Remembering the Bomb, Forgetting Why
This past Wednesday morning at 8:15 AM in Hiroshima, Japan, it was partly cloudy and 78 degrees with light winds. Visibility was about 10 miles. A bell softly rang in the immaculately kept Peace Memorial Park, remembering the moment in 1945 when the atomic age was born. The anniversary is marked in a similar manner every year with tens of thousands of people from all over the world joining in the solemn ceremony.
The dwindling number of survivors come forward each year and tell their tales of horror about that day. It’s almost as if they are re-living something that happened just recently, so vivid and emotional are the memories. Most of the survivors (many refer to them as “victims”) were young children in 1945. Many lost their parents in the blast. They say they come to bear witness so that there will be no more Hiroshimas.
Exactly 63 years earlier, weather conditions were eerily similar when Colonel Paul Tibbets, commander of the 509th Composite Group and pilot of a plane he named after his mother — the Enola Gay — flew over Hiroshima’s Aioi Bridge and began to bank his aircraft.
Just as Tibbets started his turn, the B-29 lurched violently as 10,000 pounds of American technical, industrial, and scientific ingenuity fell out of the bomb bay almost exactly on schedule (navigator Captain Theodore Van Kirk’s calculations of time over target was 15 seconds off). Little Boy, they called it, in an ironic juxtaposition to its massive bulk. It was a gun-type nuclear bomb — a crude, primitive, inefficient device by our standards. And for all the effort, money, time, and brainpower that went into designing it, Little Boy was simplicity incarnate.
A hollow bullet of highly enriched uranium 235 was placed at one end of a long tube with a larger mass of enriched uranium at the other end. The larger cylinder of nuclear material was barely “subcritical” — that is, needing just a bit more in order to start a chain reaction and cause an explosion.
When Little Boy hit 1900 feet above Hiroshima (it had drifted about 800 feet from the target), the uranium bullet fired down the barrel and impacted the cylinder perfectly. For two millionths of a second, the mass that used to be Little Boy became as hot as the sun. This heat so thoroughly eliminated humans directly below the blast, all that could be seen afterwards were shadow-like outlines of people on the concrete.
The blast — equivalent to about 13,000 tons of TNT — literally scoured out the center of the city and the resulting fires took care of most of the rest. About 70,000 people perished within hours of the blast with another 70,000 dying before the end of 1945.
Three days later –63 years ago today– history would repeat itself over the city of Nagasaki. This time, a plutonium bomb was used, increasing the efficiency of the device dramatically. Due to some topographical quirks (there were no large hills as in Hiroshima to focus the blast effect), the casualty rate was lower. Still, Fat Man managed to kill more than 40,000 that day and another 40,000 before that fateful year faded into history.
How could we have done it? Much of the world to this day asks the question, “Wasn’t there another, less cruel way to end the war?”
The decision to drop the bomb will always be controversial because the answer to that question is yes, there were other ways we could have ended the war with Japan. Some would almost certainly have cost more lives than were lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Army Air Force Commander of Strategic Forces in the Pacific Curtis LeMay believed if given six months and freedom to target whatever he wished, he could bring Japan to its knees by completely destroying its ability to feed itself. Victory assured — at the cost of several million starved Japanese.
The navy thought a blockade would do the trick. Starving the Japanese war machine of raw materials and the people of food they were importing from occupied China would have the Japanese government begging for peace in a matter of six months to a year. Again, visions of millions of dead from starvation came with the plan.
The army saw invasion as the only option. A landing on the southernmost main island of Kyushu followed up by an attack on the Kanto plain near Tokyo on the island of Honshu. Dubbed Operation Downfall, the plan called for the first phase to be carried out in October of 1945, with the main battle for Japan taking place in the spring of 1946. Casualty estimates have been hotly debated over the years, but it seems reasonable to assume that many hundreds of thousands of Americans would have been killed or wounded while, depending on how fiercely civilians resisted, perhaps several million Japanese would have died in the assault.
But there were other plans to end the war as well. Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph Bard sat in the meeting room where the Interim Committee was meeting on June 1, 1945 to decide on where the atomic bombs should be used and how. And from his vantage point, he did not agree with the main conclusions of the committee to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki without warning. Later that month, he wrote a memo to his boss, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, where he tried to make the case for not using the device.
Ever since I have been in touch with this program I have had a feeling that before the bomb is actually used against Japan that Japan should have some preliminary warning for say two or three days in advance of use. The position of the United States as a great humanitarian nation and the fair play attitude of our people generally is responsible in the main for this feeling.
During recent weeks I have also had the feeling very definitely that the Japanese government may be searching for some opportunity which they could use as a medium of surrender. Following the three-power conference emissaries from this country could contact representatives from Japan somewhere on the China Coast and make representations with regard to Russia’s position and at the same time give them some information regarding the proposed use of atomic power, together with whatever assurances the President might care to make with regard to the Emperor of Japan and the treatment of the Japanese nation following unconditional surrender. It seems quite possible to me that this presents the opportunity which the Japanese are looking for.
I don’t see that we have anything in particular to lose in following such a program. The stakes are so tremendous that it is my opinion very real consideration should be given to some plan of this kind. I do not believe under present circumstances existing that there is anyone in this country whose evaluation of the chances of the success of such a program is worth a great deal. The only way to find out is to try it out.
Was Japan ready to surrender in June? The cabinet had been wanting to give up at least since April. They had extended feelers to the Russians in hopes of using Stalin as a go-between in negotiations. But intercepts by our codebreakers released unredacted in 1995 clearly show that in addition to a demand to maintain the Emperor’s position, the Japanese would only settle for a “negotiated” peace with the army command structure still intact and no occupation. In short, an invitation to another war as soon as the Japanese recovered. Even that proved too much for many in the military who saw surrender as the ultimate disgrace according to bushido, their code of honor. When Stalin stalled the Japanese peace delegation, the military killed the tentative outreach completely.
Would warning the Japanese of the existence of the bomb have done any good? It may have. But the Interim Committee came to the conclusion that the Japanese were just as likely to move thousands of American prisoners of war to the target area. And a demonstration of what the bomb could do was out of the question. There was enough plutonium for two devices — the Trinity test “gadget” and Fat Man. After that, the supply was a question mark because of manufacturing problems at the Oak Ridge gaseous diffusion plant in Tennessee and Hanford reactor in Washington state.
Besides, after 82 days of the most brutal combat in any theater of the war, the battle for Okinawa was finally winding down. It is hard to grasp the wave of helplessness that descended on many in the civilian and military leadership as they watched the Japanese on Okinawa fight so fanatically and to the death. The prospect of invasion and continued combat throughout the Pacific was frightening. The gruesome toll of 100,000 Japanese soldiers dead and 50,000 American casualties weighed heavily on the Interim Committee in making their recommendations to President Truman.
Bard almost certainly discussed his memo with both Stimson and Truman. Stimson, an old world, old fashioned diplomat who said when disbanding the code breakers after World War I “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail,” was impressed by the arguments and even shared some of Bard’s sentiments but felt he had an obligation to abide by the Committee’s majority findings.
Truman, president for less than 3 months and in the dark about the Manhattan Project during his entire vice presidency, was being given advice from every corner on how to end the war. The decision to drop the bomb did not, he claims, initiate a great moral conflict within him. He accepted the recommendation of the Interim Committee and went off to Potsdam where the allies issued an ultimatum to Japan: surrender or suffer the consequences. The die was cast and the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was sealed.
With no good plan to end the war without massive death and suffering, an intransigent Japanese government insisting on fighting to the bitter end, mounting casualties in the Philippines and Okinawa, a war weary public, the prospects of transferring millions of men who had just survived the horrors of the European battlefields to the Pacific, and his own belief that using the bombs would end the war quickly, Truman gave the go ahead in a handwritten note on the back of a July 31, 1945 memo from Stimson regarding the statement to be released following the bombing.
“Reply to your suggestions approved. Release when ready but not before August 2.
In the end, there were probably many calculations that went into the decision by Truman to drop the bomb. Other considerations probably included the effect it might have on the Soviets. For many years, this reason was considered by several historians to be the primary concern of Truman when he gave the go-ahead to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While it no doubt was one factor in Truman’s decision, it appears now, thanks to publication of radio intercepts from the time, that the president’s primary focus was using a weapon he felt could end the war in days and not months.
Another factor was the advice given him by his good friend and confidante Jimmy Byrne, former senator from South Carolina. Byrne pointed out that spending $2 billion for a bomb that was never used, not to mention the chance that it could end the war and save lives, would anger the American people — especially those who lost loved ones because the bomb had not been tried. Some historians have pointed to this factor as an overriding one, but that almost certainly isn’t the case. Byrne’s political instincts were solid, but Truman would hardly have based his decision on what the voters would have thought after the war.
If all of this is went into deciding to use the bomb, why then does most of the rest of the world criticize us for using it?
The stories of survivors are harrowing — flames everywhere, people walking by whose flesh had been ripped off their bodies by heat and the blast, the inability to find loved ones. All the ghastliness of Dante’s Hell and a Gothic horror novel rolled into one. We pity them and ache for what they went through that horrible day.
But once –just once– I would like to hear the horror stories of the men and women of Pearl Harbor as counterpoint to the suffering of the Japanese and a reminder of who started the war and how they did it. I want to hear from those who can tell equally horrific tales of death and destruction. How Japanese aircraft strafed our men with machine gun fire while they were swimming for their lives through flaming oil spills, the result of a surprise attack against a nation with whom they were at peace. Or how the hundreds of men trapped in the USS Arizona slowly suffocated over 10 days as divers frantically tried to cut through the superstructure and rescue their comrades.
Perhaps we might even ask surviving POWs to bear witness to their ordeal in Japanese prison camps — surely as brutal, inhuman, and gruesome an atrocity as has ever been inflicted on enemy soldiers.
While we’re at it, I am sure there are thousands of witnesses who would want to testify about how the Japanese army raped its way across Asia. This little discussed aspect of the war is a non-event for the most part in Japanese histories. But the millions of women who suffered unspeakable mistreatment by the Japanese army deserve a hearing whenever the tragedy of Hiroshima is remembered.
Yes, no more Hiroshimas. But to take the atomic bombing of Japan totally out of context and use it to highlight one nation or one city’s suffering is morally offensive. The war with Japan, with its racial overtones on both sides as well as the undeniable cruelty and barbarity by the Japanese military, should have been ended the second it was possible to do so. Anything less makes the moral arguments surrounding the use of the atomic bomb an exercise in sophistry.
Those men who made the decision to use the atomic bombs on Japan had also just been instructed by the Nazi regime about the cost of fighting a conventional war to the bitter end. The German generals knew their army was defeated, and tried to get Hitler to capitulate, at least about a year before he was finally killed. Every indication at the time was that dealing with the Japanese would be worse than with the Nazis. Use of the bombs to convince the Jaqpanese empire to surrender was an act of mercy toward the Japanese people as well as to our soldiers.
On July 6th 1945 the 87th Infantry Division returned to the US and was preparing to train for the Invasion of Japan. We had European combat experience including the “Battle of the Bulge”. Plans for the Invasion called for a November landing near the Capital. Estimates of casualties were near a million. Japanese casualties would have been as high. I figure our “Home Front ” would not have put up with these figures and the “little boy” would have been used anyway. Not knowing anything about the radiation effects could have caused additional casualties to our troops. I was a member of the 87th. and owe my life to the decision to drop the bomb. While I symphacize with the Japanese in this case it was the Japanese who attacked us. The bomb was a warning to all “not to tread ” on the US.
In the Nanjing atrocity of December 1937, the Japanese invaders murdered as many as half a million Chinese civilians and POWs. In August of 1945, the Japanese forces on the Chinese mainland were still massive, the Soviet intervention in Manchuria notwithstanding. Had the bomb NOT been dropped, the only foreseeable outcome would have been the deaths of tens of thousands more Chinese civilians. The bomb save not just American lives and Japanese lives, but Chinese lives too.
Frank Moore, Columbus, Georgia
Moran, you are a superb writer.
I’ve been to Peace Park in Nagasaki and seen the horror of the bomb’s aftermath. I particularly remember the visceral sadness I felt when seeing pictures of a young Japanese woman trying to nurse her burned baby; indeed, I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. It was tragic beyond words.
Despite that, the bomb was necessary and I have no qualm with Truman’s use of it. The Japanese would almost certainly not have surrendered without it. It is quite likely that anyone in authority suggesting such a path would have been immediately assassinated; that certainly happened often enough before the war.
I have had a number of Japanese acquaintances tell me that the use of the bomb was actually a good thing for Japan in that it ended the war sooner and made it undeniably clear that the Americans could not, and should not, be resisted any further.
This attitude, strengthened by the Emperor’s surrender proclamation, enabled the Japanese to almost immediately turn their backs on their wartime nationalism and start realistically dealing with the disastrous postwar circumstances they faced, a consequence of tremendous value for them.
That woman and that baby will always haunt me, but it was better to sacrifice them and the other casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki than to suffer the inevitably greater losses of a continued war.
One last comment: you’ll look in vain for much sympathy for the “unnecessary use of nuclear weapons” attitude from those who were actually out there fighting the Japanese military. Those soldiers and sailors hadn’t the slightest problem with it other than wishing it had been available sooner.
Most of them fervently maintained that attitude until the end of their lives. Those folks who had been at the sharp end against Johnny Jap knew damned well he was a tough enemy that wasn’t going to stop of his own accord.
They knew it would be a bitter fight every step of the way to the Imperial Palace, and they were intensely grateful for the “miracle” that spared them that butcher’s bill. Read William Manchester on this issue sometime to confirm this comment.
Ending the war with the Bomb was only one of the benefits of Hiroshima and far from the most important one. After the German physicists Meitner and Hahn discovered fission it was only a matter of time before somebody somewhere took that discovery all the way and fashioned a nuclear weapon. Note, please, Americans did NOT make the discovery and had no control whatsoever over the Nazi research program that did! Meitner and Hahn had let the evil genie out of the bottle and there was nothing America could have done to prevent it! Now, who would you prefer to have the Bomb first, America or somebody else?
Given that America had the bomb, here is a CRUCIAL point: Would we have the whatever-it-took to actually use it? Consider this: America had a weapon that would end a bitter war against an enemy that was thoroughly despised and dehumanized. If we didn’t use it against the Japs (or the Nazis, but they surrendered too soon) who WOULD we use it against?
Now consider the Soviet Union under Stalin. He got the technology from us, sure, but he could have gotten it without us if we chose not to do it first. Do you really want to live in a world fashioned by a nuclear armed USSR without anybody anywhere being able to tit-for-tat Stalin or Khrushchev? You’d be speaking Russian now!!
Finally, consider the tit-for-tat angle. Stalin didn’t nuke New York or Washington because he knew we’d do the same to Moscow and Leningrad. How did he know? BECAUSE WE
HAD ALREADY DONE IT TO JAPAN! What if today’s USA-bashing helium-headed nonukenicks had been around in 1945 and moved-on.org Truman, forcing him to wimp out and not use the Bomb? Do you think for one minute that some Soviet general wouldn’t have convinced Stalin or Khrushchev that if we didn’t use the bomb against the most evil enemy the USA ever faced we certainly wouldn’t use it against the “peaceful” Soviets, especially after they soft-soaped the American MSM into painting the Soviets as our friends? Would you be willing to bet your life on that?
We did the world an enormous favor by bombing Japan BECAUSE IT INSURED THAT THE BOMB WAS NEVER USED AGAIN!
Now about Iran…
The bombs ended the war in the fastest and most humane way possible. Invasion would have produced literally millions of deaths, ON BOTH SIDES. People in thoses days were unaware of the extent of radiation damage. A generally unknown fact is that the expectation of casualties were so high that the govt is STILL issuing Purple Heart Medal’s that were ordered for the invasion. Every Purple Heart issued for Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, and both Gulf Wars were originally ordered for the invasion of Japan. Truly incredible. The American people would have said: never again, use the bomb at the slightest provocation to prevent the loss of so many American boys. Of course today, the Quislings and traitors want the US to loose anyway.
Two of my uncles fought in Europe, the other two in the Pacific. One in Army artillery, the other a Marine. I can remember near around 1967 or so, the Pacific uncles expressing, even then, the near hate for the Japanese. I can only imagine now what they must of felt toward the end of war. No doubt if left to the men who fought, not one in a million would of hesitated. The war was all about killing. Killing the most and the fastest so the war, especially for those who had been fighting for years, would be over.
And, so it was.
Some excellent observations here. One thought, “The decision to drop the bomb will always be controversial ….” I believe this statement is so only because there are those who value peace and non-violence over all, including their own freedoms. And they will forever refuse to see the logic in the decision to drop the bomb.
Without the bomb the war against Japan would have dragged on another year or two. Millions of killed on all sides. Japan would have been utterly destroyed. The USSR could have invaded and Japan could have become a divided nation like Korea and Germany.
“During my visit to Japan, I met Japanese who (unlike Soji) had lived through the war years. They shocked me when they offered me their opinion that the atomic bomb had been necessary to end the war, that the military government would have urged them to mass suicide if the conflagration of Hiroshima hadn’t happened.” Page 140
Source: Steinman, Louise, The Souvenir: A daughter discusses her father’s war, Algonquin Books, of Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, 2001
I am utterly convinced that America was justified in dropping the atom bomb on Japan. At this time, I am viewing a dvd of a BBC TV documentary entitled “Horror In The East.”
The Japanese military was a vile—and nihilistic institution. It was committed to the notion of national suicide. Surrender was not considered a viable option.
Look at the mass suicides by Japanese civilians on Okinawa when the Americans invaded. Multiply those by about 1000, in addition to all the deaths caused by military action.
The bombs actually saved more Japanese lives than American lives.
This was a very well written article, with a lot of very germane comments. My Dad was a navigator on a Navy cargo plane ferrying supplies to the island that would be the staging area for the invasion of Japan. He said that the ships at sea anchor occupied most of the ten mile radius around the island. The runway was flanked by tremendous quantities of war material, tanks, cannons, etc. He said that the A-bomb was a Godsend since we would not have to do another D-day invasion and we would not have to pay the price of hundreds of thousands of our men killed, and millions wounded.
War is hell–but when you are in one you have to win it–one of our persons dead or wounded is not worth 1000 of the enemy living. I served in the U.S. Army for 2 years (draftee) during the Vietnam War and was lucky to never have had to go into combat. I have a lot of problems when I see our military going into a building in Iraq or Afghanistan to “clear out” a sniper’s nest–the WW2 method was to use a cannon or aircraft bomb to destroy the building instead of risking the lives of our soldiers for some “feel good” reason.
Rocketman41
Surely the Peace Memorial Park ceremony is not about painting America as evil? I think the author misses the point in the last few paragraphs.
We need to remember the catastrophic power of these weapons, even if their use were justified at the time, so that, if we’re lucky, we’ll never have another Hiroshima.
Good Article.
The nuclear genie was well out of the bottle. Read “Japan’s Secret War”. Japan had seven
cyclotrons (A-bomb factories) up and running.
Six in mainland Japan, one in Wonsan which became North Korea. The latter was the most advanced, fell into Soviet hands and was how Stalin got the bomb so soon. The Rosenbergs were guilty as unmitigated sin, but were not very effective.
The only thing Japan lacked wwas fissionabile material. And had the German submarine U234 made it to Japan with those 560 kilograms of U235 on board, they could have been producing 2 to 5 bombs per day by June of 1945. These would have been Hiroshima-style bullet ignition bombs
AND dirty bombs as well from the radioactive residue left over in manufacture.
Uncle Sam had actually put the A bomb project on the back burner after learning that Hitler had blown his chances. After all, the Germans were the only ones who knew how to do things, mere Asiatics could not be expected to undserstand atomic power, you know. Fortunately, Hap Arnold
had Tibbets form the 509th, just in case.
Reinforcing the shocking discovery of the U234 was the equally shocking discovery of Kempetai code books in Shuri Castle Okinawa. These codes were unknown to our codebreakers and detailed how fission bombs and dirty bombs were to be used to inflict large casualties on us and
horrendous ones on their own populace.
Captain Truman of the Field Artillery had to digest all this in very short order and it was he who told President Truman what to do.
And after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the suicide-minded fanatics almost pulled off a sucessful that would have prevented the Emperor from broadcasting surrender and broadcasting Ketsu-go
instead. Something that would have resulted in almost total destruction of Japan and Japanese as well. This was averted only because some B29s
on their way to bomb an oil refinery had to divert and fly over Tokyo causing a blackout in the 20 minute time frame that such foiled the coup.
It was a close-run thing and some Divine Navigation may have been needed to clinch the only decent solution available by the only means available.
You’re missing one other important reason why the bombings had to be surprise – they weren’t sure the bombs were going to work. They only had two, and if they announced they were going to use one, and it fizzled, then where are they?
A few points:
Every major combatant nation had scientists who had warned their leaders of the possibility of the bomb. A speculative design, subsequently proven correct, was openly published in Berlin prior to the war. Our Manhattan project team lived in terror that they might lose the race to achieve the weapon. Within a day after Hiroshima, the Japanese high command knew what had occurred. But even after the second attack, they unanimously voted to continue the purposeless slaughter, national suicide, and rejected Truman’s surrender demand. A close friend of mine, a PhD in statistics, was a veteran munition effects expert. He studied the after effects of bombing so as to optimize future weapon usage. In pure terror, he was ordered into Japan, to assess Hiroshima, one of the first Americans to enter. He expected death, but was met by Japanese soldiers and treated well. They only demanded, once, that he not stand on a black stain. He became horrified when he comprehended their request. He was ignorant of post explosion effects, no bomb was dangerous one hour after detonation.
In quantum physics class, our home work was to assess, by calculation, the bomb’s efficiency. It was less than 1%. Today’s weapons are far more lethal.
Eisenhower framed the still unanswered conundrum: Unless mankind learns to use atomic power for peaceful purposes, it will annihilate us. Every eight months, the DoD expends more money than the entire US nuclear power industry cost. Nuclear power can melt a city, or heat a baby bottle. The decision for good, or evil, remains unchanged, by technology.
Evan:
In fact, the anti-Americanism is there – read some of the signs in the park from people who were there. And there is, unspoken to be sure, an accusatory finger pointed at us for perpetrating this horror.
I am not begrudging the Japanese their ability to mourn their dead or remember the day. But given the paucity of information about what the Japanese army did during the war in contemporary history books, it is not out of bounds for us to demand that the bombing be put in some kind of context that explains it.
“Decision for good or evil remains unchanged by technology”.
AMEN!
My military experience was in WESPAC, ported in Japan and sailing the China Seas. Safe to say none of the erstwhile tributaries of the Great Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere blame America for using the bomb. My feeling is most peace/ban the bomb activity is the legacy of Soviet mischief.
In Japan I found the resentment about Hiroshima was not the bomb but the US clinics set up not to treat radiation sickness but to monitor its progress. US clinics in Nagasaki provided treatment. Indeed Japans greatest resentment is that we interfered with their China conquest and ‘forced’ them to Pearl Harbor. Their textbooks say they were nobly rescuing China from the Chinese when the evil gaijin denied them oil to continue the benign venture.
I was in uniform that day in Germany, one of thousands waiting to be sent as foot soldiers to invade Japan. All we knew then was that a mushroom cloud had ended our dread of going to the Pacific to storm beaches and fight through cities. For the first time in years, we could wake in the morning without feeling there was an IOU out on our lives, held by someone unknown and payable on demand.
It was weeks before we learned the moral price for our relief–that over 200,000 would die from that explosion in Hiroshima and another over Nagasaki three days afterward and that our country would forever bear the burden of being the first to use weapons of mass destruction.
http://ajliebling.blogspot.com/2008/08/day-world-changed.html
Several years ago, I visited Los Alamos while vacationing in Santa Fe, NM. I spend nearly the entire day chatting up the docent, who had been volunteering for some years. He said there was a constant stream of elderly Japanese visitors coming through the little museum – most thanking them for dropping the bomb and ending the war.
There is an exhibit that presents both sides – and each side has a book available for either pro or con to write their thoughts. The “Pro” book is almost worth the trip to Los Alamos to read.
While citizens in other countries (and our own) point out that the US is the only country to use atomic weapons during war, I think it’s more telling a countries leaders what weapons we haven’t used that are potentially more distructive.
GlobalSecurity.org – Work by Japan’s Unit 731
“In 1940, a plague epidemic in China and Manchuria followed reported overflights by Japanese planes dropping plague-infected fleas. The Japanese attacked hundreds of heavily populated communities and remote regions with germ bombs. There appears to have been a massive germ war campaign in Yunnan Province bordering Burma. Planes dropped plague-infected fleas over Ningbo in eastern China and over Changde in north-central China, and Japanese troops also dropped cholera and typhoid cultures in wells and ponds. In all, tens of thousands, and perhaps as many 200,000, Chinese died of bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases.”
“We need to remember the catastrophic power of these weapons, even if their use were justified at the time, so that, if we’re lucky, we’ll never have another Hiroshima.”
“We” didn’t perpetrate the Rape of Nanking. Or the Shoah. Or the Gulag. Or the Great Leap Forward.
“We” — and “they” — need to remember that allegedly cultured and civilized human beings can commit such atrocities that cleansing by means of nuclear fire becomes morally preferable to allowing them to continue. And we especially need to remember that not everyone who shakes his head afterward and claims, “Nope, wasn’t me; in fact, I never approved of that stuff” is telling the truth.
No discussion on this subject is complete without mentioning the Potsdam Declaration.
The majority of Americans are neither directly affected themselves nor from the involvement of a close relative in a war. Few will take the time to read any commentary that captures the “feel” of the times as Moran has done here and will choose only to internalize pastoral scenes of peace and freedom. Some understand the necessity of well considered and sometimes extreme measures for survival while others simply “wish it to be”.
The War in Iraq has exposed younger Americans to a situation that won’t be “wished away” and sometimes causes innocent civilian deaths. It has also revealed again the paradox of conflicting emotions and ideals as only war can.
My compliments to you Sir for an excellent effort of reflecting the context and discussion of the war of another time. I’m also impressed with the quality of the splendid posts to your piece which added greatly to the overall presentation.
Thank you all.
Robert Steins comment explaining the dread of dying in an invasion of Japan is what most people feared about the Pacific war. The Battle of Okinawa was only a prelude to what everyone felt would be a protracted and needless bloodbath.
There was so much relief when Hiroshima was destroyed that Americans knew in their hearts that it was all over.
I can recall the personal glee when I heard the news. By any measure ,we were at war and they were the enemy who deserved destruction.
Great essay Rick Moran and a long needed reminder to those who continually fault America,that the price of Freedom is great and it increases each day.
I was a Marine 1st Lieutenant at Okinawa when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. In the offing was the invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost of the four main islands of Japan. It was scheduled for Novemmber 1, 1945 if I recall correctly. Our casualties on Okinawa and Iwo and a year earlier at Peleliu were heavy. The war in the Pacific revealed extraordinary Japanese brutality. Marines found dismembered Marines among the dead on Okinawa as they gained control of Japanes held territory. No one doubted for a moment that Kyushu would be worse, since it was a Japanese home island. Kamikazes had become more efficient in approaching a target ship, using multiple plane attacks on the same target. They would most certainly have inflicted greater losses on American ships at Kyushu since their targets would be at their doorstep. When placed on a balance scale, the decision to use the A bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki rather than not, leaves no room for argument. The Japanes civilian population would have suffered severe losses if the invasion occurred. The use of the A bombs inflicted Japanes civilian losses, indeed, but cost no American lives.
If the US were an aggressive, imperialist country we would have owned the whole world since hiroshima. Think what it means that we have shown restraint in using the bomb, even before any other country had it.The world should at least acknowledge what merciful people we are, and how this restraint all by itself proves the incredible fairness and good will of America.
Some points:
For those who claim we should have used an alternative to the nuclear bombs to force surrender… there is no way to know if any alternative would have worked. Also most alternatives that had been given a good chance of forcing surrender would have required months to force the surrender, and all of them had estimates of Japanese deaths higher than the number of deaths caused by the nuclear bombs. All of them also would have resulted in more American military deaths and more fighting over months for a nation that, having already defeated Germany, was immensely tired of the war.
Given all of that, the decision to use the nuclear bombs was, to me, quite defensible.
The Tokyo firebombing killed more Japanese civilians than both of the nuclear weapons combined. Why is the use of the nuclear weapons considered more evil (or even, by itself, evil)? Reasons, please.
When one nation is fighting another nation, what is the relative worth of one of your people against one of theirs? Please give the ratio, so that the rest of us can reason through exactly why you think Americans should have continued to die for a war we truly did not want to fight in (though, as with many countries, we were providing material support to one side).
Also, to the commenter who wondered whether this memorial is in its nature anti-American: Yes, it absolutely is.
Anyone who feels that the use of nuclear weapons to end WWII was unnecessary or premature should read about the horrors perpetrated by the Japanese in a very disturbing book entitled “The Rape Of Nanking.” While the atrocities of the Nazis have been well published, those committed by Japan throughout China, Korea and the South Pacific go suspiciously underreported. The real crime would have been to sacrifice hudreds of thousands of young Americans in a conventional invasion while a device that could end the war completely sat unused in an airplane hangar.
Several years ago, on a tour to Japan, we met a survivor of the bomb blast. He was a school boy at the time and his class was on an outing away from the ‘drop-zone.’ He was an educated man and stated it was the best way to end the war. He knew his people would fight to their death in every street if there was an invasion of their homeland. There was a young French couple who tried to stir up a reaction by claiming it just showed how inhumane the Americans were. This Japanese survivor rebuked them most effectively.
Outside the Hiroshima “Atomic Bomb” museum, there were a group of locals asking all the people exiting the museum to sign the ‘ban all nuclear weapons of war.’ I would gladly sign a petition to ban all weapons of war and was disappointed that this was not the focus of the petition. The museum – where I spent five hours – had numerous pictures and stories mentioning almost every aspect of the war. What was missing is who started the war and only a single line referring to the alleged incident in Nanking. That is the incident in China when Japanese solders savagely slaughtered men, women and children, burning them alive and slicing open the bellies of pregnant women. For me what I most remember about my five hours in the museum was what was conveniently omitted.
THANK YOU COLONEL TIBBETS
They are all gone now, except the youngest, my Uncle Bobby. The last of my own greatest generation.
Dad was in the Coast Guard, considered too old for active Navy duty. Uncle Roy was in the Navy, as was his brother Wally. Their youngest brother, Bobby, was a Marine pilot. He had begun flying at fourteen, using the money from the job my Dad got him at a drug store to pay for his flying lessons. Sneaking off to Palwaukee airport outside Chicago, where a sympathetic World War One veteran gave a young boy a chance to learn to soar with the eagles.
Wally and Roy served on aircraft carriers, with the hope they could watch out for their younger brother. But Bobby flew off fixed bases in the Pacific, flying the top line F4U Vought Corsair. What Wally and Roy wound up watching were Kamikaze pilots trying their damnedest to kill them. Uncle Roy had back problems the rest of his life from one of those pilots.
Dad went first, while I was still in High School. Uncle Wally was next, a few years after Dad. Uncle Roy held on until after I was married, and had transferred away from Chicago. But I went back, with my then small children, for his services. Two of my nephews blew taps at the cemetery. It was the first time I remember my retired career Marine Uncle Bobby crying. He is in North Carolina now, still playing his beloved golf, and still referring to my Aunt Helen as his bride.
Gone too is my oldest cousin, Bob. He landed at Utah Beach on D Day. Temporarily blinded by an artillery shell air burst, he returned to the front after only a few days of recovery. He lost a leg in France. His oldest son gave the eulogy. Until he spoke, most of the family never knew about the medals for valor Bob received. Like my other family members, he never talked much about the war.
I hear a lot of discussion about the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the second bomb dropped three days later on Nagasaki. It seems many historians, commentators, and pundits are still discussing the use of these weapons. Serious debates about the need for their employment, the moral implications, and the precedents set. Speculation, coupled with revisionist history, seem to make this an academic issue, open to many interpretations. However, to me, it is not academic. It is very personal.
You see, all of my family survived World War Two. Unlike 405,399 other American families, mine never received that dreaded visit from the Western Union man, bearing a telegram that started “We regret to inform you”. One limb lost, burns, scars and shed blood were all felt deeply, but at least they came back. But that could have been very different.
An invasion of Japan would have resulted in an estimated one million American casualties, over a third of whom would have been killed. Based on the experience of Okinawa, up to twenty million more Japanese civilians would have died. Would my Uncle Bobby, Uncle Roy and Uncle Wally have survived? Cousin Bob would have been here, as he had already been discharged with the loss of his leg. Dad too, would have survived, as he was never called to combat duty. But of the others, I understandably can’t say. But I can say that ending the war without an invasion of Japan insured that those who were still alive would remain so. Because the war ended when it did, I grew up with an Uncle Roy, Uncle Wally, and Uncle Bobby. And because the war ended when it did, 350,000 other American families welcomed back their sons, brothers, fathers and uncles. And twenty million Japanese survived to rebuild both their country, and their society.
Colonel Paul Tibbets passed away year. He piloted the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima that, together with the bombing of Nagasaki, finally ended World War II. We flew the American flag at half staff at my house, not to commemorate a bomb, but to say thank you to Col. Tibbets on behalf of my family.
Thank you, Colonel Tibbets for completing the mission that you knew would affect the rest of your life. Thank you, Colonel, for making the right decision.
The consequences had “Operation Downfall” would have had significant after affects; beside the immediate casualties, such a conflict would have brought the Russians into the conflict in much more a present way. Creating a North South
dynamic not unlike Korea; with the US holding Honshu and the Russians holding the North. Except it’s dubious that S. Korea would have prevailed without an armistice in the region.
Mao’s forces would have moved on Nationalist China; years before the fall in 1949. Britain would not have held out much longer in their
South Asia redoubts, Dubious that India much
less Pakistan would have developed in any significant way as we see today.
On the home front the quagmire in Hokkaido would likely claim Truman’s own presidency and the White House would have been ended up in the hands of arch segregationalist James Byrnes. The
cost of continuing the war, would have created significant social and economic dislocations.
Thank God for Divine retribution upon a merciless foe who certainly deserved worse than what was brought upon them. If only we could honor the brave men of the Enola Gay with a postage stamp, then perhaps future generations of Americans would learn to appreciate the real cost of freedom and liberty. Thank you for a very timely article, Mr. Moran. Just earlier tonight I was watching the MSM news showing the “solemn” ceremonies taking place in Nagasaki, and I couldn’t help but think, “gee, I wonder if they’re also thinking of the victims of Nanking, Pearl Harbor, Singapore, Wake Island, the Bataan Death March, etc.”? Probably not!
Let’s not forget that the deadliest weapon so far is the humble machete. It was an almost single cause of some 800 000 deaths in Rwanda, four times more than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. And as the uranium or plutonium core is enriched by tritium or deuterium to create the thermonuclear charge, the Rwandan machete was enchanced by the “United Nations” (he, he, he…) and in particular France’s cowardice, indiffence, and her agents’ nefarious plotting. The NUKE seeems rather benevolent by comparison…
Nanking was special merely for the fact that news of what happened there got out and remained in the eye. Every Chinese city taken by the Japanese had its time in hell from an army sacking. The Japanese army would ‘blood’ a new lt. by having them cut the head off a Chinese civilian. Just random brutality for training purposes.
Given how many Japanese civilians died fighting or committed suicide on Okinowa during its invasion, the lose of civilian life was drastically reduced by bombing the ruling military to its senses.
They were not worth what was estimated to be 1 million US causulties if we had to invade. If the Japanese continued, we could only make 1 bomb a month. Instead, our fire-bombing campaign was gutting them like a fish. It destroyed millions and destroted Japanese manufacturing. No one cares now. The anti-atom bomb types make as much sense to me as the anti-crossbow types from the middle ages.
I was medivacked to 249th. General Hospital in Japan; from Vietnam in 1966. During convalescence, I was granted a pass to Tokyo. I saw little sign of anti Americanism in the faces of Japanese I met. I have no illusions, in my opinion, our use of the nuclear option will historically be the wisest option for ending a horrible war. War is hell and our soldiers know that truth better than ideologues with platitudes. I believe nuclear weapons will be used again–the question is who, what when, where why and how?
The Americans brought war to the makers of war.
End of story.
The questions are always about whether it was necessary to drop the bombs, or if other means could have been employed.
One reason for the case of dropping them that I never see is the fact that they were dropped three days apart. Think about that a moment. We leveled one city, AND THEY STILL DID NOT SURRENDER. We had to drop another one THREE DAYS LATER before they would surrender.
My girlfriend’s dad was on board the USS Nevada, Sunday morning, December 7th, 1941. He lived. My uncle was cut in half by a Japanese machine gunner during a banzai charge on the night of June 30th/July 1st 1944 on Saipan. He died. My dad was a top turret gunner trainee on B-29′s and lived.
Had that bomb not dropped, I would not be here. And, to those who keep trying to re-write history, the Japanese would have committed national suicide if we had invaded. Perhaps 2-3 million Japanese dead-mostly women and children armed with bamboo spears.
The a-bombs were an absolute necessity to end a brutal war with the least carnage possible. FACT. DEAL WITH IT,
When I read this kind of tripe, it is clear why a large majority of the rest of the world hates the U.S.A. And way to go with the revisionist history (are you sure your last name is not Moron?) You say Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack yet there was documented incompetence and laziness by the U.S. military when they did not even bother to verify the radar reports and instead assumed they were a squadron of B-29′s. Only American’s can be so self-centered and arrogant in justifying the use of these weapons yet have the gall to dictate to other countries what they can and cannot do (like telling other countries to disarm). American’s were totally ignorant of terrorism before 9/11 and thought this only happened elsewhere. Only when subjected to it did American’s become outraged and went on this war of terrorism crusade without having all the facts. Only American’s can turn a blind eye to the atrocities their own military has committed during the Iraq war because they feel it is justified.
A couple of people said they visited the peace museum and saw no mention of Japan’s role in all of this. You are either blind or selectively skipped the museum exhibit called “Lessons of History”. Part of the inscription clearly states “Japan too with colonization policies and wars of aggression inflicted incalculable irreversible harm on the peoples of many countries. We must reflect on war and the causes of war, not just nuclear weapons. We must learn the lessons of history, that we may learn and avoid the paths that led to war.” Some of you say you have spoken to Japanese people who said they were thankful the bomb was dropped. What a load of self-created bologny because most normal Japanese know of the horrors of those bombs and have only one goal in mind, to see all nuclear weapons abolished, something that I think is impossible when you read on blogs like this the pro-stance for its use.
To read so many comments about people still believing their own countries propaganda justifying these bombings is downright sickening. To see so many U.S. citizens justifying this war crime against humanity as being less worse than the war crimes commited by the Japanese Empire is just disgusting. The U.S. continually says they are for peace yet their actions say otherwise. The U.S. asks other countries to disarm yet they hypocritically are one of only 3 countries in the world who refuse to do so. Actions speak louder than words and the U.S. and the majority of it citizens are a bunch of ignorant hypocrites. Who died and made the U.S.A. GOD? It is no wonder there can never really be true peace because of a country like the U.S. It’s no wonder the U.S. continues to alienate itself from the rest of the world while it’s citizens wonder why everyone else cannot see eye to eye with them.
The more I think about it, the more it isn’t a bad idea if North Korea and Iran continues giving the U.S. the middle finger. Plus what goes up has to come down and the U.S. has been on a steady downhill roll. It has already sold itself out to developing countries like China and India by outsourcing almost all of its manufacturing overseas. China is going to become the worlds next superpower regardless of the lies the American government will try to brainwash their citizens with. The U.S. is bankrupt financially but its citizens are sold a pack of lies stating otherwise. China and many other countries could take the U.S. down even quicker if they began dumping their foreign reserves of what can quickly become worthless U.S. dollars. The U.S. knows they have their balls in a vice and are trying to cover this up from their citizens. It is you people who are the ultimate fools.
From reading the garbage on this page, it is clear that the American government will have no problems selling out their own citizens for years to come. So yes, continue believing that the use of these nuclear weapons were justified because one day, the U.S. is going to find itself on the otherside of the fence because what comes around, goes around.
P.S. I notice that postings are moderated. I guess that is why almost every single comment here has been singlesided. Prove me wrong.
A technical point: it was the U.S.S. West Virginia which turned turtle in Pearl Harbor and some of whose crew suffocated before engineers post-battle could resuce them through the armored hull.
The Arizona victims died almost immediately, from sympathetic explosion of its magazine deck from an airborne hit between its un-armored stacks.
I’ve always thought it a great pity that the U.S. had only two nukes ready for dropping. After what Tojo’s butchers did in Nanking, Bataan, Changi, the Burma Railroad etc. etc. etc. they got off pretty easy.
Mind you, there was an upside: the next time some sprout-sucking, kumbayah-singing, bike-riding polar bear-hugger tells you that war solves nothing, remind him that Japan has been a model of good behaviour since those two big bangs.
Yes, the bomb. How buried is the destruction of Manila, in the United States Territory of the Philippines in 1945 by the Imperial Japaneses forces?
http://battlingbastardsbataan.com/som.htm
Yet, this was a contemporary event, not something distant, buried from the eye and mind in 1945.
In his autobiography Akira Kurosawa mentioned that the Japanese expected a suicide order when invasion began. he was very western and still never questioned how he would respond to that order. If that kind of order were actually given the Japanese people would be gone. Yeah that’s a big if, but still, the bombs pale in comparison.
666: B-29′s in 1941? How much of the rest of your rant is accurate, then?
Oh, and somehow it’s our fault we didn’t spot the incoming backstabbers on radar? Nice try. So if someone mugs you on a dark street, it’s your fault you weren’t looking?
One thing often forgotten is the massive fire bombing campaign the Army Air Force was carrying out against other Japanese cities. The civilian casualty rate for several cities rivaled or exceeded that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (separately.) Without the atomic bombs, both cities would have been obliterated by conventional bombing and the civilian casualty rate throughout all of Japan AFTER August 9, would have reached into the millions.
The Japanese civilians killed by the bomb were condemned to death by the Japanese government, which made began a horrific war against its neighbors as a matter of policy, and refused to surrender out of pride.
Keep in mind that 99% of Chinese prisoners of war died in captivity. 27% of US prisoners of war died in captivity. By contrast, 0.15% of US prisoners of war died in captivity.
Prove me wrong.
Done.
On some comments above:
‘Rosenbergs were guilty as unmitigated sin, but were not very effective.’
Wrong bomb. Klaus Fuchs was the man who gave the A-bomb to the Soviets.
‘The Tokyo firebombing killed more Japanese civilians than both of the nuclear weapons combined. Why is the use of the nuclear weapons considered more evil (or even, by itself, evil)?’
I have not run across eye-witness, ground accounts of the effect of the fire-bombing of Tokyo – they may be hard to come by. Of the accounts I have read, the only thing that sticks in my mind is how materials used in construction of Japanese buildings were extremely vulnerable to fire. But, easily accessible accounts from the ground of the fire bombing of Dresden paint a truly horrific picture, such as graphic descriptions of people running from their homes, only to sink into the molten asphalt and burst into flame.
I am of two minds here. At this point in time, it may be in our better interests to accept and let pass the judgment of some as to the utter inhumanity of the use of atomic weapons. Twisted souls like ”666” above, and other more active players like Osama bin Laden (actually his heirs, rest in pieces, dude) would like to twist our justifications in reverse to set off a nuke on us. On the other hand, it might be a more effective deterrent to say unapologetically, ”yeah, we used ‘em, and we’d do it again in a heartbeat if anyone tried to do it to us.”
666: That was a long post. I was wondering if there was some sort of argument in there?
“You say Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack yet there was documented incompetence and laziness by the U.S. military when they did not even bother to verify the radar reports and instead assumed they were a squadron of B-29’s.”
And this demonstrates that it wasn’t a suprise attack, how?
“Only American’s can be so self-centered and arrogant in justifying the use of these weapons yet have the gall to dictate to other countries what they can and cannot do (like telling other countries to disarm)…Japanese know of the horrors of those bombs and have only one goal in mind, to see all nuclear weapons abolished”
Would you like a side order of fries with that cognitive dissonance?
“American’s were totally ignorant of terrorism before 9/11 and thought this only happened elsewhere.”
1993 World Trade Center Bombing? 1995 Rhiyadh bombins? 1996 Khobar Towers? 1998 Embassy Bombing? And that doesn’t even cover domestic terrorism.
“The U.S. asks other countries to disarm yet they hypocritically are one of only 3 countries in the world who refuse to do so.”
Let’s see… Russia, China, France, England, India, Pakistan, Israel, USA… help me out with the math here, that’s ’3′ right? Oh, and let’s not forget the nuclear umberella extends to the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Turkey who don’t want to make nuclear weapons but do want to deploy them…you know, just in case. Did I leave anyone out?
“So yes, continue believing that the use of these nuclear weapons were justified because one day, the U.S. is going to find itself on the otherside of the fence because what comes around, goes around.”
Please take a class in logic. Please. If I take a rifle and start sniping at kids in whatever is your home country, could it be justified by the fact that you used rifles in the 17th century? If I bludgeon someone’s head in with a club or hack up someone with a machette, is that just ‘what goes around comes around’ because someone else has done so?
“P.S. I notice that postings are moderated. I guess that is why almost every single comment here has been singlesided. Prove me wrong.”
Give me a break. No one-sided thread is complete without the token troll showing up and making a poisoning the well of the opposing argument by being a total idiot. Thanks for filling those shoes. You argue your side so badly, I’m half-inclined to think (particularly with your handle) that you are someone’s sock puppet.
Richard Frank’s book “Downfall” lays out options regarding ending WWII in the Pacific; his book covers the last 6-months of the Pacific War. Several points surprised me, one of which was that American public opinion was turning against a lengthening of the war. He does not say that we were demanding a quick end, as in a “pull out,” but that Americans seemed to be wanting to see a quicker end then a longer one; more of a mood than a demand.
Another interesting and surprising point was that any end that did not result in the Jap forces surrendering,
existing Jap forces would have greatly harmed local non-Jap residents. There were large and well armed Jap forces left in China, in SE Asia, and on those Pacific Islands our forces by-passed. Also, a naval blockade could have resulted in killing off large numbers of Japanese civilians. And, there could have been large numbers of Chinese civilians, maybe 150,000, dying each month that the war continued.
A previous commenter said that the Japs came close themselves to having nuclear weapons, in fact much closer than the Germans. No doubt in my mind that the Japs would have used that weapon technology once it was workable. The Japs had plans to launch a submarine raid on our West Coast using two of its very large submarines, both of which had the ability to launch seaplanes and drop so-called dirty HE bombs on USA targets; take your choice, San Fran, Seattle, LA, San Diego, or where? This raid was planned to begin August 17, 1945.
There are a lot of people alive who survived WWII who would not have except for those two bombs. So, while they were horrible and I hope nuclear bombs are never dropped again, they did help the Jap command realize that the Japanese nation had to surrender.
My grandfather was drafted towards the end of the war and trained in Ohio to be among the first wave of Americans to land on the mainland of Japan. He claimed that the trainers were grim and detached, to the point of producing an “un-Christian fatalism” amongst the troops they were instructing. Three times he was put on a plane to the west coast that never took off for one reason or another, learning as he deplaned the third time that a mission deploying a secret weapon had been successful, temporarily staying their orders. As it turned out, my grandfather never left the US and thus never died in Japan as he had fully expected. My mother was born a year and a half later. Lucky him, and lucky me.
666,
Your screed was pitiful, even for a troll. Can’t even get your facts straight. B-29s at Pearl Harbor? Would’ve been real nice to have had B-29s in 1941! You are right about the fact that one of the mistakes made that day was a misidentification of the Japanese strike force as Army Air Corps bombers – but they were B-17s, not B-29s. It would have made little difference anyway – the defensive posture on December 7th was such that an effective defense was almost impossible. The Japanese would have lost a few more planes, but our losses would probably have been about the same – just more of our planes shot down instead of destroyed on the ground. The real problem, and what so enraged the population, is the fact that it was a sneak attack.
Wow, all the bad things that have happened geopolitically in the last 67 years are all the U.S.A.’s fault. Yeah, it was our fault Hitler killed 6 million Jews. It was our fault that Stalin and Mao and the Communists killed 100 million people. It was our fault that the Japanese had been raping their way across China, killing millions. It was our fault that North Korea came storming across the 38th Parallel in 1950. It was our fault that the tsunami killed all of these people a few years ago.
I’ve been to Hiroshima. I’ve been to Nagasaki. The Peace Park in Hiroshima, in particular, is quite a serene place. But they miss the point entirely – there would have been no Hiroshima were it not for Pearl Harbor or the Japanese atrocities throughout Asia. I’ve been to Thailand, China and Korea. HInt: It’s not the United States that their people hate.
So sad to be you, looking at life through those s&*t covered glasses. Put your tinfoil hat back on and crawl back into your hole.
666 has to be the stupidest troll in existence. Evidently s/he/it has never even heard of Google. Check it out, 666 (must be the Number of the Big Stupid Beast), and tell us when B-29s were first built and flown, and when radar was invented and when it was installed in Hawaii.
What an ultra-maroon.
666: “When I read this kind of tripe, it is clear why a large majority of the rest of the world hates the U.S.A.”
They hate the USA because they are stupid like you, or because they believe in anti-USA propaganda, distortions and anti-Western ideologies?
Dropping the bombs was, in retrospect, the most merciful of the options available (invasion, starvation, firebombing). What hate-mongers like 666 also seem to forget is what happened AFTER Japan (and Germany) surrendered. What happened to countries that surrendered to the Nazi regime, or to the Japanese? What happened to those people who became part of the post-WWII Soviet Union? Then compare that to the treatment of Japan and (part of) Germany after their surrenders to the USA.
666 couldn’t even get the point right that the B-29 wasn’t made until 1943 and didn’t have its first combat mission until 1944. But hey, don’t let facts get in the way.
And remember this – the last few countries that “gave us the finger” ended up regretting that fact when they ran into what real power could do.
Schmucks like you will rant and rave about how eeeeevil the US is…right up to the point when you need us to save your sorry rear end again. Just once, I wish we’d let you rot. 100 yerars of oppression might let you appreciate what we’ve done for the world.
Folks a lot like 666 pulled the plug on the South Vietnamese, driving the craven Dems in Congress to kill the funding for US involvement there, collapsing the whole of southeast asia and setting loose a storm of murderous carnage. The estimates were over 2 million southeast asians murdered in the two years that followed. The American Left and Democrats demanded a policy change in southeast asia that murdered more people than the entire Vietnam War prior, plus Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
Paul, 4:39 p.m.,
According to William Manchester, the Japanese were trying to surrender after Hiroshima, but the destruction by the bomb had utterly destroyed all means of communication, and they couldn’t get the word out.
I was at the museum in Hiroshima Aug 4 two years ago and didn’t attend the services on Aug 6. I was offended by the implication that it was our fault, and by stupid Americans there who were trying to stir up people at the museum, yelling that we dropped the bomb on them because they were “yellow”, and that we would never have dropped it on “white” Germans. Idiots.
When I saw the pictures of the people who had died but were not incinerated by the bomb, I was struck by how much they look like Saddam’s victims at Halabja.
I’ve lived in Japan for well over 20 years now. I’ve visited Hiroshima but not Nagasaki. There is an scarcely-veiled anti-American air to the memorial in Hiroshima as there is to the annual observances.
To my mind, the biggest down-side to the use of nuclear weapons to end the war was that in the twinkling of an eye an utterly defeated, reprehensibly vicious and pitiless aggressor nation was converted into a victim.
That, and we left that little twirp of a war criminal, Hirohito, on the throne. Now he is honored as a hero by the unreconstructed still in the government.
My father took that long walk through the lagoon at Tarawa, where he eventually took a couple of rounds. After his recovery he went to Okinawa as a replacement in that fight. Then they sent his outfit to train for the invasion of Japan.
Until the day he died he thanked God for the A bomb.
One thing that’s been somewhat understated here is that the Bombs almost certainly saved large numbers of *Japanese* civilians, never mind the American military personnel. I myself am very sympathetic to the claims that American casualties should be considered: but let’s for a minute discuss what would have happened had we invaded Japan, or not invaded Japan and tried to blockade it. Whether we invaded or not, the Soviets certainly would have invaded Hokkaido late in 1945. The Soviet army tended to roll forward, looting everything in its path, raping the women, and basically leaving a path of destruction almost unparalleled in history. If we’d blockaded, Japan would have been starved severely at the least prior to any surrender; after the second bomb, when it was obvious they should surrender, there was an abortive coup by Japanese army officers who wanted the whole country to immolate itself under the bombs rather than surrender. If we’d invaded, we’d have had to fight our way through cities and the countryside, using our artillery and air power to devastate everything in our path. The Japanese government was planning to hand out bamboo spears to civilians, male and female, from children to the elderly, hoping that they would attack the Americans with them when we came ashore. Civilian casualties, among Japanese, would have been in the millions, almost certainly.
A friend of mine whose mother is Japanese was taking a history class some years ago in college, and the subject of Hiroshima came up. The teacher took the position that dropping the bomb was wrong, because the Japanese government planned to surrender anyway. Tom argued with her, recounting his mother’s experience in the country at the time. According to her, the government was on the radio every day exhorting everyone to fight the Americans. The teacher was unmoved, of course, because she’d already reached her conclusion: the bomb was unnecessary and criminal, because America did it and it resulted in civilian deaths. You can’t confuse such people with facts: they’ve already made their minds up.
Just yesterday NHK was airing a program on Japanese suicide boatmen during WWII. In addition to kamikaze pilots, men and boys (one man interviewed was 15 at the time) were trained to drive explosives-laden boats into enemy vessels. When surrender was announced, many of the boats were destroyed or scuttled by the Imperial Japanese Navy, but one was recovered intact by Australia forces in Indonesia; its in a war museum in Canberra.
I’ve been to both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both are beautiful cities (Nagasaki more so, with its islets, steep hills, and Dutch and Chinese influence); it’s hard to believe what the two cities endured.
I’ve seen mountains here in Japan that were denuded of pine and cedar trees: the trees’ resin was used to fuel kamikazes’ final flights. Insane.
If you wander through either A-bomb museum, you’ll probably find school children on a field trip. The last time I visited Hiroshima’s, there were Japanese high school kids pointing and laughing at the mannequins of the survivors, skin hanging off, bodies cut/pierced by glass shards; it’s a display that is/was beside a room in which you can see melted glass, a clump of fine sewing needles fused together into a ragged column of steel, and a small sack: the skin from a human thumb, skin that just slid off, thumbnail intact. I felt like cursing the high schoolers for profaning the whole museum, but the A-bomb no longer means anything to them. It’s just history.
The A-bombs were horrible, but they were the right way to bring about an already heinous and drawn-out war. A land invasion would have been horrible, for both invaders and defenders, for it would have taken longer and probably cost more in every possible way.
Have you seen the ceramic (because there was so little metal left) hand grenades that were being made for the expected invasion? The bamboo spears? The bamboo bullets? Does “banzai cliff” in Saipan mean anything? Land invasion would have been awful.
666 is a “progressive,” the kind who, in different days, supported eugenics, Stalin’s purges, and Pol Pot’s “Year Zero.” He’s probably got on his Che Guevara shirt to honor a beast who was mighty brave when executing men tied in place.
TO: Bart, et al.
RE: [OT] 666
“Twisted souls like ”666”….” — Bart
Indeed. His choice of nom des blogs is quite apropos. And his de rigueur ad homs to be expected accordingly. Not to leave out all the problems with facts and math pointed out by celebrim.
RE: The Article Itself…
….is excellent. And much appreciated.
TO: Dave
RE: That Book; Japan’s Secret War
I’ll have to get that one. I was unaware of all that. Sounds very interesting.
TO: 666
RE: Keep It Up
You’re a prime example for US all. Not a good one, but certainly ‘prime’.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Don't stop posting, a good laugh breaks up my day nicely.]
The real motive behind A-bomb revisionism is not the bomb itself or the choice to use it, but the fact that it was Americans who made the choice.
The same goes for the attempts to exaggerate the depravity of the conquest of the North American natives — as a conquest, it wasn’t particularly barbaric compared to other conquests in history, but because it was America that was being built, it is singled out by the Left as equivalent to a genocide.
Anti-Americanism is not merely lurking in the background here — it is driving it.
anyone who supports both nuclear bombs should be asked
1. if the point of the bombs was to show japan that it was clearly and quickly over if we wanted it to be (b/c we have these super bombs now) then why couldn’t the bombs be either a) shown to the japs and demonstrated so as to scare the japs into surrender or if necessary b) dropped offshore to demonstrate the power of the bomb to the people directly but still minimizing casualties
2. why was there only a 3 or four day gap between the first and second bombs? was 3 days really enough time to conclude that only another nuclear bomb could cause surrender? note that the actual surrender didn’t take place until 15 days after the second bomb-which is approximately three times the lag in between the bombs.
but i agree that using the bomb to cause surrender was probably the best option.
Eishehower and Marshall (as in 5 star general) said it was not needed and I trust their judgement on military more than you bloodthristy commenters or Truman a poltical hack.
TO: nick werle
RE: Really?
“Eishehower and Marshall (as in 5 star general) said it was not needed….” — nick werle
Eisenhower, ‘yes’. Marshall, perhaps. But certainly not a definite ‘no’.
The point being that deployment of such a weapon IS a political decision. But once the decision is made to deploy the device, then it becomes a military decision process as to WHERE to employ it.
Marshall’s approach to employment of these weapons was even more bloody-minded than just two bombs on two cities….
Admittedly, he preferred targeting military aspects, but without the knowledge of the secondary effects, we’d have lost many troops to radiation sickness and cancers.
You can sit-back and relax in your comfy chair and quip about how ‘bloodthirsty’ others are. But then again, I doubt if your life has ever been ‘on the line’.
Or would you be willing to go and be a human-shield in Georgia?
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[It's easy to be brave from a safe distance.]
P.S. Eisenhower could speak safely about it some 17 years later, after he had finished his two terms as president. If he’d said such a think BEFORE 1952, he’d never have been elected president in the first place. [Note: Talk about 'political hacks'.]
But considering he had his hands full with ending of the War in Europe at the time he heard about the weapon, he was hardly well-versed on all the issues involved in the War in the Pacific.
He says he was of the opinion that the Japanese were about to surrender, but they hadn’t yet. Had they. And people in Washington who were more focused on the War in the Pacific had better information than Eisenhower had on the subject.
Then again, in every war, there are going to be generals who disagree with something or other. Look at what Longstreet wound up thinking of Lee after the Civil War. Let alone Pickett. Then again we have a fine example in WWII Secretary of War Stimson, who at the end of World War 1 disavowed the code-breakers saying, “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemens’ mail.”
Chuck Pelto:
“Then again, in every war, there are going to be generals who disagree with something or other.”
Other military leaders (besides Eisenhower) who disagreed (presumably with the necessity of not just the second but the first bomb): Mcarthur, (supreme allied commander in Pacific) Admiral Leahey, (chief of staff to the president-equivalent of today’s chairman of the joint chiefs) and Admiral Nimitz (chief of navel operations).
hardly just ‘some’ dissenting opinions among ‘some’ generals.
“You can sit-back and relax in your comfy chair and quip about how ‘bloodthirsty’ others are. But then again, I doubt if your life has ever been ‘on the line’. [It’s easy to be brave from a safe distance.]”
Its also easy to order the deaths of people when your not the one dying, and ‘easy’ to justify a decision that saved you from battle as ‘justified’ after the fact. Comments about what’s ‘easy’ in the bomb situation cut both ways.
My Dad and Uncle were mustering to support ‘Olympic’, and would have been on the ships putting the troops ashore — prime targets for the kamikazes. My Dad had been at Okinawa, where the kamikaze attacks were perfected. They both pointed out to me that in November 1945 the strongest typhoon of the century devastated Okinawa — and would have smashed any American invasion fleet deployed in that region. For Japan this would have been proof of divine intervention on their side, and no surrender would ever have been possible.
A German friend of mine, who was 10 when Hamburg was firebombed, pointed out to me that the Nazis, and the Japanese, kept their civilians in the target cities as a matter of policy. No London-style evacuation of children to the countryside (his mother broke the law and snuck him out to relatives 30 miles away, from where he watched the rosy glow on the horizon of the fires that killed everyone in his neighborhood and many others). Air-dropped leaflets had warned Japanese to get out of the cities or face total destruction — some families leaving were turned back by Japanese checkpoints.
Another uncle of mine (USNA class of June 1942) died in Kula Gulf in 1943 when his ship was torpedoed. His shipmates told me stories of Japanese patrol boats machine-gunning floating survivors, and of later finding bodies of U.S. sailors tied to trees at a Japanese base, used for bayonet practice. But all my kids were taught in school about WW2 was how mean we were to the Japanese children.
“Martin:
I’ve lived in Japan for well over 20 years now. I’ve visited Hiroshima but not Nagasaki. There is an scarcely-veiled anti-American air to the memorial in Hiroshima as there is to the annual observances.
To my mind, the biggest down-side to the use of nuclear weapons to end the war was that in the twinkling of an eye an utterly defeated, reprehensibly vicious and pitiless aggressor nation was converted into a victim.
That, and we left that little twirp of a war criminal, Hirohito, on the throne. Now he is honored as a hero by the unreconstructed still in the government.”
That is of course the problem Americans like to neglect : ideology. Japan was (and *is*) an honor-shame culture. Different from muslims in politeness, smartness and the names of a few prophets – not in essence. The Japanese will revert to their nature before WWII and they will do it soon.
Why ? Because that’s exactly what “bushido” (“shinto”) demands.
Want to change it ? Convert them to Christianity. Or if you truly must have something else, to confucianism.
Ideology matters. We have lost it. “Freedom of religion” is over, only a few stabs away from final death. And those stabs will hurt.
Heh, at least one thing is for sure : nothing can defeat Christianity, not in the long term. However people’s attempts to commandeer God for their own, like islam, will demand an astonishing price, payable in blood.
Heh, but on the other side : it won’t be American blood. The arabs are, as they’ve done so many times before, digging their own graves. Locking themselves up in pits that they will themselves set ablaze. I just pray Europeans won’t be joining them.
Thank you and I agree that the story needs balance; something I have never seen from official sources and that has angered me. I don’t want to rub salt into the Japanese historical wounds for no reason, but when they bring up our inhumanity, I want us to shame them with their barbaric treatment of our military, those of our allies and of the Asia civilians and military.
My father was a navy signalman and was the third one sent to the beach in Okinawa after the first two were killed. He expected to part of the invasion force of the mainland if that occurred. He was in one of the bombed cities, which one I don’t remember, days after the end of the war. I have questioned him about his feelings concerning the use of the atomic bombs. In particular since I served on FBM (missile) submarines in the later 1960’s and had to deal with the possibility that I could be partially responsible for launching 16 nuclear armed missiles and killing millions. He has never had any regrets; nor do I. I have always thought that the use of the bombs saved millions. Your article confirms my long held opinion.
TO: george weiss
RE: Soooo….
“Its also easy to order the deaths of people when your not the one dying, and ‘easy’ to justify a decision that saved you from battle as ‘justified’ after the fact. Comments about what’s ‘easy’ in the bomb situation cut both ways.” — george weiss
….tell me when you put YOUR life on the line for US?
Regards,
Chuck(le)
TO: george weiss
RE: By the Way
Your saying…
“Its also easy to order the deaths of people when your not the one dying, and ‘easy’ to justify a decision that saved you from battle as ‘justified’ after the fact. Comments about what’s ‘easy’ in the bomb situation cut both ways.” — george weiss
….goes VERY well with your observation about….
“Other military leaders (besides Eisenhower) who disagreed (presumably with the necessity of not just the second but the first bomb): Mcarthur, (supreme allied commander in Pacific) Admiral Leahey, (chief of staff to the president-equivalent of today’s chairman of the joint chiefs) and Admiral Nimitz (chief of navel operations).” — george weiss
I doubt if any of these military and naval flag-grade officers would have been in the down-and-dirt of slugging it out with the fanatical Japaneses.
And again, I point out that the Japanese had NOT surrendered. Not until the bombs fell. There’s something about cause and effect in that.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
TO: All
RE: What If, Anyone?
I’ve got a copy of Victory Games highly-detailed, board mega-game of the early 1980s on my shelf. I’ve been toying with it, on occasion. The last occasion was to see if the Japanese could have invaded and seized the Hawaiian Islands, instead of just bombing the military and naval forces there.
Guess what….they could have succeeded. And what a pill that would have been to deal with.
At any rate, it might be interesting to break it out and evaluate American losses from an invasion of the main islands using that format. Considering the forces the Japanese could have brought across from China, it seems likely that the casualties would have been horrific. After all, they were for Iwo Jima, Okinawa and other places where the fanatical Japanese fought to the death.
I know lots of generals like to tout their particular arms ability to ‘win the war’. The Air Force in particular likes to think they can do it by bombing the enemy into submission. This despite the failures to do such in Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, etc., etc., etc.
The Navy likes to think that blockades will have a similar effect. That despite their failures during the American Civil War, Germany, Japan, Korea and Vietnam.
The truth of the matter was stated quite clearly by T.R. Fahrenbach, in his masterpiece This Kind of War: A Study In Unpreparedness, where he said….
And, based on all the evidence presented to date, the utter annihilation of the Japanese people would have been what it would have taken to invade. You doubt this? Look at Saipan….
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[What on Earth are they teaching in high school these days?]
Can you imagine the outcry that would have occurred when Americans learned we had such a weapon and Truman had failed to use it. 200,000 wasted American lives!
Talk about impeachment.
Every gold Star mom would be parading in front of the White House screaming for his scalp.
Several points:
* We are still giving out Purple Heart medals minted for the invasion of the Japanese home islands.
* More died in the firebombing of Tokyo than did as a result of either (or possibly both) atomic bombs.
* Without the bombs, the Commies would have seized the northern islands as part of a joint attack, and we’d have a North Japan and South Japan ala North Korea and South Korea.
Japan, like Germany and Italy, were seized by fascist madness, and they needed to be shocked out of it, and unlike WWI they were smashed so thoroughly, so utterly, that there would be no doubt that they lost and could not talk about ‘stabbed in the back’ or keep fictions of their superiority alive.
There are more Japanese and Americans alive today because of the atomic bombs than there would have been without them, and that’s an undeniable fact.
DavidN said:
“One thing that’s been somewhat understated here is that the Bombs almost certainly saved large numbers of *Japanese* civilians”
Let me agree that the Japanese people benefited the most from the bomb. The popular Japanese slogan at the time was “100 million will die for the Emperor and nation.” What would Leftist jerks like 666 be saying now if the bomb hadn’t been used?
One of my first jobs after high school was working with a pressman who had been aboard a USN destroyer in WWII. He was selected to be a squad leader in a 20-man landing party, which would have been formed into a naval infantry battalion for the coming invasion of Japan. He said they’d chalkboard infantry tactics and shoot at targets floated off the fantail; I seem to recall he said they had Springfield ’03s!!! Real tactical exercises were difficult to hold aboard ship, they did what they could. IMHO, those guys were really cannon fodder; meat for the grinder. No idea how Kruger’s army would have used the Naval battalions and hope it would have been as reserve forces or for plugging gaps. In reality who knows now.
He then went to college on the GI Bill, joined ROTC because of the extra bucks and was called up as a 2nd Lt. of Infantry for Korea and got shoot up over there.
His opinion was that he was kept alive because of the two bombs so he could enjoy Korea and later cutting paper printed ads during the day.
Isn’t it odd that so many criticize the atom bomb but do not likewise criticize the samurai sword which killed far more people in a more terrible way? You can not help but come to the conclusion that those who criticize the atom bomb do so because it was a uniquely American weapon while they neglect criticism of the samurai sword because it was uniquely Japanese. Criticism of the atom bombings all boils down to irrational America-bashing.
Another point to keep in mind is that on August 14-15, several days after the bombing of Nagasaki and after the government and Hirohito had accepted the Allies’ Potsdam declaration — in effect, agreeing to surrender on Allied terms — there was an attempted coup by army officers to prevent the surrender.
While this coup attempt failed, it indicates the degree of fanaticism rife throughout the Japanese military command. Such men would have been commanding the home defense forces had an Allied invasion been carried out.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Military_reaction
Bart:
“I have not run across eye-witness, ground accounts of the effect of the fire-bombing of Tokyo – they may be hard to come by. Of the accounts I have read, the only thing that sticks in my mind is how materials used in construction of Japanese buildings were extremely vulnerable to fire. But, easily accessible accounts from the ground of the fire bombing of Dresden paint a truly horrific picture, such as graphic descriptions of people running from their homes, only to sink into the molten asphalt and burst into flame.”
NHK ran a special of an hour or so on 10 March 2005 on the anniversary of the fire-bombing. Given the number of interviewees, I doubt that accounts are difficult to come by, exactly, but most of them probably haven’t been translated. It was three years ago, so I don’t remember the broadcast in detail, but it wasn’t all that different from what you hear about Dresden. And yes, many Japanese residential buildings around the aircraft production facilities were of wood and paper; NHK also spent a long time on the gel of the bombs, which clung to inflammable surfaces.
Well one thing that should be pointed out is that there was no guarantee that invasion means no nukes. At least at the planning stages of Downfall the option of using nukes as part of the initial bombardment was an open option.
Perhaps apocryphal:
An American executive working in the auto industry was in Hiroshima for meetings at the Mazda headquarters. Like all VIP visitors, they took him on the obligatorily solemn visit to the Peace Park. When they were done, breaking the silence his Japanese host asked him what his thoughts were.
He replied, “I think your country will never attack the United States again.”
’nuff said.
I had just returned from Germany and was at home
on leave before my unit was to go to be a part of the invasion of the Japanise mainland whhen the bomb was dropped. I agree that the bombs saved lives and have helped to prevent another World War.
Some nitpicks:
“Tibbets, … flew over Hiroshima’s Aioi Bridge and began to bank his aircraft.
Just as Tibbets started his turn, the B-29 lurched violently as 10,000 pounds … fell out of the bomb bay”
The bridge was the aiming point, so the bomb was released before the plane reached it. The plane turned away only after releasing the bomb.
“Due to some topographical quirks (there were no large hills as in Hiroshima to focus the blast effect)”
Nagasaki has hills in the middle of the city. That, plus the fact that the bomb was a little off-target, shielded parts of the city, reducing the casualties.
“There was enough plutonium for two devices — the Trinity test “gadget” and Fat Man. After that, the supply was a question mark because of manufacturing problems”
A third bomb would have been available by the end of August, with 2–3 per month thereafter.
The only military leader who may have criticized the use of the bombs — *before* they were used — is Eisenhower, and even that is questionable. Stimson didn’t note any objection in his diary, and the only contemporary record of Ike’s position is a personal letter, saying he didn’t have the “slightest idea of what is going to happen in the Pacific.”
As late as the morning of August 6, 1945, the Japanese still had more than one million troops in China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Korea. They were still killing, not only allied soldiers, but the civilians of those nations (more than one million Vietnamese died under Japanese occupation, even though no battles were fought there; we don’t even know how many Chinese died in the occupied zones, though the number exceeds ten million). In peace negotiations, the Japanese government was still insisting that it be allowed to retain control over Manchuria and Korea, and that it be allowed to conduct its own trials of Japanese soldiers accused of war crimes. The notion that the Japanese were willing to surrender is accurate only if you believe that we should have allowed them to continue the mass murder of Asian civilians. Given that the Chinese and Filipinos, at least, were our war allies, and had sacrificed greatly for the war effort, the Japanese terms could not be accepted.
The Japanese government was simply not facing the facts. They believed that, if they could inflict enough American casualties, they could obtain favorable peace terms. The atom bombs were no more destructive than our “conventional” bombing raids had been, but they proved to the Japanese leaders that the U.S. could destroy them without our having to land any troops on the home islands. In effect, the bombs destroyed their last illusion, and they had to surrender.
It’s been said that American soldiers thanked God for the atomic bomb. I think everyone in east Asia thanked God for the atomic bomb.
We should remember one other thing: Very few people really knew how destructive the bombs were. If the war had continued without the atomic attacks, we would never have known their true power, and the small wars of the post-1945 era might have become a large war between the U.S. and the USSR. That would have led to another dark age, if not the end of civilization. Perhaps God finally came up with a weapon so horrible that even we human beings were afraid to use it. Fear, as they say, is the beginning of wisdom.
(My father was slated to be in the October, 1945 invasion of Japan, so I have some bias here: If not for the bombs, I might never have been born. Full disclosure, if you will.)
It was neither the Arizona nor the West Virginia that capsized at Pearl Harbor, but the Oklahoma.
I think the use of the bomb, together with the Russian invasion of Manchuria and the sea blockade, were necessary to produce the psychological environment in which it was possible for the Emperor to order his government to surrender. That’s hardly an original observation. But I also think the use of the bomb created a psychological climate *among the Allies* in which something short of an unconditional surrender was possible. When you have as awesome a weapon as the Bomb, you can afford to be magnanimous. So Hirohito kept his pitiful throne in return for helping to enforce the surrender and American occupation.
Dave,
“Japan’s Secret War” is a really awful book. Rather than repeat myself, I’ll refer you to my review of it at Amazon.com.
I would not be here except for the atomic bomb. My father was on an LST enroute for the invasion of Japan when it was dropped. I have no doubt that he would not have survived that effort. My children and grand children thank God and President Truman for our lives.
I wrote about this a few years ago on my own blog. One thing to remember about ending the war by other means is that (Rick is rihgt) all the other means would have cost more lives than the atom bombings. As historian Richard Frank documented in his book, <I<Downfall, for most of 1945 civilians under Japanese military occupation were dying at the rate of 500,000 per month.
An extremely effective blockade was already in place, so effective that by mid-1945 the average calorie intake of japanese adults was about 800. This was a slow way to starve to death.
Unquestionably, continuing the war by conventional means would have cost millions of more lives, across the entire of the operational theaters engaged in fighting Japan and the areas still under Japanese occupation. The potential million Allied casualties of an invasion of Japan would hardly have been the majority of the human toll.
The use of nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved East Asia from itself and created the conditions that made its current prosperity possible.
Most opponents of the bombings do not comprehend the homicidal lunatics who ruled Japan in 1945. Paul Berman’s “Terror and Liberalism” is still the definitive text on this topic: much of the Left either refuses to admit mass death-and-murder psychoses, or (even if they admit the “mass” nature of these psychoses) will not acknowledge that a country’s governors believe them.
No nuclear weapons have been detonated over populated targets since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Chuck Pelto:
instead of responding to criticism of your argument you simply repeated your argument. You argue that someone who was not in danger for invasion of Japan has the benefit of not having to worry about it. But the fact remains that that very concept of bias and ease of decision means it is easy to justify decisions that save your own ass. the fact also remains that you were not going to be the person bombed. And most importantly the fact remains that repeating an argument isn’t a response to a criticism of it.
no doubt your response (again) will be “but your life wasn’t on the line.” merely repeating without responding.
“And again, I point out that the Japanese had NOT surrendered. Not until the bombs fell. There’s something about cause and effect in that.”
Actually–the fact that something occurs after nothing thing does not establish cause and effect.
those (who unlike me) argue japan was goign to surrender anyway would argue they were going to surrender without the bomb and without the invasion. If given an amount of time, japan would have surrendered.
Know when the Soviet’s finally declared war on Japan? THE DAY BEFORE the first bombing. as you’ll say ‘there is something about cause and effect in that.’ In Hirohito’s surrender speech to the nation, the bomb was mentioned, but mentioned first was the soviet invasion. You say there was no way they would have surrendered without the bomb-but they had no real time-certainly not enough time to surrender between the first and second bombs.
so you say you have to basically be a solider on the ground to have an opinion. You even dismiss authority such as Eisenhower or Macarthur or the ranking admirals as not being on the grund. How then were president Truman. and the secretary of war soldiers on the ground? what gave them their right to make the decision? Their asses were NOT on the line.
BTW-what action COULDN’T be justified with your “until your but is on the line’ argument? If nobody but a soldier is allowed to have an opinion..then wouldn’t a terror bombing of 50 nuclear bombs on the same day also been justified-even after surrender-just to make sure they weren’t lying and going to become terrorists. sure you disagree? your but isn’t on the line. tell me i cant steal for a living? until your poor you cant judge. tell me i cant smoke-until your addicted don’t criticize smoking.
I personally don’t even disagree that the bomb was not necessary. I’m simply saying that dropping it offshore or waiting a little more time before the second one would have produced the same results. Have you even considered such things? Or is your response only “until your but is on the line…”
but you will probably just respond “until your but is on the line…”
ps- sorry the soviet declaration of war was after the first bombing but before the second
No one that I know of asks us to apologize for the outcome of WWII. Most Germans don’t want the Nazis back; most Japanese would rather live in a democracy than a military dictatorship. The rest of the world seems to agree with them. They don’t wish we had lost the war; they just wish we had won it in a more humane and civilized way.
The Good Guys slaughtered millions of innocent civilians during the war. With our advantages in technology, logistics, and numbers, we may have even killed more average Joes than our enemies did. Most of those immolated were not really Nazis, fascists, or militarists. They were like you and me – trying to get on with their lives despite all the trouble their damn fool political leaders had gotten them into. Their presence or absence had little effect on their country’s ability to wage war. We killed them anyway – blew them up, burned them, fragged them, shot them, suffocated them, buried them, starved them, irradiated them – by the cityful. And then we won the war.
The moral quandary for some of us is: If the Good Guys killed all these innocent people, how can they be called good? We’re pretty confident the Nazis and the militarists were bad. But considering what we did to defeat them, how can we still say we’re good in comparison?
There is no satisfactory answer – I think human nature and the chaos that prevails in the world make it necessary for us to accept some contradictions. Personally, however, I can tone down the dissonance by remembering that when Good Guys seem to do bad things it’s usually for a good reason, and when the crisis is over they can go back to normal. For Bad Guys, though, badness IS normal. To them, killing innocent civilians is not an exceptional measure taken in dire circumstances – it is merely another tool for achieving their goals.
I guess I’d rather be a reformed killer living with my conscience than an active serial murderer without a conscience.
Donald Sensing: “…for most of 1945 civilians under Japanese military occupation were dying at the rate of 500,000 per month.”
Not quite that bad. Frank says, “What is clear beyond dispute is that the minimum plausible range for deaths of Asian noncombatants each month in 1945 was over 100,000 and more probably reached or even exceeded 250,000.” I think it’s worth pointing out that the bulk of these were Chinese, i.e. Allied, civilians. Of course if the Japanese rail network had been destroyed in August–September, as was planned, the Japanese death rate would indeed have skyrocketed, due to mass starvation.
I have to cast my vote with those who support the decision to use atomic weapons on Japan in lieu of invasion.
Having studied the plans not only for Operation Downfall but also for Japan’s Operation “Ketsugo” (their plan for the defense of the home islands), it’s impossible to come away without the firm belief that Downfall’s first phase — Operation Olympic — would’ve been a nightmare of blood and was far from a sure-thing. The Japanese did an excellent job of anticipating where we would land on Kyushu and when we’d do it; there’d have been no element of surprise whatsoever, just a head-on slugfest that would’ve rivaled the Western Front in WWI for its industrialized slaughter.
Operation Coronet may have fared better, if for no other reason than both the Americans and the Japanese expected that Japan would pretty much shoot its bolt against the Kyushu invasion.
Anyway, my own father was an artilleryman who’d fought across Western Europe and was slated to participate in Downfall, so add me to the list of people who can probably thank his existence to the decision to end the war the way we did.
Most here seem to find it mighty convenient to speak of “the bomb” and pretend that any valid point about Hiroshima applies equally to Nagasaki.
I wonder if this article, and the entire comments thread, would have been any different at all if “the bomb” had been three, four or even ten atomic bombs.
That being said, the first bomb was by far the least horrible option in ending the war. I’m not convinced that Nagasaki was necessary.
Perhaps the best book I’ve read on the subject is
Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, by Richard B. Frank.
Everyone w/ an interest in the topic should read it.
Claims that Japan had any possibility of producing a nuclear bomb are nonsense. There were a handful of scientists exploring nuclear fission, but only in very small laboratory experiments. They were far behind the Allies in actual understanding of the field, as were the Germans.
The claim that the German submarine U234 had a large quantity of uranium-235 on board is UFO territory. Isotopic enrichment or purification of uranium is an enormously difficult process. To get enough U235 for an atomic bomb, the U.S. built the gigantic Oak Ridge facility. The K-25 gaseous diffusion plant alone was larger than the Pentagon; it was operated in series with the S-50 thermal diffusion plant and Y-12 electromagnetic separation plant.
Neither Germany or Japan ever had any enrichment plants, much less huge plants like Oak Ridge. U234 carried 560 kg of ordinary uranium oxide. The Wilcox book cited by “Dave” is a farrago of unsupported claims and rehashed rumors.
Was use of the Bomb necessary to end the war? Almost certainly. The delusional state of the Japanese militarists is nearly unbelievable. (Admiral Anami asserted that the Soviet declaration of war would push the U.S. to accept Japan’s conditions for surrender, because the U.S. would fear Soviet ambitions in the Far East and want Japan as an ally.)
I have seen only one plausible suggestion for how Japan might have surrendered otherwise. The Japanese militarists argued that when the U.S. invaded, Japanese forces by their suicidal bravery would inflict heavy casualties, and then the U.S. would be demoralized and accept Japanese conditions. If the U.S. explicitly refused to invade Japan – the militarists’ last rationale would be lost. That might have tipped the balance in Japan’s War Council. Might.
I am sorry for the innocents who were destroyed by the atomic bombs. I am much sorrier for the much larger number of people whose lives were destroyed by Japanese aggression and oppression in the East Indies, in the Philippines, in Burma, in the South Pacific, and above all in China.
Good article, though I’d like to point one thing out. It is certainly just to remember the context of the bombings, and this was certainly a just war against a brutal enemy. But let’s also remember that those who were killed were not the ones who had previously slaughtered American soldiers in Pearl Harbour – the targets were civilians. Saying that those people got what they deserved has little merit as an argument.
One can still defend the bombing, of course. If it is accurate that, in the end, lives were spared by the decision, then I subscribe to it. It maybe was the right decision – but still unfair to those targeted. A paradox? Maybe, but we’re talking morals here.
TO: george weiss
RE: Problems
Only between you and nick werle. And first to him. Then you chimed in with the same silly ‘arg’, So I replied to you with the same response.
What’s your problem with that?
I just asked whether you or nick had ever had you life on the line for US. Something to put your understanding of REAL PHYSICAL DANGER IN COMBAT into its proper perspective, against the experience of the combat vets we’ve heard from here.
Is there a problem with allowing for personal experience as a factor in determining credibility? Or are you suggesting we should ask a plumber for advice on performing open heart surgery?
Well. I’m still waiting for you to answer the question in the first place. Something you’ve been evasive about. So why shouldn’t I ask you AGAIN to answer a simple question?
But I’ll rephrase it. What time have YOU done in the Armed Forces of the United States? Which branch? What specialty? What units?
Note: Please be patient with me. I encounter a number of impostors floating around the web. I’m sure you can understand.
Actually, cause and effect are a well established means of determining something. If you don’t care for it, it sounds like a personal problem.
Yes. There was. It caused the US to press forward with using the bombs to end the war quickly before the Sovs could invade the Japanese islands. There’s more of the cause and effect. Albeit on a different country than Japan.
Try not to put words in my mouth. It makes you look oh so foolish….or worse.
Why not? YOU did. And thanks for allowing me that riposte.
Their political asses were on the line. Especially Truman’s, as so many others here, and even Moran, have pointed out. But you, for some strange reason, seem to not care about that aspect.
As for what gave ‘them the right to make the decision’….
….are you having difficulty with reading English? Try re-reading my citation of General Marshall’s comment (above).
Again with trying to put words in my mouth. Very naughty of you. But not unexpected.
Isn’t that a double negative? You DO have problems with English!
You seem to have a fixation with this. I know a cure….
…go visit your local Army or Marine recruiter today.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. -- Samuel Johnson]
It is also worth noting that Truman lied to the American people and the rest of the world about the true nature of the targets involved. In his own words:
“The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”
Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, Containing the Public Messages, Speeches and Statements of the President April 12 to December 31, 1945 (Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1961) page 212. The full text also was published in the New York Times, August 10, 1945, page 12.
TO: Arni
RE: Heh
“It is also worth noting that Truman lied to the American people and the rest of the world about the true nature of the targets involved. In his own words:
“The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”” — Arni
If there were a replacement detachment in the city, it could be determined to have a ‘military base’.
But what does that matter to those some people who don’t care about the Japanese people as a nation and culture?
One would get the distinct impression such as they would rather we wiped the entire people off the face of the Earth. That’s the sort of madness T.R. Fehrenbach was warning about (see citation above).
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[The Truth will out.]
Please run this article every year.
Thousands of American boys should not have died or been horribly crippled to salve Mr. Stimson’s misguided conscience, or the selective consciences of fastidious observers in 2008.
Millions enslaved by Japanese troops, in prison camps, conquered territories, in medical experimentation camps were entitled to be released immediately, not when Mr. Stimson’s conscience was clear.
There will always be those that second-guess the homeowner that shot an armed burglar (“could’t you have yelled “halt” one more time?”). They always put the burden on someone else.
There will also be those “citizens of the world” who “feel” that thousands of people (other than themselves) should have been shot, burned or bled to death or been maimed avoid dropping the bomb on a hostile power.
Not me.
Moran’s editorial should be made even stonger and run every year. I notice that each year more articles hint that for all kinds of humanitarian reasons, we ought to have defererd the drop. There must have been another way.” Yeah right.
This question has been, and will continue to be debated, but please, let’s not drag out the old pony of an excuse, Pearl Harbour.
There were many failings on the American side that allowed Pearl Harbour to become the tradgedy it was. All the way from ignored intelligence to mishandled communications.
It’s an issue that’s more complex than generally stated.
Using the Atom Bomb may have been the right decision when looked at from several of the angles already mentioned, but it needs better arguements than the seemingly interminable ” vengance for Pearl Harbour”.
It’s a childish, callow arguement brought forward by those who don’t want to be reminded of the nasty, brutal, sometimes horrific decisions that war thrust upon us, and seeks to wrap those decisions in a cloak of righteous vengance( Whatever the body count).
ok you win. brilliant.
ooops that was me trying to tell you:
ok you win. brilliant
TO: All
RE: Sooo….
“chuck pelto:
ok you win. brilliant.”
We have an impostor in the house.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Imitation is the highest form of flattery.]
TO: george weiss
RE: Don’t Apologize…
….enlist for Airborne-Ranger. And get a Life….or 20.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[You haven't lived until you've almost died.]
Exactly!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mcarthur, you had to tell them who he was evident of their ignorance) Admiral Leahey, and Admiral Nimitz
and your ad hominem attacks aside my family members spent 62 years in the military and dont have to tell you what campaings we were nvovled in despite your opinions and non sequiters , the facts are that major military figures said it was not justified as a military weapon (oh gee) just as you wrote “it was not a military question… it was a political decison by a creation of a corrupt political machine in Misssouri against judgement of the LEADING military minds .
and
I completely think the nuclear attacks were justfied when you start with the Rape of Nanking, where the Japs killed more people AFTER surrender than both of our bonbs and end it with the Japs training little school kids to resist our men to the death with bamboo spears.
But we all lost a little humanity in that war no matter how many future casualties were forstalled, killing tons of people that easily and horribly can’t make us more human and moral, even if the war was forced on us by those Bushido barbarians. Mass aerial attacks of civilian targets were once condemned as the tools of the fascist when it was Warsaw, Guernica and Coventy but we learned well and outdid our teachers with Dresden and Tokyo until we ramped it up with nuclear munitions.
Bottom line:
Bombs dropped – about 200,000 Japanese deaths.
Bombs not dropped – about 100,000,000 deaths
Estimates vary on the estimates of US and Japanese losses during a battle for the Japanese homeland. For a number of reasons: how long would it last being the major one. No one even remotely suggests that it would be any better than Okinawa. Most agree that it would have been worse.
The Japanese Army had orders to return to the sea in the event of an Allied invasion of the Home Islands – killing everyone in their way. Again, estimates vary, but range up to 75 million IIRC.
Even if it was “only” 50 million killed, the choice seems clear to me.
For whatever the reason, dropping the bombs was the right decision.
It is somewhat interesting to note that the further you were from the field of battle (ground war) the more likely you were to believe that they were unnecessary.
We have all become less humane and more callous since the bombs, no matter how justified their use was. It was a horrible thing and we have followed a slippery slope downhill regarding human life. Kill a hundred thousand now, forestall a million next week, that is the devil’s math.
Javelin, have we really become “less humane”? I think not.
Cast your mind back to the concentration camps established by the British to neuter the Boer commandos. Thousands of women and kids died.
Think of “donkeys” who sent so many young “lions” to their deaths on WWI’s western front.
That we can now get our minds around the potential for nuke-related megadeath is one thing. The fact that it hasn’t happened argues, rather convincingly, that we have indeed become cautious about recourse to war.
TO: roger
RE: Javelin’s Ignorance
“Cast your mind back….” — roger to Javelin
Exactly. Javelin’s education seems to have left out Mass bombings during WWII, i.e., firebombing Tokyo. Not only that, he apparently doesn’t read very well as that has been mentioned several times on this thread alone.
Additionally, he doesn’t seem capable of doing compare and contrast, e.g., if we’re more callous, as he/she/it thinks, why is it Baghdad and Basra are not glass parking lots after 2003? Let alone all of Afghanistan.
Instead of mass bombings, or nukes, which we certainly could have and would have if Javelin’s theory is correct, we used precision bombs with greatly reduced chances of doing unnecessary damage.
But Javelin and his/her/their ilk don’t seem to think very well. And I blame the vaunted American public education system for failing to teach them HOW to think. Instead that organization is only intent upon teaching young people WHAT to think.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[If you want to hire a smart kid, just out of high school, hire the home schooled.]
In the 1930s, the three most militarized societies on Earth were Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. (You can add Fascist Italy, if you like.)
We fought shooting wars against two of these (or three if you include Italy). And since 1945, the loser nations have been among the most pacifist on Earth — a truly remarkable transformation, and one that’s not appreciated as much as it should be.
How long this pacifism will last is an open question. But my guess is it will endure for about three or four generations, or roughly as long as those who directly experienced it are alive to tell of it. After that — once living memory is gone — the naysayers and revisionists can speak up and begin their drive to dominate public discussion.
Already you can hear their voices, and these will get only louder and more insistent. Eventually, they will dominate the received opinions prevalent in society. At that point, the situation is ripe for a rerun.
Whether or not the atomic bomb was necessary to defeat Japan quickly (I think it was), it is clear that the bomb’s existence, and our willingness to use it, prevented a WW 3 between the west and the Soviet Union fought with conventional arms.
If humans weren’t the tribal, territorial animals that we are, the whole story might follow a different script. But we are what we are, and the old Roman general was completely right when he said, “If you want peace, prepare for war.”
For those who are arguing one way or the other about the Soviet Union’s participation in or the precipitation of the surrender of Japan, please consider this: Would Stalin have declared war on Japan *at all* if we didn’t drop the bomb first? Consider: The USSR was at peace on August 1, 1945. There is no realistic argument that Japan would have attacked when it had its hands full with the other Allies. Stalin’s three biggest enemies, the US, Britain, and Japan were killing or were planning to kill themselves at a terrific rate. All he had to do was sit back and watch his enemies eliminate themselves. That’s exactly what he did during June and July. Why not wait for August, November and maybe well into 1946, then attack when there was nothing left? Because when the bomb was dropped he knew that Japan’s surrender was days away and it was his last chance to fulfill his end of the devil’s bargain he had extorted out of FDR and Churchill for all of eastern Europe in exchange for his help with Japan. Note the timing. He attacked days after Hiroshima. That meant he had his armies already to go at a moment’s notice. Why was he waiting?
For whatever reason Japan would have surrendered whenever, the participation of the USSR would never been a factor except for the bomb.
I have a BA in Japanese language and literature, and not surprisingly am a nihonphile. None the less any honest comparison of the societys at the time can only come to one conclusion: The only moral choice at the time was Allied victory, as quickly as possible!
As for whether the atomic bomb was decisive, or the Soviet conquest of Manchuria, or whether any of a myriad of other actions the Allies could have taken instead would have gotten the Japanese to surrender at lower cost all I can say is the Japanese are human beings, not chickens in a Skinner box! With free willed human beings big, noisy and obvious works a lot better than subtle.
I blame allot of posters here for me not working becouse I was to busy reading some of these excellent posts. I agree with most of you. What had to be done was done. To 666 and the like I would say some things to you but I refuse to cast pearls before swine.
Mr. Weiss, Regarding your first two questions.
“1. if the point of the bombs was to show japan that it was clearly and quickly over if we wanted it to be (b/c we have these super bombs now) then why couldn’t the bombs be either a) shown to the japs and demonstrated so as to scare the japs into surrender or if necessary b) dropped offshore to demonstrate the power of the bomb to the people directly but still minimizing casualties”
Even a superficial reading of the history of the war will convince you that the Japanese would not be “scared” into surrender.
“2. why was there only a 3 or four day gap between the first and second bombs? was 3 days really enough time to conclude that only another nuclear bomb could cause surrender? note that the actual surrender didn’t take place until 15 days after the second bomb-which is approximately three times the lag in between the bombs.”
The first bomb was the demonstration you asked for in question 1. It was followed by the dropping of leaflets describing the new weapon and that it would be used again. It didn’t work.
“but i agree that using the bomb to cause surrender was probably the best option.”
But they just didn’t do it right? I think you’re using an atomic hair splitter.
Chuck Pelto:
you obviously have reading comprehension problems. I believe the dropping the bomb was the right move as well as believeing that mass murder through strategic bombing has lowered all our sense of humanity. How cons like you can cheer this but shriek abour abortion is beyond me. War makes us all ugly and callous. I’m sorry if my ambiguity and mixed feelings doesn’t fit into your knee jerk, one dimensional world view. Yes, I know all about the Rape of Nanking, Bataan Death March and their heinous camps and treatment of civilians, especially the Chinese. But I refuse to be a soulless revenge killer ala Dirty Harry too. Every human life has meaning.
TO: All
RE: Javelin’s Problems….
….with English comprehension.
Javelin thinks I was complaining about his take on the decision to drop the bombs. When anyone with more than two synapse to rub together would realize I was addressing his thought that we are more callous today than we were back then.
I rest my case….
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[What good is it if I talk in flowers if you're thinking in pastry?]
Thanks for the great post regarding the atomic bomb. My opinion is biased since my Dad was staged for the invasion od Japan. He was in the Marines and had been trained in the use of a Browning Automatic Rifle. The bomb is possibly the reason I am here today. The bomb also should be credited for allowing folks like 666 to express their anti american opinions and call it freedom of speech. It is amazing how cowards become cowboys when they can hide behind a words they do not have to back up.
“I believe the dropping the bomb was the right move as well as believeing that mass murder through strategic bombing has lowered all our sense of humanity.”
I think this guy gets it. If you’re a civilized person, cognitive dissonance and guilt are among the natural consequences of killing other people – especially if you didn’t necessarily “have” to kill them. That we’re having this debate today means we’re still civilized people, a civilized nation. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll ever come up with a satisfying resolution. Letting ourselves off the hook doesn’t seem quite right; neither does flagellating ourselves for the rest of eternity. I think it’s just something we’ll have to live with.
TO: Bugs
RE: Au Contraire
“I think this guy gets it. If you’re a civilized person, cognitive dissonance and guilt are among the natural consequences of killing other people – especially if you didn’t necessarily “have” to kill them.” — Bugs
You obviously DON’T get it. And it’s been explained, over and over and over again in multiple comments above.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[For additional information re-read this message.]
“But to take the atomic bombing of Japan totally out of context and use it to highlight one nation or one city’s suffering is morally offensive.”
I agree with that.
It’s similar to highlighting only the 6 million Jews that died, and the ever-present focus on the Holocaust, all the while forgetting that 40 million! White Christians perished in WW2 too.
The bombing of civilian cities in WW2 started first when Churchill bombed Berlin. That led to Germany’s bombing of London, and then Allied bombing of Axis cities, including the fire-bombing of Dresden.
What Churchill started culminated in the A-bomb being dropped on 2 Japanese cities without much compunction.
Use of two atomic bombs to end the war in Japan doesn’t have to be an act of mercy toward the Japanese people to be justified. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were A-bombed the war ended quickly and as a result some American lives were saved. A-bombing the two Japanese cities worked to end the war. What more need be said? Gen. Curtis Lemay was proven right, “If you kill enough of them they stop fighting.”
TO: Mike O’Malley
RE: Guess Again
“The bombing of civilian cities in WW2 started first when Churchill bombed Berlin.” — Mike O’Malley
The Nazis bombed London first. At least according to what I know. Some idiot pilot of a Henkel bomber, unable to find his target and wishing to save fuel on his trip back to France, jettisoned his bomb load, which landed in the vicinity of London.
If you have evidence supporting an alternate universe….please present it.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Anything that CAN go horribly wrong, WILL go horribly wrong. And at the most devastating opportunity. -- Murphy's Law, as understood by the military]
P.S. Are you, O’Malley, suggesting that the Japanese did not bomb civilian populations in China during the romp-and-roll period therein of the 1930?
Germany did not bomb civilian London first. England bombed Berlin first. Just look it up, OK?
Germany had limited its attacks to RAF targets, until Churchill ordered the bombing of Berlin.
http://www.worldwar-2.net/timelines/war-in-europe/european-air-war/european-air-war-index-1940.htm
“Luftwaffe attacks continue against the RAF’s airfields in southeast England. The first night-attack by RAF on Berlins industrial targets is made by 43 aircraft from RAF Bomber Command in retaliation for the accidental attack on London the night before.”
Churchill is not the “hero” that everyone thinks he is today. Pat Buchanan just wrote a book about it, that is excellent and meticulously footnoted for Neocon denier types.
Don’t bother making any snarky ad hominem attacks back at me, just study the history and don’t deny it, OK?
Civilian bombing got out of hand, ON ALL SIDES, in WW2 and that climate made it easier to justify dropping the A-bomb. Dresden was another bombing of a civilian area.
To sum up:
Hitler did not order the bombing of London, the orders were limited to RAF targets only.
If the Henkel pilot made a mistake, then fine, the key is it was not ordered.
Churchill did order the bombing of Berlin however. That order occurred BEFORE any German orders to bomb London.
TO: Mike O’Malley
RE: Accidents v. Orders
“Germany had limited its attacks to RAF targets, until Churchill ordered the bombing of Berlin.” — Mike O’Malley
You have trouble reading English?
Sure. Churchill ORDERED the attack on Berlin. But because a stupid Luftwaffe bomber pilot accidently jettisoned his bomb load over London.
Cripes….
…when did you graduate from high school, anyway?
Regards,
Chuck(le)
P.S. It was probably one of the best mistakes to happen to England. Churchill took it for a deliberate attack. So he ordered the attack on Berlin.
Bozo Goering, in retaliation, began bombing London, diverting assets from the successful campaign against the Royal Air Force. This allowed the RAF to regroup and reorganize.
Otherwise, the RAF was doomed and the English command and staff knew it. As a result of the accident and the redirection of assets, the RAF WON the Battle of Britain….thank God….
Unfortunately, most US(and Japanese) citizens are completely unaware of the massive crimes against humanity committed by the Japanese in WWII to both Chinese citizens and Allied POW’s, rivaling anything the Nazis did(even to this day their anthrax experiments alone in China still effects youth today there). MacArthur was so obsessed with a presidential run, everything from the Rape of Nanking to slaughtering POW’s was swept under the rug to make the rebuilding of Japan appear as smooth a process as possible. For a basic 101 of WWII history that is all but ignored completely, research ‘Japanese war crimes’ on Wikipedia. There is a fairly comprehensive overview of subject matter, and a wealth of references to some excellent books on a completely forgotten Holocaust in the far East. The decision to to drop only two bombs shows more restraint then barbarianism as is often portrayed. Start with subjects such as ritualistic cannibalism of captured US officers and anthrax-laced candies for Chinese children followed by live vivisections and go from there.
The Rape of Nanking is only the tip of the spear. Think millions, not tens of thousands. Factories of death such as Unit 731, the Bataan Death March, hell ships, and the originally planned ‘balloon bombs’ were not to carry explosives, but massive quantities of anthrax(hundreds of them made it to the US with explosives, but were ineffective and censored from making the news-hence the Japanese gave up on the idea). Fortunately, try as they might, they were not able to come up with an effective delivery system for biological weapons even after using hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens to test their ideas. After seeing how dangerous a gram of weaoponized anthrax can be in 2001, its a good thing hundreds of tons of it were never dropped on the US west coast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes
The US government was aware of all that was going on in China when making the decision to take the initiative to end the war with a massive and decisive show of force. The total numbers of those killed in China was suppressed as there was no desire of Chinese government to show a high death toll by an occupying enemy who plundered their nation so swiftly. The captured information for Allied scientists provided by warehouses full of documentation on experiments on live human subjects was invaluable to a group bound by ethics, and information was quickly suppressed in the learning systems of all involved(US/China/Japan) to make the transition to the new world order a smooth as possible. The release of the Iris Chang book ‘The Rape of Nanking’ in Japan in 1997 caused much outrage among Japanese students toward their government as there was no prior knowledge of what had happened. Sorry to drivel on about this, but if I start to get into anything other then the most basic outlines of the actual history of the war in the Pacific, I’ll end up typing 100 pages tonight.
To: Chuck Pelto
1) Yes, I graduated from high school.
2) I knew you could avoid a snarky ad hominem comment, that’s very typical of Neocons.
3) I’m glad you learned something about WW2, that isn’t widely known in the English speaking world, since the WW2 history we get in the English-speaking world is often produced by English or Jewish historians, and they certainly need to be watched for a lack of neutrality.
Regards.
PS To: Chuck Pelto
you wrote: “P.S. It was probably one of the best mistakes to happen to England.”
That’s a wildly improper statement, since it seems as if you are saying that the digression of the air war from military targets to civilian areas was a good thing for England and/or Germany?
That makes little sense to me.
Up to July 1940, not one single German bomb has fallen on British towns. Hitler had given orders that no British towns are to be bombed and, above all. bombing of London is completely forbidden and embargoed. Churchill knows this, because he’s reading the German code, he’s reading the German Air Force signals, which I can now read in the German files. Churchill is reading the signals and he knows that Hitler is not doing him the favor.
Hitler is still hoping that this madman in England will see reason or that he will be outvoted by his cabinet colleagues. So he’s not doing Churchill the favor of bombing any English towns. Churchil is frantic because he thinks he’s being outsmarted by Hitler. On July the 20th he sends for Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of Bomber Command. and he says to Sir Charles Portal, as we know from records from Command to the Air Ministry, “When is the earliest that you could launch a vicious air attack on Berlin?” Sir Charles Portal replies to Winston, “I’m afraid we can’t do it now, not until September because the nights aren’t long enough to fly from England to Berlin and back in the hours of darkness. September, perhaps, and in September we will have the first hundred of the new Sterling bombers …” But he also says, “I warn you, if you do that, the Germans will retaliate. At present they’re not bombing English targets, they’re not bombing civilian targets at all and you know why. And if you bomb Berlin, then Hitler will retaliate against English civilian targets.” And Churchill just twinkles when he gets this reply because he knows what he wants.
TO: Mike O’Malley
RE: Tell Me….
….do you speak German?
Regards,
Chuck(le)
P.S. If not, thank history.
Chuck Pelto, you are a hackneyed idiot. I am glad you were able to learn something about history that might not fit in the confinement of your ideological position.
Indeed, it is hard sometimes for any reactionary, knee-jerk “hoo-rah” Neocon dupe to learn anything, but at least you have.
Consider it a good day for you. I ask you, is today’s UK what the British WW2 vets fought for? What did Churchill achieve? He lost the Empire, and the English have already demographically lost England, and Europeans much of Europe.
Churchill created a climate that allowed Muslims to immigrate into the West. Some victory for us and the “english-speaking” world. Yeah keep on cheering. Neocons for some reason love to hear that Europe is going down, yet they cannot see that England is still more English than Texas is Texan. Texans are already a minority, GWB’s home state is in worse shape than England is. Duh!
Cheers!
TO: Mike O’Malley
RE: [OT] Yeah….
“Chuck Pelto, you are a hackneyed idiot.” — Mike O’Malley
…Right….
Show me your Mensa membership ID number, buckie, and I’ll call you ‘bro’.
RE: [OT] Britain Today
“Consider it a good day for you. I ask you, is today’s UK what the British WW2 vets fought for?” — Mike O’Malley
That discussion was fielded by Roger L. Simon a couple of weeks ago. Sorry you missed it.
Care to get back ON-TOPIC?
TO: All
RE: Typical ‘Liberal’ Mentality
As has been noticed by so many others in various venues, Mike makes a good example of the typical ‘liberal’ approach to discussion. Changing the subject, prevarication, not answering questions and ad homs.
’nuff said.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Prevaricator: A liar in the caterpillar state. -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary]
Thank god that the Americans and the Allied forces helped ended the WW2 and making countries under Japanese occupation liberated and gained independence. Should the Japanese did not invade us, may be, Malaysian would not know the meaning of independence. God Bless America.
WWII Japan demonstrated racism at its worst!
Just ask the Chinese people who had been put upon by the Japanese for ages.
The bombings most certainly saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides.
Sadly necessary.
Regards