Now that Obama has gone to Hiroshima, "conservative" dogma is now frozen: Dropping the bombs was heroic and noble.
“Here was an enemy who had been trying to surrender for almost a year before the conflict ended.”
How hard is it to surrender?
If they were so ready to surrender, why didn’t they do so after the first bomb?
total BS
We told them to surrender or we would drop the bomb. They didn't we dropped it.
they STILL didn't and we dropped another.
THEN they surrendered.
A person can surrender whenever they wish. No on can prevent you from unconditionally surrendering.
To save US military lives.
'nuff said.
...Dropping the Bomb: Why Did the U.S. Unleash Its Terrible Weapon?...
To some it’s cognitive dissonance. To others it would be an absolute no. To the vast majority, there was no choice.
For myself, it was most likely a necessity. My Dad was in a staging area in the Phippines in the first week of August, 1945 waiting for orders to ship out for the invasion of Japan.
There is a huge difference in a cease fire being portrayed as surrender with military gains intact, and unconditional surrender.
The Japanese were NEVER ready to surrender.
What a pile of tripe.
There were also Germans that wanted to sue for peace, but they were not in command.
Remember studying how the Island hopping Marines found the Japanese defenders would fight to the last man? They were not defending their homeland. Invading the Japanese Islands would have been a bloodbath of US Military. And it took a second bomb to convince them to surrender.
We did not attack Japan first, we should have reduced Japan to a smoldering cinder in the Pacific.
Pacifists re-writing history, as usual.
Iwo Jima.
An attempt to surrender?
Thr Japanese shure weren’t surrendering on the Pacific iles on the way to the homeland.
Dropping the bomb as self defense. Japan beat us to testing a nuke (Jap nuke test Feb 1945) and it would only be a matter of time before Los Angeles was a smoking molten hole.
We had to drop the bomb.
In his 1967 book Utopia: The Perennial Heresy, Professor Thomas Molnar put his finger on a major reason why the bomb was used:
In our times the portentous event is the atomic bomb which creates general insecurity and is credited with effecting a total change in mankind’s destiny since it can no longer be called a “single event” but a permanent state with which we shall have to live from now on. Accordingly, voices are already heard that, living as we do “in the shadow of the bomb,” our traditional moral assumptions will have to be reconsidered. Religious leaders declare that the existence of “the bomb” has so activated our awareness of science that, as Paul Tillich says, “we must forget everything traditional we have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself.” Political leaders, fearful of the final cataclysm of nuclear annihilation, say that men must huddle together under a world government.... [Emphasis added.]
Were the purposes of using atomic weapons much more sinister than what was reported to the public. Did communist / one world government types within the Truman Administration want a horrible weapon unleashed as a pretext to establish a one word government.
Was it a large-scale version of an operation like Fast and Furious?
I read it, but not sure I believe it.
Those people were ready for the war to end and they believed what the government told them about the conduct of the war. I remember my Dad saying that nobody was gloating over the dropping of the bomb. They knew it was a terrible thing but it had to be done or the further amount of American casualties would have been too high to bear. Therefore the American people accepted the necessity of dropping those bombs. My Dad maintained that people shouldn't try to rewrite history. My parents both said the Japanese were cruel during the war and my Mom admitted she had trouble interacting with Japanese in America after the war. I'm just reporting her feelings as a slice of history, I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with it.
The allies demanded total surrender
the japanese “peace feelers” were not surrender at all
no surrender, no peace
in the last days of the war, even after the bomb at hiroshima, hundreds of planes from the Marianas destroyed city after city. The japs would not surrender even in the face of total destruction.
It took Nagasaki to shock the emperor into capitulation and total surrender
This and several other little gems are in the article. Overall it is a liberal aligned screed with these glaring errors:
In the quote above, it ignores the fact that surrender is the simplest thing in the world. Stop fighting. It isn't complicated. Just stop, lay down your arms and raise your hands. Sure a vindictive enemy (like Russia) may kill a bunch of you anyway, but maybe you should not have attacked them in the first place. Wars are to be avoided for a reason.
The author decries that the US did not "define" unconditional surrender. Color me dense but I think the term "unconditional" means without conditions. The Japanese wanted conditions, so it wasn't unconditional, and the American public would not have accepted it.
By the end of the war, the concept of punishment for their egregious hostility had not nearly dissipated. Heck, here we are more than 70 years later still pissed off about it. If I murder a man, the state doesn't let me go if I apologize. They'll punish me anyway. Why should it be different for groups of people?
Why surrender if you are winning? At that point - Japan was winning. Makes no sense at all.
Don’t you realize peace overtures are quite different than surrender?
I’ve read the entire article.
May I comment now, Father?
Jesus, Mary and Joseph.