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Greenfield" Hiroshima's Lessons for the War on Terror
Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog ^
| Monday, August 12, 2013
| Daniel Greenfield
Posted on 08/13/2013 5:35:00 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at sultanknish.blogspot.com ...
TOPICS: Government; History; Politics; Religion
KEYWORDS: greenfield; hiroshima; japan; nagasaki; sultanknish; worldwareleven
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To: Louis Foxwell
2
posted on
08/13/2013 5:37:05 AM PDT
by
Westbrook
(Children do not divide your love, they multiply it.)
To: arasina; daisy mae for the usa; AdvisorB; wizardoz; free-in-nyc; Vendome; Georgia Girl 2; ...
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.
3
posted on
08/13/2013 5:37:41 AM PDT
by
Louis Foxwell
(This is a wake up call. Join the Sultan Knish ping list.)
To: Louis Foxwell
Well, his ideas are correct, his central fact is wrong.
The bombs didn’t end the war, a tape recorder did.
To: Louis Foxwell
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".
5
posted on
08/13/2013 5:44:37 AM PDT
by
Tax-chick
(Ask me about the Weiner Wager. Support Free Republic!)
To: Louis Foxwell
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.
6
posted on
08/13/2013 5:46:28 AM PDT
by
oh8eleven
(RVN '67-'68)
To: I cannot think of a name
> The bombs didnt end the war, a tape recorder did.
Please elaborate.
7
posted on
08/13/2013 5:46:29 AM PDT
by
Westbrook
(Children do not divide your love, they multiply it.)
To: Louis Foxwell
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.
To: I cannot think of a name
Your comment deserves elaboration. Please elucidate.
9
posted on
08/13/2013 5:47:10 AM PDT
by
Louis Foxwell
(This is a wake up call. Join the Sultan Knish ping list.)
To: Louis Foxwell
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.
10
posted on
08/13/2013 5:49:00 AM PDT
by
airborne
(MY HEROES DON'T WEAR CAPES. MY HEROES WEAR DOG TAGS ! ! !)
To: I cannot think of a name
Recordings were laid down on EP records in those days.
11
posted on
08/13/2013 5:49:14 AM PDT
by
Eric in the Ozarks
("Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth.")
To: Louis Foxwell
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.
12
posted on
08/13/2013 5:51:23 AM PDT
by
BitWielder1
(Corporate Profits are better than Government Waste)
To: Louis Foxwell
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.
13
posted on
08/13/2013 5:57:59 AM PDT
by
GenXteacher
(You have chosen dishonor to avoid war; you shall have war also.)
To: Westbrook; Louis Foxwell
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.
To: Louis Foxwell
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.
15
posted on
08/13/2013 6:05:46 AM PDT
by
mfish13
(ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES!!!!)
To: Eric in the Ozarks
“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.
To: GenXteacher
But then the globalist oligarchs could not exploit their creation, the terrorist orgs.
17
posted on
08/13/2013 6:09:57 AM PDT
by
MHGinTN
(Being deceived can be cured.)
To: Louis Foxwell
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.
18
posted on
08/13/2013 6:12:11 AM PDT
by
left that other site
(You Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Shall Set You Free...John 8:32)
To: Louis Foxwell
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.
19
posted on
08/13/2013 6:13:18 AM PDT
by
Jack of all Trades
(Hold your face to the light, even though for the moment you do not see.)
To: 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.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.
20
posted on
08/13/2013 6:26:36 AM PDT
by
Pan_Yan
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