Posted on 08/06/2013 7:48:46 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
August 6, 2013 marks the 68th anniversary of the first use of an atomic bomb, and August 9th the last. Japan did not surrender for five days after Nagasaki was bombed, during which time the Soviet Union declared war and the Americans conducted additional, conventional firebombing raids on a Japanese city. Emperor Hirohito was asked to break a deadlock in the imperial cabinet that had blocked an unconditional surrender up to that point.
To this day, Harry Truman is viewed by ardent critics as a war criminal and the United States is deemed as being stained by a sin as indelible as slavery. In fact, last November, a "documentary" on Hiroshima and its aftermath produced by Oliver Stone was shown on television and, as might be expected, it presented the standard apologist's take on the history surrounding Truman's decision to use nuclear bombs.
To quote Stone from an interview he gave to the Stanford Daily earlier this year, his production was intended to "cause Americans to rethink your history ... because you're not the indispensable, benevolent nation that we pretend to be." He might have gotten his facts straight before making such an arrogant and ignorant comment, but as we know from his past works, facts seem to get in the way of his agenda.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
When they wrote that, the Church fathers failed to interview the priest who was my hs teacher, a US chaplain on the Bataan Death March.
Throughout military history, it seems the Romans came up with a foolproof idea:
1. Conquer your opponents.
2. Dissemble the city, stone by stone.
3. Salt the fields arounds the dissembled city.
4. Disperse the conquered survivors throughout the realm.
5. Label it, “Pax Carthagia”.
Also good to see Enola Gay fully restored at the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center.
We did what needed to be done at the time. There was little choice.
Stone is clearly just another leftist mental case who can’t handle the truth.
Too bad in just a few short decades, American leadership and government have changed from honorable and respected to dishonorable and disrespected.
My Dad was in an infantry regiment on V-E Day that was ordered to withdraw 60 km westward to let the Red Army in. His unit was getting ready to ship to the Pacific when the A-bombs were dropped. For that I’m both grateful and here.
IIRC, the second-guessing about Hiroshima/Nagasaki started in 1985 on the fortieth anniversary with floating candles down the river in Hiroshima, and with scolding & finger pointing from Walter Cronkite & other libs.
Not hard to see why. The evil racist warmongering nuclear cowboy Ronald Reagan had just been reelected, and the A-bomb observance was just another way of bullyragging him & anticommunism in general.
But the Hiroshima remembrance has since taken on a life of its own, especially in Japan where it is widely believed that World War Two did not really begin until August 6, 1945.
Had there been an invasion, the number of dead Japanese civilians would have been vastly higher than the number who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention the vast numbers of American military men and Japanese military men who would have died.
The only argument against using the bomb would be to show that Japan could have been persuaded to surrender without it, and no one has managed to do that.
The doctrine was not arrived at by interviews.
Face this fact.
If Japan had possessed a Nuclear bomb and the ability to use it. They would have dropped it on California, or New York.
They would not have hesitated one minute.
Harry Truman -—one of history’s greatest presidents.(even if he was a Democrat)
My uncle flew near Nagasaki a day or two after the bombing there. He said he was certain the war was going to be over very soon. He flew in PBYs or PBMs at the time from Korea I believe. He added, he did not care a whit about what happened.
Right now, there is a battle raging at DU over whom to believe, Oliver Stone’s revisionist Hiroshima history or the very words of the Emperor Hirohito’s speech in which he ordered a surrender specifically because of the nuke bombs.
Must now go and decontaminate.
August is Enola Gay Pride Month. Be sure to remind a liberal.
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=56
'Jon Stewart, War Criminals & the True Story of the Atomic Bombs"
Estimates I’ve read on the projected toll of invading mainland Japan:
US KIA’s: 100K+
US casualties: over 1 million.
Japanese KIA’s (civilians included): Over 1 million.
Japanese casualties (civilians included): No estimates, just a mind-bogglingly huge mess.
Now, here’s what most of these red diaper babies never think about, which proves that they are stupid:
Let’s say we didn’t drop the A-bombs. What was our plan? We weren’t just going to sit around on ships out at sea, delivering surrender ultimatums. This whole trope of “give peace a chance” wasn’t going to work with Japan. Their military leadership was fanatical and was ready to take the entire country down the rat hole with them.
No, our plan was roughly this: LeMay had the logistics lined up to start firebombing the entire main island of Japan, starting in September, ‘45. He was going to start firebombing raids, like the ones done on Tokyo, at the north end of the island, and work his way south. The schedule was daunting - about every third day, a new city would be targeted. The bombers with the frag & napalm loads would fly over first, then the “matchstick” bombers with the magnesium flares would fly over and ignite the mess that the cast iron and napalm loads had created down below.
Estimates were that over 1 million Japanese civilians would be killed in these raids. There were over 20 cities to be targeted. Over 200K Japanese died when we immolated Tokyo, so I think the estimate of 1 million civilians killed is rather low. Japanese cities are very densely packed, and when one imagines a firestorm taking over their cities, there’s really few ways out of the situation. It becomes a huge, open air crematorium. Without a super-accurate census of the population before the event, there’s really no way to accurately estimate how many would die.
LeMay had worked very hard on lining up the logistics and plans for this effort, and LeMay was actually seriously pissed when the A-bombs just showed up on his doorstep with the 509th. If the A-bombs worked, all of the logistical effort and expense we had invested in getting ready to burn Japan to the ground was for naught. And, make no mistake, it was a huge logistic effort, and a lot of Marines died to take islands close enough to Japan to allow us to stage the materials, planes (including fighter support), people and munitions close enough to the mainland to accomplish this.
After the mainland cities had been burned to a crisp, their infrastructure bombed to ruins, *then* we would start invading.
If we had not dropped the A-bombs, I seriously doubt that Japan would have recovered to where it has today. The survivors would have been rebuilding for 20+ years longer than they had to.
Stupid people seem to forget that even in July 1945, Japan was killing 10,000 - 15,000 people PER DAY in China, Korea and southeast Asia.
I once had a serious, high-level Chinese scholar, certainly no friend of the Japanese, ask me - “ why did the USA only drop 2 atom bombs? If China had them, we would have not stopped dropping them on Japan.”
I do not doubt that is what the Emporer of Japan believed as well - the Americans would not stop until Japan was turned to glass - because that’s likely what the the likes of Tojo and Matsui would have done if they controlled the weapon.
My father finished his ETO tour in B26’s and volunteered to follow the unit to the PTO where he ended up on Okinawa, flying missions while the Marines were still fighting around the Shuri line. His unit was to be part of the invasion buildup and his last mission was dropping warning leaflets over Japan that something big would happen if they didn’t surrender.
I’ve read around a dozen books written by Marines who were part of the island campaigns and their descriptions of the fanatic behavior of the Japanese and the atrocities they committed that were an indicator of what the invasion would cost in lives.
On Peleliu, of 10,900 Japanese troops, only 19 Japanese POWs were left at the end of the campaign; the rest fought to the death or killed themselves. The last 27 Japanese holdouts on the island didn’t surrender until 1947. Marine and Army casualties on Peleliu totaled 9600 casualties, killed and wounded. The stats on Okinawa and Iwo Jima were even worse.
The bomb saved millions of lives on both sides. The Japanese should still be kissing our asses for saving their nation from total destruction. No apologies should ever be given for dropping the bombs.
Not only was Truman told of the atrocious casualty projections but the Joint Chiefs forcast a ferocious war for the conquest of Japan that would’ve taken into the 1970’s to accomplish.My USMC Dad told me that The choices were thousands of casualties or millions of casualties,there was never any third option.
This is usually THE day to go to Dulles and see the Enola Gay.
There’s always a crowd of both supporters and protesters. The docent led tours, when they stop in front of the Enola Gay, are taken over by Col Scott Willey (USAF ret and one of NASMs leading experts on the plane and the mission. I’ve seen him personally hand protesters their a&&es, very diplomatically and based on fact, when they try to resort to agitprop and sloganeering.
There’s a great article from years back in the Weekly Standard titled “Why Truman Dropped The Bomb”. Worth reading (can’t post the link correctly from my smartphone), it provides all the conclusive evidence needed to demonstrate that before the Nagasaki bomb the Japanese senior leadership were planning on national suicide ...
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