Posted on 08/06/2014 8:24:20 AM PDT by Retain Mike
My father was a motor machinist 3rd class on a yard minesweeper (YMS-389) that was heading from Okinawa to participate in the invasion of mainland Japan. He figured that he would have been killed if the atomic bomb was not dropped. For me and my generation, I’m glad it was.
There.
Fixed it for somebody.
It’s true, they didn’t want to surrender after Hiroshima. Truman demanded an unconditional surrender and Hirihito came up with “conditions” so we said “FU” and dropped Little Boy on Nagasaki and told them the next one (we didn’t have a third one yet though) would be on Tokyo.
Hiromshima and Nagasaki were military cities in that the ‘civilians’ there were mostly working in munitions plants, etc. They were military targets for that reason.
We only had the two A-bombs; Fat Man and Little Boy. Both were totally different designs. They weren’t sure if one, both or neither of them would work.
The prototype for Fat Man (plutonium bomb) was detonated at Almogordo, NM on July 16, 1945.
It worked, so it was a pretty sure thing that Fat Man would work also.
Little Boy (uranium bomb) made it’s debut over Hiroshima; that design was never tested previously. Obviously, it worked just fine.
Japanese women training to defend Japan with bamboo spears.
At Saipan hundreds (maybe even a few thousand - no one knows the real number) of Japanese civilians committed suicide by throwing themselves from cliffs, rather than surrender to the Marines, because of the propaganda they had been fed. Had the U.S. invaded Japan the civilian deaths would have been astronomical.
Which one did they stick with before the hydrogen bomb? Or did they still make both plutonium and uranium bombs?
According to wikipedia, they made 32 Little Boys and 120 Fat Men before they were superceded by newer designs.
But why "imperative"? That implies that there was absolutely no other choice.
A starvation blockade and conventional bombing would have been options --followed by a demonstration of our wonder weapon and then perhaps a negotiated peace, or perhaps unconditional surrender.
I'm not saying that we should have done that -- politically it may have been an untenable position, and we could be blockading and bombing them still today -- but it was alternative, at least in theory.
The poor Japanese... it’s meant to be a finger-point from a leftist about supposed racism, even when those bombs were being made to drop on Germans (but Germany surrendered before they were ready). And it’s surprising how many people don’t consider how those two bombs, while taking so many Japanese lives, saved so many American (and more Japanese) lives.
Thanks for clarification on the military aspect of the targeting. I was focusing on the civilian casualties obviously. Let’s face it, if you decide to use an atomic bomb but don’t kill a lot of people with it, the effect might not be realized. Heck, we still had to do it twice before they came to their senses. It’s pretty hard to break the will of your enemy...
No doubt they were options, but they came after invasion. The invasion was the selected course of action, the bombs were an alternative to the selected course of action because if they worked it was thought they would achieve the desired result. Blockade and conventional bombing never met the strategic objectives, which is why they weren't selected.
To what? The war of aggression started by the Japanese? The millions of deaths for which the Japanese were responsible? The slavery, the use of humans as guinea pigs for biological experiments? The facts show it was not a proportionate response because it was too small a response to be proportionate.
That they would kill the POWs is indisputable, but there was no way for them to have a chance to get back to assist the defense of the home islands, unless they swam.
Remember, up to the time of WWII the Japanese were pure warriors and trained and indoctrinated as such. They were brutal before then to the Chinese and others.
I realize I was deliberate in choosing imperative, because I advocate for those who are long dead and/or are passing away. They were past the point of considering options for dealing with this crisis.
You do make me think I should work on the narrative to emphasize the increased fragility of support for the war based on the huge increase in casualties for the 12-15 months leading up to August 1945. The country really didn’t feel the human cost the first two and a half years of involvement. But then Europe beginning June of 1944 and Okinawa in spring of 1945 hit this country hard. I remember the story told by one man who was too young to serve, but as an adolescent delivered telegrams part-time for the local Western Union office. He eventually quit, because every day he had to deliver the death notices and people began looking at him with some combination of anxiety and hatred.
Indeed. I had an employee who is Indonesian and she told me a story of her grandfather. He fought against the Japanese and was captured near the end of the war. He was still captive when the war ended. The Japanese executed all of their prisoners at this POW camp, including her grandfather even though the war was officially over. She said her family never recovered from that loss.
So awesome..and I’m sure it WAS near spiritual. Thank you!!
I was thinking of the same things. I understand how hard it is in this day and age to wrap one’s mind around it but that was the mindset in Japan then. Very little of the population knew anything of the outside world and the militant leaders were dead set on keeping it that way and pushing the entire country to fight to the death. For a number of reasons they would have proudly done so.
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