Posted on 05/10/2016 9:34:31 AM PDT by Zakeet
This month, President Obama will become the first incumbent American president to visit the Japanese city of Hiroshima since the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945.
That bomb - and a second atomic blast on Nagasaki on Aug. 9 - effectively ended World War II; Japan surrendered six days after the Hiroshima bombing. However, the human costs were huge. Estimates of those killed go as high as 150,000, and even for those who survived, it was a hellish, life-altering experience.
[Snip]
In the first Gallup poll from 1945 just after the bombings, a huge 85 percent of Americans approved the bombings. However, figures from 2005 show a significant decline to 57 percent. Meanwhile, another poll conducted by the Detroit Free Press in the United States and Japan in 1991 found that 63 percent of Americans thought that the bombings were justified in a bid to end the war, while just 29 percent of Japanese did.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Actually, the Constitution doesn’t put education anywhere. It doesn’t mention education.
As for education’s being a matter for the states—that assumes that government has a legitimate role in education AT ALL. It does not.
The government does not brkng children into being and it has no legitimate role in their education.
Estimates were we would have suffered casualties of from 200,000 to as high as 1,000,000(MacArthur)
They started the war and we ended it. Amazing that so many Azzholes in this country would be willing to sacrifice that many American lives
The re-write of history continues.....
“They would also think the mass carpet bombing of Germany was wrong as well.”
My mom lived through that, in a small town near Stuttgart. The allies night bombing missed some of their targets and hit her town instead. Fortunately for me she survived.
She blames Hitler to this day for not surrendering earlier. Well actually she’s blames Hitler for the entire mess. No one in her family registered with the Nazi party.
I said many more raids...it was not like we had a strategic stockpile of 100s of them. I know there were more so we are discussing the extent of them, not that there were none.
The thrust of my comments was not the number of bombs, it was why does not anyone question why Hirohito did not give up before he did facing an onslaught they knew was coming. Yes they had a large number of soldiers but a limited availability to move them around. Their airforce was reduced to a large number of planes to be employed as kamikasi planes and their navy was only deployed in the inland sea. So, it appears Hirohito and his war lords decided at first to fight to the last man. To me that means that worked till they were worried they would be reduced to ashes with little loss of live by the US. Hardly does that make us the bad guy here.
But of course Pearl Harbor was a "misunderstanding".
Japanese believed that if they destroyed the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, that would knock America out of the war and give Japan free reign in the Pacific.
They misunderstood.
They thought all Americans then were weak and feckless, just as some are today.
And given our Democrat lead politics of those times, such misunderstandings are, well, somewhat understandable.
Japanese did not understand that sinking our fleet would p*ss us off, big time, and there would be h*ll to pay.
So it is, technically, correct to say Pearl Harbor resulted from a "misunderstanding".
And it saved Japan from being divvied up into two, like Germany and Korea.
Pearl Harbor was about knocking out our carriers, but the carriers weren’t in port on December 7th. Had they been, it would have been a whole different ballgame.
Most “parents” refuse to discipline their children so I am not surprised by this.
Kinda reminds me of a statement I read years ago that Bull Halsey said...went something like “I intend to make Japanese the most common language heard in Hell”.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
YES!!! I did business with -- and then was treated to lunch ("negi" -- eel) by the elderly Chief Technologist of a Japanese materials firm. During lunch, he shared with me that he was one of the very first Japanese Army officers into Hiroshima after the bombing.
I responded that, at that time, I was seven years old.
He said he had to hike several miles back along the railroad line to find a working telegraph -- and, then no one at headquarters would believe such a description of destruction -- from a junior officer.
Before we finished lunch, he confided in me:
"If you folks had not dropped those two bombs -- giving our leaders an excuse to stop fighting -- your son and my grandsons would still be fighting in the hills of Nippon."That was in 1979.
When I was in Japan with the USAF, (1961-64) everywhere I explored on my motorcycle in the back country, I found hills riddled with caves and fighting positions.
I believed Takagi Sensei....
~~~~~~~~~~~
Only a liberal imbecile like 0b0z0 would apololgize for saving millions of lives
I don’t follow the threads of a screw to arrive at a conclusion. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Was then. Is now.
Forgot the LOL!
Yup! Shoulda listened to Patton.
Has Seattle torn down their statue of Lenin?
“These guys were not going to surrender without a massive shock”
That’s very true, much more than modern Americans realize.
The Japanese people were resigned to losing 1,000,000 dead in the coming invasion of Japan. They knew that they would lose, but surrendering without this sacrifice would make them ‘lose face’ as a nation, and this was of an importance that we cannot conceive of in the West.
The atomic bombs hit like a force of nature. A typhoon, an earthquake, a volcano. It gave the people of Japan a chance to surrender without losing face- you do not lose face by acquiescing to nature- and surrender is what they did. This saved them a million dead, and saved us a similarly huge number. Many of us wouldn’t be here if our fathers had had to invade Japan.
As terrible as the bombs were they brought the war to an immediate end.
No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
George S. Patton
FUBO!
FU!
Depends...
On December 7, 1941 the US had a total of seven fleet carriers and one escort carrier, of which two (Enterprise & Lexington) were stationed at Pearl Harbor.
On December 7, Enterprise was just returning from Wake Island and Lexington had just arrived near Midway.
Had one or both been sitting ducks in port and destroyed, the US still had Saratoga in San Diego, plus Yorktown, Hornet, Wasp, Ranger & Long Island in the Atlantic.
Of those, Lexington, Yorktown, Wasp and Hornet were eventually sunk in the Pacific.
The US already had several carriers in production, but the next ones available were Essex & Yorktown (CV-10) in early 1943.
So the big question is: had Enterprise and/or Lexington been lost at Pearl Harbor, what US carriers could have been available for the Battles of Coral Sea and Midway (May-June 1942)?
Hard to say, but here's something to keep in mind: after Coral Sea, where Yorktown was severely damaged, emergency repairs at Pearl Harbor quickly got her back into the fight in time for Midway.
So it's realistic to think that had either or both US carriers "sank" in shallow Pearl Harbor, they might well have been repaired and ready for battle six months later at Coral Sea.
Bottom line: you're possibly right about the war's early years, but by August 1945 the US had produced over 100 carriers of all sizes, and the war's outcome would not have changed.
They wouldn’t have believed it if there was a pre-warning.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.