb could have been used on a Japanese military base or even on Mt. Fuji where no one lived just to warn the Japanese what kind of bomb the US developed.

Nuking civilians is a very bad, dangerous and evil precident to make! No one should approve of the mass killing of civilians, regardless of their nationality or the "leaders", who claim to be their rulers. The "pro nuke civilians opinion" is also a danger to US security!

Anna....

If the killing of 100,000 civilians the previously proven military installations of Hiroshima didn't have the effect of ending the war.....what makes you think that dropping the bomb on Mt. Fuji.....a TRUE civilian target would have a greater effect.

Honestly Anna you can't have it both ways....

If dropping he bomb on both cities had no effect....
if only the threat of an attack from Russia motivated them to surrender,

(coincidentally, three days after the Nagasaki bomb was dropped on that Naval target)

then how in the world, would dropping a bomb where only a few civilians were killed....have the desired effect?

MacAurthur had already publically warned Russia to leave the Japanese northern Islands alone....in no uncertain words....Russia had almost no Navy after WW2...even the decimated Japanese Navy could have sunk any Russian ships attacking any part of Japan....easily.

Truly, Truman, no war hawk himself, had no choice whatever.

They were whipped outside Japan, but very powerful within their main islands.

They had been planning for this attack.....hundreds of thousands of American & Japanese would have died.

Anna....honest question.

How could fire-bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, London & Coventry be considered a valid method of conducting war on military targets,, because they used conventional bombs, but Hiroshima & Nagasaki....."terrorism".

Terrorism isn't the killing of civilians....that is a totally unavoidable tragety of war....

It's the intentional targeting of civilians that is terrorism.

If the unavoidable deaths of cviilians were terrorism.....and no country wanted to be guilty of it.....then no country could ever defend themselvs from true terrorists, or an invading army.

Hi George!
I disagree with all bombings where civilians are the prime target. When civilians are accidentally killed or are on a military installation then that's war.

Nanking, Auschwitz, etc. were horrific war crimes, but unlike the atomic bombings no one is claiming these crimes were justified.

Are the murders of an arsonist not as bad as those of other murderers?