Hiroshima, Nagasaki Bombings Were Needless, Said World War II's Top US Military Leaders

Stark Realities ^ | 08/06/2023 | Brian McGlinchey

[Georgia Girl 2]

My Dad who was stationed in the Pacific and was in Hiroshima 6 weeks after the bomb once told me that if they had had to storm the Japanese beach heads we would have lost another 500,000 men.

[Nifster]

You post this crap with no comment

[Fury]

My Japanese stepdaughter had the opportunity to talk with both her grandmothers about this. Both wanted the war to end and were thankful when it did. Support for the war seemed to vary for different parts of the country. Both grandmothers lived in rural areas (one in Nambu, one in Inokashira - which are both about 40-45 minutes from Fujinomiya). Relatives in Shizuoka proper were more strident even though that city was badly damaged by Allied bombing.

[Mears]

I was 13 when the bomb was dropped………the adults in my neighborhood were delighted because it ended the war.

….

[HockeyPop]

Indeed. All of the scientists were on board. I know this because my family was there. One of them was a 21 year old who was given sole responsibility for the design and computations for one component of the bomb. He would later work with Teller and Samuel Cohen on the hydrogen and neutron bombs respectively. In ‘48 it was he who informed Truman that the Soviets were weeks away from testing their bomb and stationing an observatory In Alaska was needed. Under Reagan he led the study advising going forward with the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) which forced the Soviets to compete financially eventually leading to bankrupting them. Revisionists are evil in the most Biblical sense.

[MarMema]

Why does that bother you?

[Nifster]

Precisely

[rlmorel]

In the Bill Whittle video I referenced above, he makes a personal comment to that exact same aspect as well.

His father (and yours...and mine as well) were three of those men who might never have come home from an invasion of Japan.

On a related note, every year, my father would give a Memorial Day speech in his hometown.

This picture was from 1995, which was also the year of the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the bombs.

My father had very strong feelings about the use of the Atomic Bomb, and in that speech in the town square after the parade he brought up the subject because it was all the rage in the news to talk about the racism, inhumanity, and needlessness of the use of the bomb, and it made him pretty mad.

I don't have a transcript of his speech, but...in it, he said something like "There is a lot of controversy about it today, but not from me. If we had more of them and earlier, we should have dropped them and kept dropping them until they surrendered."

The next day in the local paper, under the picture I posted above, it said something like "WWII Veteran Says America Should Have Dropped More Bombs"

My dad was solidly unrepentant. He didn't care what people said about him.

And neither did I.

[DesertRhino]

” but it was LeMay who crippled the homeland’s military machinery. “

Childish. LeMay was angry about the bomb because his firebombing was overshadowed by the nukes. And it was a very joint thing. The NAVY killed manufacturing as much as the B-29s did. US Navy subs utterly strangled them. And without Navy and Marines, the B-29s had no Marianas bases. No Iwo Jima fighter bases.

Without the Navy, Lemay was helpless.

[Nifster]

Precisely

[DesertRhino]

Ike spent the whole war in the ETO. Would anyone ask MacArthur his opinion of the war in Europe. Ike was wrong if serious. But he was it was a later political sop to make Japan feel good about being an ally.

[FreedomPoster]

Larry Schweikart’s post from earlier today, from here:

https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/4173267/posts?page=5#5

Everything you need to know about the dropping of the atomic bomb can be found in Richard Frank’s book, “Downfall.” He had access to Japanese, as well as American, archives & memoirs as well as the post-war recollections of Emperor Hirohito.

*Casualty projections were all over the map, from 100,000 to 1 million for the US, up to 10 m for the Japanese.
*Ketsu-Go, the Japanese plan for national suicide, was already being put in place and civilians given what equipment there was and training as to how to become bushido jihadist suicide bombers. They were totally down with it, as seen in the suicide bomber #s on Okinawa. The plan for “one man, one ship” exchange was fully in place. Suicide torpedoes were already being built.
*Through Okinawa, the number of Japanese troops who surrendered, despite obvious evidence their units were destroyed and they had no hope of winning, was almost ZERO. On Iwo Jima, fewer than 2,000 prisoners (almost all wounded) were taken out of a garrison of 20,000. There was no evidence, anywhere, that the Japanese civilians on Hokkaido or any other island would actually surrender.
*Here’s the amazing thing about the numbers: everything Truman saw was really, really LOW. He never was briefed on total air, infantry, support, naval casualties, or those of just ordinary but predictable accidents. Thus he decided on the LOWER estimates.
*As late as 2 days after the Hiroshima bomb, Japanese council records show that the council was split on whether to accept the Potsdam Agreement (it took unanimous consent to do anything).
*The government sent Dr. Nishina to Hiroshima to confirm it was an atomic bomb. When he did, he was asked, “How long til we can get one?”
*The Soviets entering the war was important for two reasons: First, it ended the fantasy that Japan could reinforce the home islands with China-based troops, and second, it ended any hope that the Japanese could get the Russkies to pressure us to accept anything less than “unconditional surender.”
*Finally, the decision to retain the emperor ran COUNTER to all US public opinion polls. It was taken because MacArthur and Nimitz thought it would be easier to disarm and control the civilians if the emperor went along with the plan.
*Even after Hirohito decided (following the Nagasaki bomb) to surrender, groups of “dead-enders” tried to assaswinate him and put a harder line guy in.

[Mariner]

Many of the quotes are in this document.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-2012-09-19/html/CREC-2012-09-19-pt1-PgH6128-2.htm

[rlmorel]

"...Revisionists are evil in the most Biblical sense..."

I agree. It is a form of fundamental un-truth and deception. I despise it utterly.

On a personal level, I have tried to face the things our country has done that are less than laudable, and there are many of them.

I try to stare those things in the face and accept them, good or bad.

I always felt the was a great country.

But it wasn't just all the "good" things we did that ended up making it great.

It was the totality, both good and bad, that has made America what it became.

Just as it is with individual people. None of us are who we are, for better or worse, without those things we would rather not remember.

But, this despicable cowardice, this inability of people to accept and face up to this, resulting in the tearing down of monuments and such other revisionist activities, fills me with rage.

And one of the worst things is impressing our values of today on people who made decisions in 1945...never mind 1775 and 1861.

[ConservativeInPA]

The bottom line was that Japan unconditionally surrendered. The bombs did exactly what they intended - end the war. Did repeated fire bombing of Tokyo end the war? No. More civilians were killed in Tokyo than in Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined. You can argue that fire bombing Japanese cities and the two bombs brought about the end of the war, but that certainly does not make the case that either one was humane.

If I were the CinC, my axiom for all conflicts is to minimize American casualties, no matter the cost to the other nations. If American troops had to invade Japan proper there would be significant U.S. casualties. That did not happen because of the bombs.

Contrast my warmonger side with my inner dove. The peace loving side of me is very strong. It takes egregious actions by another nation to flip the switch from peace to war. Diplomacy is paramount and only when that fails does the switch to war happens. It takes a significant attack and loss of American lives to begin a hot war, and even then diplomacy should continue until peace is obtained. It takes an unconditional surrender to end American attacks. No cease fires, no decrease in operations, attacks continue to the moment a surrender occurs. We get it over as quickly as possible.

That minimizes American loses. I don’t care about the other side since we should never be in the situation where we start a war. We don’t start wars, we end them. Unfortunately, that has not been the case in recent history and I am ashamed because of that.

[Nifster]

Because it’s pointless. Either they have a point of view or the don’t. If they don’t no reason to post it here

[Getready]

The Japanese didn’t surrender after Tokyo was firebombed. They didn’t surrender after Hiroshima. The argument for a demonstration of the power on an uninhabited island was floated. But nixed cause if they told the Japanese where and when, the fear was that JApan would move American POW’s there to be obliterated. The article talks about decimating a forest. Yeah...that would work.
Japan had its own research on atomic power...but not too advanced as we found out AFTER the war. In the book HIROSHIMA by Hersey...he recounts that the explanation the JApanese used to explain the bright flash was that Magnesium was dropped on the high power lines to create the flash.
If we invaded Japan, hundreds of thousands of Americans . and millions of Japanese would have been killed.
Seeing the power of the A-bomb helped prevent further war by the doctrine of MAD.(mutually assured destruction)
The article is a lie written by someone who knows that history can be falsified. Complete idiot for trying.

[Tijeras_Slim]

LeMay had burned out over 35% of most major cities with his firebombing tactics. They could have done it without the atomic bomb, just not as quickly.

Plus McArthur really wanted to invade to on up Ike and be the biggest of big dogs.

[mass55th]

The NAPF was organized in 1982. Their office is in Santa Barbara, California.

Here's the Advisory Board list they have on their website:

Hafsat Abiola
Christine Ahn
Tadatoshi Akiba
Medea Benjamin - Code Pink founder
Helen Caldicott, M.D.
M.D.Noam Chomsky, Ph.D.
Jean-Michel Cousteau
Michael Douglas
Shirin Ebadi, J.D.
Anne H. Ehrlich, Ph.D.
Paul R. Ehrlich, Ph.D.
Riane Eisler, J.D.
Daniel Ellsberg, Ph.D
Beatrice Fihn
Harrison Ford
Johan Galtung, Dr. hc mult
Jane Goodall, Ph.D, DBE
Ira Helfand, M.D.
Bianca Jagger
Marc Kielburger, J.D.H.H.
the 14th Dalai Lama
Rev. James Lawson
Robert Jay Lifton
Mairead Corrigan Maguire
Judith Mayotte, Ph.D.
Gloria R. Montebruno Saller, Ph.D.
John Polanyi
Queen Noor of Jordan
Admiral L. Ramdas
Hon. Douglas Roche, O.C.
Elaine Scarry, Ph.D.
Robert Scheer
Gerry Spence, J.D.
Oliver Stone
Noel (Paul) Stookey
Setsuko Thurlow
Ted Turner
Peter Yarrow

I didn't realize that Mary Travers from Peter, Paul, and Mary had passed, so it's only Peter and Paul. Yarrow was arrested in 1970, and convicted for taking sexual liberties with a 14 year old girl after she and her 17 year old sister showed up at his hotel room. He did three months of a 1-3 prison sentence. Jimmy Carter pardoned him in 1981.

With some of the names on that list, I wouldn't trust this group as far a I could throw them.

[miliantnutcase]

Yep.