Greenfield" Hiroshima's Lessons for the War on Terror

Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog ^ | Monday, August 12, 2013 | Daniel Greenfield

[Louis Foxwell]

Monday, August 12, 2013

Hiroshima's Lessons for the War on Terror

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog

In the summer of '45, the United States concluded a war that had come to be seen by some as unwinnable after the carnage at Iwo Jima, with a bang.

On August 6th, the bomb fell on Hiroshima. And then on the 9th, it was Nagasaki's turn. Six days
later, Japan, which had been preparing to fight to the last man, surrendered.

For generations of liberals, those two names would come to represent the horror of America's war machine, when they actually represented a pragmatic ruthlessness that saved countless American and Japanese lives.

There can hardly be a starker contrast to our endless unwinnable nation-building exercises in which nothing is ever finished until we give up than the way that Truman cut the Gordian Knot and avoided a long campaign that would have depopulated Japan and destroyed the lives of a generation of American soldiers.

[Louis Foxwell]

Sultan Knish/Daniel Greenfield Ping List (notification of new articles).

FReepmail or drop me a comment to get on or off the Sultan Knish ping list.

I highly recommend an occasional look at the Sultan Knish blog. It is a rich source of materials, links and more from one of the preeminent writers of our age.

[Westbrook]

Nuke Mecca.

Twice.

[Louis Foxwell]

Sorry about the excerpt. It is the only way to get the post up with the current glitch.

Greenfield opens some nasty wounds, not the least of which are cowardice and lack of moral fibre.
We have to get the children out of the living room.

[I cannot think of a name]

Well, his ideas are correct, his central fact is wrong.

The bombs didn’t end the war, a tape recorder did.

[Tax-chick]

The spectacle of Nidal Hasan trying to communicate to a politically correct military bureaucracy that he really is a Muslim terrorist is almost comic. Before the shootings, he expressed sympathy for terrorists and put his Islamic holy warrior tag on his business cards. He did everything short of hiring a skywriter to fly over Fort Hood writing, "Nidal Hasan is a Muslim Terrorist".

[oh8eleven]

In the summer of '45, the United States concluded a war that had come to be seen by some as unwinnable after the carnage at Iwo Jima
Carnage at Iwo Jima, yes. But I think it was the battle for Okinawa that convinced the US they could never win by invading Japan.

[Westbrook]

> The bombs didn’t end the war, a tape recorder did.

Please elaborate.

[a fool in paradise]

The Left repeatedly pushed the meme that it took Booosh longer to win the war in Iraq than it took to win WWII. Except we entered WWII while it was already under way for several years and finished it off with two major nuclear strikes.

The same double standard they used when they proclaimed that at least Saddam Hussein kept acts of terrorism down in Iraq (by raping and disembowling prisoners’ wives, cutting off their hands, etc.). Generally behaving as a tyrannical dictator against everyone, not just terrorists, but critics and innocents.

[Louis Foxwell]

Your comment deserves elaboration. Please elucidate.

[airborne]

The real lesson is our occupation and complete control of their government.

Unless we are willing to set up a Marshal Law scenario like MacArthur did, the Middle East will always be a snake den in need of extermination.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Recordings were laid down on EP records in those days.

[BitWielder1]

It is better to end a war by winning it than it is to drag it out for decades.
See how well Germany, Italy and Japan recovered by their own labor, as opposed to Vietnam.
Iraq and Afghanistan are Vietnams, they will never be like Japan.
As far as nation building is concerned, let the losing countries rebuild on their own, so they A: Value what they have, B: Earn the skills to keep building and C: Don't burden American taxpayers forever.

[GenXteacher]

On Sept 12, 2001, a single ICBM should have struck Mecca, hitting with all 8 warheads and reducing it to nothing. Then Afghanistan should have been saturated from one end to the other with nerve gas, Kabul nuked, and every structure in every village hit with World War II scale conventional bombing. Not so much as a goat left. Then the nuking of Baghdad, Tehran, and other strongholds of the enemy afterward. This could have been done in two weeks, followed by the announcement that the US will not tolerate assaults on its own soil.

[I cannot think of a name]

After the second bomb fell, the senior Jap commanders decided the war was lost, and the decision was made that the emperor should go on the radio and tell the people to quit. Many of the next level of officers decided they couldn't accept this, and they would take control away from the emperor. The reasoning was that it would be better to have Japan totally destroyed and every person killed rather than surrender.

The senior commanders said they couldn't go against the emperor, so they would have to commit suicide to get out of the younger commanders way. That night they had a large gathering to ‘celebrate’ the death of the senior commanders. Too much was drunk and things didn't end till morning. They rushed to the Emperor's palace and surrounded - no radio address today.

What they didn't know was that it had previously been decided that the Emperor might not be able to get through reading such a document. It was decided to record the message and play it back over the radio (I don't know if the device was actually a ‘tape’ recorder, it may have used wire as many did back then).

When the radical commanders surrounding the palace heard the Emperor's voice over the radio, they knew they were sunk and committed suicide themselves. I always thought it was funny that people marveled at how good the Japaneses became at building consumer electronics. Hell, without them their country would have probably been bombed into the stone age - although it might have taken a little longer as we had already dropped the only two atomic bombs we had on them.

[mfish13]

One thing that is never mentioned in all the weeping an gnashing of teeth, that 100,000 captives held by the Japanese were dying per month at that time. Still captives died at the end of the war for a while as they were too starved to survive, but many who died in captivity were saved.

[I cannot think of a name]

“Recordings were laid down on EP records in those days.”

There were recorders using magnetized paper tape in the late 1920’s, BASF invented Mylar tape sometime in the 30s, although as I mentioned in my answer above, the device would probably have used wire instead of tape. We used wire recorders extensively through World War II.

[MHGinTN]

But then the globalist oligarchs could not exploit their creation, the terrorist orgs.

[left that other site]

I had the privilege of meeting and chatting with Gen. Paul Tibbets.

There was NO doubt in his mind (or mine) that we did the right thing at the right time.

[Jack of all Trades]

In his book “The Five Rings” Musashi described a tactic in fighting (either individual combat or war) called Piercing the Bottom. In this tactic one does not stop when the enemy is defeated physically, but continues attacking with such ferocity that the enemy loses all hope of victory and completely gives up resistance.

[Pan_Yan]

One thing that is never mentioned in all the weeping an gnashing of teeth, that 100,000 captives held by the Japanese were dying per month at that time. Still captives died at the end of the war for a while as they were too starved to survive, but many who died in captivity were saved.

My dad was on a baby flattop that picked up POWs from a Japanese internment camp and took them back to an island with a large hospital. He was almost 80 before my brothers and I got him to talk about it.