Posted on 08/06/2010 7:02:21 AM PDT by AccuracyAcademia
This week marks 65 years since the United States dropped the atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, President Harry Truman delivered a “rain of ruin” upon Hiroshima, Japan, with Nagasaki hit three days later, killing 100,000 to 200,000.
Truman’s objective was to compel surrender from an intransigent enemy that refused to halt its naked aggression. The barbarous mentality of 1940s Japan was beyond belief. An entire nation lost its mind, consumed by a ferocious militarism and hell-bent on suicide. Facing such fanaticism, Truman felt no alternative but to use the bomb. As George C. Marshall put it, the Allies needed something extraordinary “to shock [the Japanese] into action.” Nothing else was working. Japan was committed to a downward death spiral, with no end in sight.
“We had to end the war,” said a desperate Marshall later. “We had to save American lives.”
Evidence shows the bomb achieved precisely that, saving millions of lives, not merely Americans but Japanese. The Japanese themselves acknowledged this, from the likes of Toshikazu Kase to Emperor Hirohito himself. Kase was among the high-level officials representing Japan at its formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri. “The capitulation of Japan,” Kase said definitively, “saved the lives of several million men.”
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
It's just that any sort of analysis I come up with indicates that the two A bombs were not needed and would have been better saved for their surprise value the next time something like that WAS needed, such as 9/12/01.
The Japanese would likely have all starved within a year of VJ day had we done nothing but watch and observe.
Hardly....The Battle of Okinawa was from early April until mid-June, 1945.
Allies suffered more than 50,000 casualties,Japan lost over 100,000 troops,more than 100,000 civilians (12,000 in action) were killed, wounded, or committed suicide, approximately one-quarter of the civilian population died ....
So two month later you say the Japan was just going to give up before a foot was set on any of the home Islands?
Britain looked beat in 1940 and held out to win... Germany was totally destroyed from the air by early 1945 yet it still had to be taken foot by foot...
Consider that if the two a bombs prevented one just one "Okinawa" both side were ahead of the game..... The A bomb let Japan(that by tradition did not surrender but would fight to the death and/or committed suicide) to in effect surrender and save face at the same time...
If the war had stated conventional war is there any real drought that, just as in "beaten Germany", Berlin still had to be taken; we would of at the very least had to take the capital of the "beaten Japan", Tokyo?...
And it a fair bet taking just one of Japans five main islands would be far bloodier then taking Okinawa
You are quite wrong:
Japanese assets in place at the time of the ear invasion:
14 dug in divisions on the southernmost island of Kyushu (900,000) well armed. Many had been transported from China to defend the homeland.
10,875 aircraft that were to be used as kamizakes against the invading ships. Estimated casualties at sea were to be one third to one half of the invading forces.
US assets:
We were going to land 14 divisions on Kyushu and six months later 25 divisions in Honshu. The one to one ratio of combatants in Kyushu would have been in the Japanese favor and the carnage on the American side would have been horrific.
Estimates handed to Truman for the invasion:
1.75 to 4 million American casualties.
no less than 10 million Japanese casualties.
The difficulty of feeding the Japanese populace was going to be a real problem and the toll could have reached 30 million Japanese through combat, disease and starvation.
Many of the Freepers on this board today would not be around if we had invaded Japan. I am one of them. My dad was moved from Europe to Mississippi to train for mountain fighting. He was told that it would be far worse than Europe. His unit in Europe had 76% attrition rate.
The decision to drop the bomb was a great one. It saved many American and Japanese lives.
Russia had scheduled the invasion of Hokkaido and were in the process of moving people when the bombs were dropped.
We could have ended up with North and South Japan. It was very close.
We have never had 100 carriers.
Where di you get this number?
Most of the aircraft that were scheduled to take control of the skies were to come from Okinawa gound bases.
NOBODY was going to invade Japan after Okinawa, nor did anybody need to. Okinawa put American heavy bombers within 300 miles of Japan instead of the 1400 from the Mariannas; that would have had the effect of tripling or quadrupling the numbers of those B29s, had there been any remaining real targets for B29s.
I mean, try looking at Japan on Google Earth and come back to me with how many fields of grain you can find. Japan was totally dependent on the sea and its access to the sea had been cut off and all of their large ships destroyed. If they'd really wanted to go on fighting after September 45 it would have been little fishing boats versus bearcats. Who do you really think would win a bearcat vs fishing boat fight??
Me too.
the only method for holding land after conquest is with infantry. Bombers are good, but they cannot win a war.
You are right about the 100 carriers. Acutally 99 commissioned during the war.
The Japanese navy was pretty much exhausted after the Battle of Leyte Gulf and was not a real concern.
If there had been an invasion, their planes would have been flying from airfields, not from ships.
A friend of mine, in his eighties now, was told to write his goodbye letter to his family. He was a Marine on Okinawa and was informed that they were going to be landing on Kyushu within a few days and it was not expected that any of them would survive.
The first bomb was dropped the next day and he came home and had a family.
Japan had to be put down permanently. It was extremely dangerous.
You need to have someone sit down and explain to you the diference between a carrier and an escort carrier.
NOBODY was going to invade Japan after Okinawa
By "NOBODY", do perhaps mean, "MacArthur"? The troops and supplies wee already underway, dear. Your statement is patently absurd.
I mean, try looking at Japan on Google Earth and come back to me with how many fields of grain you can find. Japan was totally dependent on the sea and its access to the sea had been cut off and all of their large ships destroyed.
Japn fed itself prior to 1860 without any foreign trade whatsoever.
If they'd really wanted to go on fighting after September 45 it would have been little fishing boats versus bearcats. Who do you really think would win a bearcat vs fishing boat fight??
No one is saying we would not have won. What you don't seem to want to acknowledge is that Japan was not going to go without an extremely bloody fight that would have dwarfed Okinawa - unless we used the game-changer the we developed in the mountains of east Tennessee, the Snake River Valley of Washington State, and the deserts of New Mexico.
“It should be noted that when President Harry Truman was considering whether to invade Japan instead of dropping the bombs, his advisers estimated that an invasion would result in one million American casualties and at least two million Japanese deaths. In the strange calculus of war, the bombs actually saved Japanese lives.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748703748904575411123599873634.html
No American government would ever survive any sort of a scene involving a million war casualties and Truman knew that. Whatever plans might have been in the works prior to Okinawa had already been stopped BY Okinawa.
Again as I read it it was unnecessary. The Japanese were looking for some sort of a way to surrender and all Truman had to do was tell them that the war was over, and to call when they got hungry enough to want Americans to land and distribute food.
Again as I read it it was unnecessary.
It doesn't matter how you read it. You are factually incorrect, and not in a small or unimportant way. The Top Secret national archives were declassified in 2006.
So on May 25, 1945, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after extensive deliberation, issued to General MacArthur, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and Army Air Force General Henry Arnold, the top secret directive to proceed with the invasion of Kyushu. The target date was after the typhoon season.
President Truman approved the plans for the invasions July 24. Two days later, the United Nations issued the Potsdam Proclamation, which called upon Japan to surrender unconditionally or face total destruction.
Three days later, the Japanese governmental news agency broadcast to the world that Japan would ignore the proclamation and would refuse to surrender. During this same period it was learned — via monitoring Japanese radio broadcasts — that Japan had closed all schools and mobilized its school children, was arming its civilian population and was fortifying caves and building underground defenses.
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