Posted on 08/06/2023 7:01:59 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I’ve seen some of these. However, I’d like to hear from the Marines who were scheduled to hit the beaches.
He just sat at his desk every Aug 6th and cried knowing there were Americans who thought the bombing was wrong and he should have died.
It’s obamian revisionist history painting America as always rotten to the core.
During Obama, yes, the core was rotted out by his acceleration of his coalition of Marxist muslim ideals intended to destroy America.
Tell that to my father who was stationed on Okinawa in the summer of ‘45 waiting for the final assult on mainland Japan. When the bombs were dropped and Japan surrendered it was a great relief to the US troops who were expecting even greater resistance on the mainland then they encountered on Iwo or Okinawa.
I have to say that I am here today because my father didn’t have to go into the mainland in the final assult.
There was a movie - a comedy - made in the late 1950's based on that idea called 'The Mouse That Roared'. A small country decides to declare war on the US so they can reap the benefits of losing to the US...At the time lots of people thought it was too close to the truth to be funny.
However, it took another five weeks to secure the island, so there was not a lot they could do with it.
Almost 7,000 USA dead in the battle, so it was never completely safe until the war ended.
Also, Iwo was never utilized at the level they had planned.
It was supposed to launch fighter escorts for B-29 bombers, plus create an emergency landing site for damaged bombers that could not make it back to their home base. Those two things never really happened in large numbers.
It did poke a hole in Japans radar coverage, naval surveillance, and naval supply chain, plus it killed 21,000 Japanese soldiers, so it was clearly a high value outpost for the Japanese military command.
While you are correct in saying "...there is absolutely no reason to accept anything the government says at face value...", as so many men and their families knew from hard experience in war and painful loss at home, accepting that the Japanese would fight to the last man, woman, and child was borne out by firsthand experience, not by "anything the government says".
My father, IAGeezer912's father, wildbill22's father and Bill Whittle's father (as he explicity describes in his excellent video I linked to in my post earlier in the thread at #53. which had were all men who had either fought firsthand in the Pacific and seen the ferocious tenacity of the Japanese in every battle they fought them in or seen the Japanese civilians on Saipan throwing themselves off the cliffs rather than be taken capitive (actually given safe refuge) by the American forces, or were in the forces being marshalled for the upcoming "Operation Downfall", and they knew full well that any one of them might never make it home.
You are welcome to your personal opinion that using the bombs was "morally bankrupt and completely unneccessary", and if you oppose the decision for religous, moral, or personal reasons, I fully accept that it is your opinion even if I disagree, and you have many people who agree with you.
But your use of government veracity in ANY way is not the way you should buttress your position.
All those men listed above, and perhaps millions of others on the slate to take part in "Operation Downfall" carry far more weight, and do not constitute the "word of the government".
If you haven't seen the linked video, I suggest you give it a view.
What an amazing reply Hockey Pop... thanks so much to you and rlmorel for sharing history and insights with us.
You are correct about the bombs saving a large number of American lives, of course. But what is ignored in all of this is the fact that using the bomb to convince Japan to surrender almost certainly saved a very large number of Japanese lives as well.
Japan in 1945 was preparing for defense of the home islands by arming civilians - including women and children - with whatever weapons were available, down to sticks, rocks and the like. The Japanese people were conditioned to believe that surrender was disgraceful and that they had a duty to the emperor to fight to the death to defend Japan.
I’m the event of an invasion, our forces likely would have been faced with the prospect of being attacked by poorly armed civilians alongside regular Japanese troops, resulting almost inevitably in a.huge massacre of Japanese civilians. Certainly the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused massive civilian casualties; nobody can dispute that. It is arguable though that a conventional invasion might well have been even worse.
There is a lot of truth to that. There is a reason that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the targets for nuclear attack rather than larger and more important cities such as Tokyo. Those larger, more important cities were already largely destroyed by fire bombings. It would have been a waste of the A-bombs to use them on targets that were already largely in ruins.
The A-bombs certainly caused mass casualties, but what do these people think would have happened in Japan had the war dragged on for another year or more and an invasion of the home islands occurred? More fire bombings and massacres of civilians would have been the likely result.
I good friend of mine was in the Army along with 500,000 other troops staging and waiting to invade Japan, then The Enola Gay happened and he came home. He died last year 96 yo.
Japanese industry at the time was highly dispersed, as a deliberate defensive measure. Just about any Japanese city was "strategic militarily". USAAF had a list (and checked it twice) and they were all "naughty". Some more so than others. Hiroshima and Nagasaki hadn't been hit with incendiary bombing (yet), just because they weren't at the top of the list. This made them ideal targets for the atomic bombing: militarily significant, but as yet undamaged. Also, Nagasaki wasn't the primary target for Bock's Car ... IIRC, Kokura was. But Kokura was completely overcast so they hit their secondary target (Nagasaki) instead.
Incidentally, USAAF ran a "leaflet bombing" campaign in late July, 1945 warning that any of several cities were about to be destroyed and that the citizens thereof should evacuate.
Horseshit.
The “Author” of this drivel needs to read a true history of the period.
If the Japs were on the verge of surrendering, why were we marshalling our forces to invade?
Why not just blockade until the Japs surrendered?
LeMay would have torched the entire country, but he ran out of targets.
The Japs were terrified that if the Russians invaded Japan, they would go “full Berlin” on the female population. That got their attention.
The author needs to visit with one of our few remaining veterans of World War II and ask them about the necessity of the Bomb...
Indeed...one of the things I love about Free Republic is that on nearly every subject, we can be well within that famous “Six Degrees of Separation”, and thus, be closer to an issue or history!
Thanks for sharing that with us, HockeyPop!
There is no reason that both can’t be true. We dropped the bombs both to force Japanese surrender and as a means to contain the Soviets. Based on Soviet actions in Eastern Europe in the three months between the German surrender and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, it was pretty clear what Stalin’s intentions were in Asia- grab as much territory as he could. Dragging out the war for another year or more would likely have resulted in far more Communist dominance in Asia than what actually occurred. Further, nobody was sure that Stalin was going to be satisfied with what he had in Europe. There was a very real possibility that he could have fought only with a token force in Asia, fortified Europe and moved the Iron Curtain further west while the US was occupied with and diverting most of its military resources to a Japanese invasion. The threat of nuclear retaliation might well have been the only thing that could have deterrred Stalin.
Obviously we can never know what didn’t happen because of dropping the bombs, only what did happen. But it is at least conceivable that many lives were saved and much suffering was avoided globally because of it.
They didn’t interview MacArthur about the war in Europe and how it should be conducted. Idiotic article, very deceptive, and ignores the reality that all of this was in a Cold War context designed to placate Japan. Also, every single person interviewed was a geezer who faced no personal danger whatsoever from the planned invasion of Japan.
Good point. Patton wasn’t exactly alone in his observation that war was a grand human endeavor, terrible, but magnificent, reaffirming values, etc. Interestingly enough, the exact same debates were had reference the belt fed machine gun.
There’s an interesting book out there called the social history of the machine gun. Fascinating, but there are leaders who really do like the idea of soldiers moving off in glorious combat.
They aren’t like normal people
That is kind of what I was angling at, I didn't know quite how to word it. But I think we can both understand why it is an odd concept to try to relay.
I am certain that when the longbow first came out, it was branded as cowardly by those who were doing their fighting with the short sword.
The same dynamic applied to the horse calvary in WWI, where they simply got mowed down by machine guns, as is probably addressed in that book you mentioned.
One could also address the American Colonials (and by extension, the indian tribes at the time) who not only fired from behind cover, but aimed at the people who seemed to be in charge of the units.
We see that nowadays as intelligent fighting, back then, they (the British) viewed it as barbarous and cowardly.
In the end, it comes down to military people who don't want to change the way they fight, because the way they fought is what they know and are geared towards. We are just as (even more so) susceptible to that mindset, although I have had some indications (at least before our military was woke and broken) that our military leadership was taking into account future ways of waging war, how to fight it, and how to defend against it, but...
Warfare is a history of innovation to offensive war, and counter-innovation to defend and neutralize those new methods of war. It is constant, ongoing, and lots of people die while that pendulum of innovation swings back and forth between offensive innovation and defensive innovation.
I just don't want to be one of those people participating on the ground on defense when the pendulum has swung to innovation on offense.
I am glad you brought up the officers of the Guards division revolt to kidnap the emperor and keep the war going. It was foiled by the bravery of Hirohito’s household staff.
Where would have the first atomic bomb been dropped? Dropping those bombs have prevented similar bombs from being dropped in a war for 78 years. You can guarandamtee somebody would have dropped a nuke somewhere, sometime. Those bombs dropping have served a great purpose in the following 78 years. It showed leaders from all countries and political leanings of how bad they are.
If they hadn't been dropped, where would have they been used? Korea? Vietnam? Afghanistan? China? Iran? Cuba? Because Japan got them, no other country has.
It’s easy to be generous when your butt isn’t on the line.
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