Posted on 08/06/2009 6:01:03 AM PDT by libstripper
“while 38% disapproved”
Easy to say now.
Definitely was a game changer. We’d been fighting them long enough. The bomb closed the deal. Death is death. I don’t see how conventional bombs, artillary, or bullets are any different. War is hell. The object is to win.
A good number of those protesting the bomb being dropped probably wouldn’t be alive today because their grandparent would have been killed in the invasion of the Japanese home islands.
Okinawa. That's all the basis you need to know that the land invasion of the Japanese mainland would have killed millions -- mostly Japanese.
We did the Japanese an enormous favor by nuking them.
The cities we bombed were also major industrial sites for the Japanese military.
Somehow, that part of the story is left out of the picture and the anti-Americans paint the picture of America attacking random towns where people were living and working happily.
They were building the machines that were killing Americans and our allies.
Sad as it was, it happened at a time when we knew how to win wars and had the will to do so. It has not been that way since.
100% correct. BTTT.
Yup.
AMEN ... well put
Grandchildren, who likely never would have been born, but for Hiroshima.
It's easy to play monday morning quarterback when you are a soft, spoiled 19-yr-old on a college campus with your head full of anti-American propaganda.
The difference is/was that launching an invasion on the Japanese home islands would have cost an estimated 500,000 American and allied lives. Dropping the bombs cost us ZERO American and allied lives.
The Japanese were warned 3 days in advance so they could evacuate the cities being targeted. They were warned of the destruction to come and chose to ignore that warning. They started the war and we ended it. I have absolutely zero problem with us using the bomb.
The firebombing of Tokyo by LeMay would kill almost as many people as the Hiroshima bomb. War is hell and whether burned by an A-Bomb or indendiary induced flames the death is horrible.
If your mother and father had never met, would you have been your mother's child or your father's child?
“The Japanese were warned 3 days in advance so they could evacuate the cities being targeted.”
Moreover, by firebombing 67 cities earlier, we’d already killed twice as many Japanese as were killed in the A-bomb attacks, yet they STILL hadn’t surrendered. We were prepared, if need be, to keep delivering A-bombs, roughly 3 a month through October, if need be, until the Japanese came to their senses. Fortunately it only took 2 bombs, but it’s pretty clear that in choosing this option, the US minimized the destruction of life on BOTH sides, not just among Allied combatants.
The USSR entered the war on August 9. What we’ll never know is whether the Japanese might have acceded to the Potsdam conditions for surrender prior to August 6 had the Soviets instead declared war on August 1, for example.
I am reading a travel book in preparation for a trip to Japan.
The book only mentions Japan’s ‘entry’ into WWII.
After a passage that tells of bombing raids on Fukagawa: “When asked how they spent the return flights after raining death and unimaginable grief on tens of thousands of unprotected Japanese civilians, the American crews routinely described listening to jazz on the radio or handing around pornographic photographs as diversions.”
Not sure what this is supposed to tell me about Fukagawa.
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