The Patton Adage....
Posted on 08/08/2023 9:07:26 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The japs attacked us first.
Thank God for the bomb. Or that bastard Emperor would have killed all the Japanese.
Oh gosh The Japanese are upset. Of course had they never sided with Hitler things might have gone differently
Japan was essentially defeated before we dropped the first bomb. As such they refused to surrender though we had burnt their major cites to the ground with conventional bombing.
One must realize the warrior culture of Japan at this time. Though defeated it is more honorable to fight until the death though death is inevitable but honor in battle is of first importance though it be death.
We dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima and they refused to surrender. We dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki and they did surrender but oddly only because of the emperor. The War Lords wanted to fight to the end in a battle they knew was defeat but honorable defeat. The emperor demanded surrender even though he had no real power over the war lords. As he was the emperor it gave the war lords face saving and thus could surrender. If not for this the invasion of Japan would have been of great American blood but rivers of Japanese blood.
Japan started the war and the USA stopped it.
Japan killed millions of people and the United States stopped them from killing more.
They started it. And wonder what people in Nanking and dozens of other places have to say?
And people like talking about the starvation blockaid? That would have taken another year or 18 months. How many of our men, and our POWs would have died in that time? Even the ones that didn’t die, why should they have to spend another year of their lives in that hell just to appease modern revisionists?
They were an utterly vicious, cruel, and dirty enemy. After we nuked em, they have been as nice as people come. In my opinion, we should melted Mecca and Medina after 9/11.
The world would be unimaginably better to this very day. Bush was spineless.
Look up Unit 731 if you can stomach it. There are no prisoner walking around today with tattoos.
Every. Single. Prisoner was murdered. And in ways that woulda turned Mengele’s stomach.
On Chichi Jima, they committed cannibalism against captured downed US airmen.
We are friends now. But Japan deserved every blow it got and complete capitulation.
The bombing of Japanese cities killed as many, if not more Japanese than the bomb. The difference is fire bombing required dozens of bombers and hundreds of sorties. Nuking only required one.
The incendiary bombs were rotated about several Japanese cities in the months leading up to Hiroshima.
The death tolls from these were many, many times what Hiroshima was.
Leaflets and propaganda was aimed at convincing Japan that a big, big weapon was imminent.
They were warned again and again, and people felt bad about using the bomb.
But, after two spectacular nuclear explosions (not deadlier than a night of incendiaries) Japan got the drift.
They surrendered, saving maybe 5-10 million lives and preserving their country to rise again.
The bomb saved a lot of lives.
bkmk
I am sure that Truman also considered the adage (attributed to Gen. Patton) that in war the objective is not to die for your country but to make the enemy die for his country. When considering the estimates of American casualties regarding an ground invasion of the Japanese islands, the Patton adage looms large.
“Four years earlier”
Back in the ‘Better Red Than Dead” days the horrors and immorality of nuclear weapons were screamed from every cafeteria tabletop and slobbered over by every useful idiot on air or in print.
August 6th always brought the blonde bimbos chasing and collaring Colonel Paul Tibbets, commander of the Hiroshima mission. They would shove microphones in his face and demand breathlessly....
“Do you have any regrets on dropping the atom bomb and killing so many people?”
For many years, he would remain silent. Then, toward the end of his life he said in reply......
“Yes. My regret is that I did not have the opportunity to drop it four years earlier.”
Or words to that effect.
The fact is that the atomic bombs saved millions of lives, both American and Japanese.
WWII was so much more complicated than who used kinetic force first. Just like the currrent russia/ukraine conflict.
BL for me though is using the atomic bombs did end the war earlier and saved millions more than it killed, both American and Japanese. An invasion would have killed millions and then that mass famine would kill millions more.
Read the Franks book years ago and recently re-read it. Highly recommended.
Japan set the rule for that war and the rule was no mercy for anyone considered an opponent.
POWs - no mercy as they were tortured, beheaded, enslaved and worked/starved to death.
Battlefield wounded - no mercy as they were bayonetted.
Unarmed corpsman and medics with red crosses on their helmets - no mercy and use the red cross as a target. Kill the medical help and kill those who could have been helped.
Wounded soldiers in hospital beds - no mercy as they were bayonetted.
Western civilian internees - no mercy as they were enslaved and worked/starved to death.
Asian civilians, Chinese, etc. - no mercy as they were slaughtered in the millions.
The US played by Japan’s rule and had no mercy. Too bad for Japan, but they had it coming.
Yup. No one ever seems to remember, or wants to talk about, any of that.
“Four years earlier”
Back in the ‘Better Red Than Dead” days the horrors and immorality of nuclear weapons were screamed from every cafeteria tabletop and slobbered over by every useful idiot on air or in print.
August 6th always brought the blonde bimbos chasing and collaring Colonel Paul Tibbets, commander of the Hiroshima mission. They would shove microphones in his face and demand breathlessly....
“Do you have any regrets on dropping the atom bomb and killing so many people?”
For many years, he would remain silent. Then, toward the end of his life he said in reply......
“Yes. My regret is that I did not have the opportunity to drop it four years earlier.”
Or words to that effect.
General Tibbets passed away in 2007. His wish was to be cremated, and his ashes scattered in the English Channel. His rationale was to avoid a burial and headstone to be vandalized by knuckleheads described above.
Tibbets was a true leader, an officer and a gentleman...and a great American hero.
If you don’t want Hiroshima and don’t want Nagasaki don’t do Pearl Harbor. Pay back comes with interest.
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