Posted on 06/03/2013 9:46:31 PM PDT by TexGrill
I hope this won't lead to a Mothra resurgence.
Victim counts are subjective, depending on who or what side tells the story. Official U.S. counts are about 8,000 Christians died immediately from the blast, from a neighborhood of 12,000 Christians. One percent of Japan’s population died there, but ten percent of Japan’s Christians. Nagasaki and it’s Urakami district are forgotten in comparison to Hiroshima. Nagasaki was called the San Francisco of the Orient. Perhaps only 200 soldiers stationed there, largely civilian. From what I’ve read, Nagasaki was targetted to send a message to the Soviets, of what the U.S. was capable of. Sort of the first strike of the Cold War.
That's pretty much the standard non-Western way of war. They don't declare war all that much. The Chinese intervention in Korea was a massive sneak attack, but no one's ever called them on it. We lost thousands of GI's that day.
And destroying the enemy's stuff is also pretty standard issue military strategy. We killed more people via strategic bombing in Germany than in Japan, and burned their cities to the ground with napalm. A lot of this stuff is meant to cow the populace in order to minimize the resistance to their rule once they win. Killing millions of Japanese and German civilians via aerial bombing certainly helped secure the peace once we defeated their conventional forces. The underlying threat was that we would pull back in the case of rebellion and burn their cities to the ground again. Between the chevauchee during the Hundred Years' War and the depredations of the Thirty Years' War, I think it's hard to say that the Japanese have any monopoly on medieval military practices. The Chinese themselves haven't exactly been angels. In the 18th and 19th centuries, they exterminated the Dzungars, massacred tens of thousands of Taiping rebels after they surrendered in Nanking and did another post-surrender massacre of an estimate 70,000 surrendered rebels in Yunnan. Bottom line is that nobody has clean hands.
, Nagasaki was targetted to send a message to the Soviets, of what the U.S. was capable of.
Nice. The Soviets wanted payback for the Japanese defeat of Russia decades earlier. Americans wanted to block the Soviets from a grab in Japan.
Perhaps our dads knew each other. My dad was also responsible for overseeing a large neighborhhod in Tokyo as part of the occupation forces. He had personal commendations from Gen. MacArthur. My dad passed away while I was a teen, so I didn't get a chance to ask him much about 1945 and what happened. I do have pictures of him having a limousine and a large fancy home in Tokyo after the war, presumably taken away from a Japanese official. He enjoyed that for a few years, as he was a poor kid from a Philly ghetto.
Yes, they probably knew each other. My dad died in 1974 when I was 23 and he was a young 57 (born 1918).
Too bad we can’t ask them a lot of questions.
blattt, wrong! 1941 was the year of the infamous Japanese sneak raid on Pearl Harbor.
“Very few Asian countries are thrilled about this idea. When I lived in South Korea, the South Koreans hated Japan more than North Korea.”
Then South Korea should have done more to take care of the North Korea ‘problem’ than they did. The first step is NOT building factories in that country.
The west has a sense of ROE that the east does not have.
During WW2 the US threw that book out as American flyers strafed lifeboats and Marines torched spider holes.
we learn fast, there are no rules in war.
maybe one day we will apply that to the WOT (terrorist)
else we lose.........
Japan has a long term demographic problem, and Koreans are going to the beneficiaries of declining birth rates as the country continues to have too many elderly and not enough Japanese babies. There is a lesson here for white Americans toponder.
Late at night keystroke error....
Wasn't Nagasaki a secondary target?
This is not true. Nagasaki was hit because the Japanese high command refused to surrender. They kept the emperor from surrendering until we hit Nagasaki. They wanted to keep fighting and make the Allies invade Japan. After Nagasaki they caved. Douglas MacArthur was who kept the Russians out of Japan. He refused to let them carve up Japan the way they did in Germany and other EU countries after the war.
FDR and Churchill caved and let the Russians not only have part of Germany but they got to keep Poland and other countries under the Soviet Union even though those countries were sovereign nations before the war. FDR, the biggest communist ever elected to President until Bozo came along.
Douglas MacArthur was who kept the Russians out of Japan. He refused to let them carve up Japan the way they did in Germany and other EU countries after the war.
That’s what I said.
I know all of that. Thank you.
You can say it is not true, but that doesn't make it so. The truth is unclear. Truman felt hitting one city (Hiroshima) was enough. One U.S. position was considering forcing the Japanese high command to surrender by warning them we would not stop the Soviets from invading, and allowing the Soviets to do so. The Japanese knew the Soviets would be brutal. Another U.S. position (our military command) was that we block the Soviets by a second nuclear strike to end the war. Truman didn't want the second nuke dropped. Unknown to him, the second bomb was pre-authorized for a drop as soon as it was ready, without having been tested. There were many (including Truman) who felt the Japanese would have surrendered just at the threat of unleashing the Soviets on them. Our military wanted the second bomb dropped to both force Japanese surrender and to keep the Soviets out of Japan.
So it's not just the Japanese Emperor not having control of the Japanese military, but our civilian leadership (White House) was straining to control our military leaders. Perhaps this helped lead to Truman firing MacArthur in 1951. (I feel MacArthur made the right choices, not Truman.)
Yes, it was on a list as a secondary target. But once go-ahead was given to drop Fat Man, and the primary target was obscured, the decision to drop on Nagasaki was automatic. They were ordered to have a visual drop to proceed. Many feel there was no need to drop a second nuke, and there continues to be much controversy about it. The Japanese were going down in defeat, and only mere days had elapsed since the first atomic drop. We would have been better off seeking a true military target, rather than the heart of Japan's Christian community in a civilian city.
Ain't that the truth! You know your history very well. The U.S.A. is a very young country, and many only look at the last hundred years of hostilities. Hostilities, and interim periods of peace, have gone on in Asian countries for thousands of years. History would be very different if the Chinese and Mongols had conquered Japan in the late 1200's.
Mongols with their subjugated Korean and Chinese armies invaded Japan in 1274 and 1281. They pierced the hands of Japanese captive women and hung them on the side of their boats to intimidate the Japanese. 140,000 Mongols, Koreans and Chinese in 4400 boats attacked Japan, using explosive shells and grenades during a time when Europe was medieval. Japanese barely survived, and got better protecting their nation from attacks. Who knows what the future holds?
The Japs have small ones. Inferiority complex.
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