Posted on 05/29/2016 6:29:04 AM PDT by Arthur McGowan
The original plan was to take everything they wanted, and then seek a peace settlement where America and England accepted the Japanese conquests. The military leaders did not think we had the stomach for a long, costly campaign to retake what Japan had conquered. They seriously underestimated American will after Pearl Harbor. What Japan wanted in 1942 was our surrender to Japan’s new empire, something I have no doubt Obama would be willing to accept.
Read “Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947” by D. M. Giancreco (2009). He’s gone over the events leading up to the end of the war. We were going to invade Japan. They knew we were coming and where we were going to land. They were more prepared than we knew. Dropping the bomb saved possibly a million Allied lives and probably 15-20 million Japanese lives. I think we had about a million Purple Hearts made up in advance.
We were going to stop nuking Japanese cities after Nagasaki and save the bombs for tactical use. After we invaded Kyushu and set it up as an invasion base to invade Honshu, we would have been operating on the Kanto Plain. We would have been dropping nukes on troop concentrations and targets around and probably in Tokyo.
LOL
The Japanese Empire was the most open and peaceful organization ever.
One hundred planes, loaded each with 20,000 lb of High Explosives, doing the same amount of damage would not have caused a stir. In fact, the US did hit Japan with those conventional loads just after Nagasaki was blasted and no one weeps or grovels for them.
I am reminded of an old MAD MAGAZINE cartoon from the 1960s in which FDR bows and apologizes to the Emperor of Japan because American ships at Pearl Harbor blew up and damaged the hearing of Japanese pilots flying overhead.
“As the daughter of a veteran of the Pacific Theater of war, who was scheduled for the invasion, I find any revisionism of evil Imperial Japan a disgrace and an embarrassment to my country.”
And you’re right to feel that way. This is a disgraceful and shameful article of the sort popular among those who will never have to fight a war. It lets them stroke their moral superiority to the unlucky GIs who would have been shot to death by the tens of thousands in the conventional invasion.
My own father had just finished fighting in the European theater. His division, along with the other ETO armies, was told that they would next be sent to the Pacific for the coming invasion. There were already 700,000 troops like your father staging there. They weren’t expected to be enough. General officers familiar with Japanese defenses predicted that the first five waves of GIs landing on the beaches would be cut to ribbons. Apparently an acceptable alternative for the morally pure who condemn the bombs.
Further: in “The Rape of Nanjing,” a Chinese general visiting the sites commented, “You Americans do good work.” As the Chinese plan for Japan was to kill all males over 13, sterilize the remainder and use as slaves, while all females would also be sterilized and become comfort women. There would be no living Japanese today.
That's probably closer to the total of the4 Nagaski and Hiroshima bombs combined, IIRC. Not even the notorious John Hersey put the number that high for just Hiroshima.
Well we were smarter then and only willing to accept unconditional surrender. We have since allowed all sorts of shenanigans to end military action, how has that worked out for us?
An endless stream of kamikaze planes,that must have been another attempt to surrender.
Exactly as Admiral Bull Halsey would have preferred: "Before we're done with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell."
Oh for God’s sake!!!
What started WWII in the 1st place??? Don’t be simplistic and say “Pearl Harbor”.
1) Japan was run by a military cult.
2) Japan needed natural resources their islands didn’t have.
3) The Japanese were aggressively waging war against their neighbors and US strategic interests in the Pacific to gain those resources.
With the situation above and the Japanese culture being what it was, unconditional surrender was the only option. WE declared WAR on Japan AFTER their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. GERMANY declared war on US to support their Ally.
If Hitler hadn’t been insane, we could have had a negotiated peace with Germany. Japan, never. They had to be crushed, and rebuilt as a modern western nation. Nothing else would ever have worked.
“Wow. You read the article in ______ minutes!”
Way back in high school my wise art teacher pointed out a useful tip:
You can get the point of a paper fast by reading the first sentence of each paragraph.
I’ve also learned that, thanks to reading enough over decades, it’s pretty easy to get the point of a paper by sampling portions of it, without having to read the entirety - it’s probably pretty close to something already read, studied, and refuted.
So yeah - article was read sufficiently buy several of us in just a few minutes. Doesn’t take long to see it’s yet another ignorant self righteous screed, the author not comprehending the horrors of war and the difficulty in disengaging from it, and the author opting to entertain conspiracy theories.
Did some well connected leaders manipulate the ear to favourable outcomes? Yeah, probably. Could WWII have ended months earlier? Doubt it, war isn’t stopped like turning off a switch - unless you strike with such overwhelming force the opposition faces an instant existential crisis only resolved by instant and total submission.
they started it
WE FINISHED IT
all the peace overtures, willingness to surrender.... blah blah blah
PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH
and
if you got the hammer use it...
NEXT TIME DONT BOMB PEARL HARBOR
and we should deal the same with islamic jihadis...
but wont til the white house traitor leaves...
You are exactly right!
LIBs rewriting history are insufferable. These degenerates need to climb back under their fetid rocks.
Utter bullsh**.
L
Estimates I’ve seen have Hiroshima at 135,000 and Nagasaki at 64,000, but there are numbers all over the map so you could well be right.
I guess the main point is to put them in context of the huge numbers of deaths from conventional fighting and bombing at the very same time. The atomic bombs focused Japan’s attention because of the spooky nature of one weapon doing so much damage in an instant. The death toll itself is something Japan seemed to willing to accept with resignation. Glory for the Emperor.
It looks like President Trump needs to root out all the Russian moles “re-educating” us at the Smithsonian...
The disgusting attempts to rewrite patriotic American history
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.