Not to mention that list is a tad bloated. For example it asserts that US Marines clashed with nationalist rebels in the 1891 Civil War. Now my knowledge of this conflict is incomplete, but the closest incident I could find was he Itata incident, which was the seizure of a ship illegally carrying arms that left San Diego, but that was hardly a ‘clash’, and was barely an intervention.
A search for these terms finds the same list repeated on different webpages - almost self-propagating without an original source.
The terminology of that list is designed to inflame. It is not even close to being a balanced account.
The USA dropped ine too many nukes.
The USA shouldn’t have dropped any nukes.
The USA should have invaded because the Japanese had barely any military.
The USA should have blockaded Japan, conventionally bombed and starved the island.
The USA would not let Japan surrender on terms favorable to Japan.
The USA is racists so we had to nuke Japan.
And now the USA is an aggressively imperialist country, so we shouldn’t have done anything to Japan.
These arguments contradict each other and historical fact.
It’s even sillier than that. It wasn’t the Itata incident, but the Baltimore Crisis directly after the incident. Sailors from the USS Baltimore were on shore leave in a bar when they were attacked by a mob. Two sailors died and 17 were hurt. So the US military wasn’t even the aggressors in this “clash”, but, dare I say it, the victims.
Yeah, I was wondering if it was based on the Baltimore Incident. That list is looking more and more like a joke. The 1892 entry for Navassa makes it sound like the US invaded Haiti and crushed a popular movement with huge loss of Haitian life. In fact the Navassa is a bare rock island that is claimed by both Haiti and the US, its claim to fame was having a Guano company on it. Some workers killed some supervisors and a gunboat was used to pick up the criminals. Wow. Hitler got nuttin’ on the evil USA.
Also, troops sent to quell devastating riots are listed as if they were in major battles.
While ** gonzomax**'s position is a popular one, it is not supported by any contemporary documentation. There is simply no indication in the record that the Americans dropped the bombs for any other reason than is commonly given, to end the war.
No indication it was to send a signal to the Soviets. No clue that the Japanese were targeted because of their race. No hint that the bombs would not have been used on the Germans. The historical record supports the common judgement that the US used the bombs to end the war.
Lacking proof, gonzomax is simply engaged in revisionism (which is useful) based on nothing (which is not useful).
Truman faced a number of options;
Invade
Blockade
Conventional bombing
Nuclear bombing
Giving up and going home
In truth, he rejected number five and preceded to do all the other courses of action. He followed every course that would lead to ending the war. While the two bombs certainly pushed the Japanese to surrender when they did, the pressure from the other actions was also quite considerable. It took all this stuff to push the Japanese to surrender.
By ending the wad in the fall of '45, rather than say in the spring of '46, we saved tens of thousands of Chinese lives in addition to those lives who would have been lost in an invasion or a more prolonged starvation campaign.
Ending the war early by any means was the right thing to do. The evidence shows this was the only consideration of those who made the decision.
The revisionism is not mine. Truman trotted off the million dead after we dropped the bombs to try and justify it. The American people were not sold that it was a good idea. So they told everybody how many lives were saved to make dropping the bombs more palatable. It won the day and works til today. That does not make it true. There are plenty of good sources that argue it. You are just rejecting any thing that makes you uncomfortable. It was a horrible thing we did. It is not hard to buy what makes you feel better.
Imagine D-Day and the Battle of Normandy, but if the Germans knew exactly when and where the Allies would attack. Now imagine a typhoon devastates the Allied staging grounds just before the operation is launched. Now imagine if it were not against occupied land, but in the enemy homeland. Now imagine every man, woman and child being your mortal enemy due to lies spread by the junta. Now imagine that the defenders would gladly, fanatically, lay down their own lives and the lives of their civilian wards if it meant killing you. Now imagine a mentality adamantly opposed to surrender - every fight is a fight to the death.
This was not a moral alternative. It would have meant death for hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers, as well as Japanese soldiers and civilians. There was no good alternative. We had to use the bomb, or else face the nightmarish scenario of invading the Home Islands.
The Japanese didn’t want surrender, they wanted peace, as evidenced by their somewhat laughable attempts to mediate through the Soviet Union (similar to how Himmler tried to form a separate peace with the western Allies - and nobody paid any attention to him, either). This would have left the aggressive, brutal, inhuman regime intact. We had to force unconditional surrender, and be done with it.
In short, Japan wanted a time out, or half-time, so they could reconstruct and go back to what they were doing before. It was sooooo considerate of the eeevil Imperial USA to not let them do that!
No there aren’t. Your lack of decent production in this thread is proof alone of that.
No, we are rejecting ‘analysis’ made by folks who have a political axe to grind, dislike the US, or want a Japan pity party in favor of analysis made by military sources from all over the world, as well as those who were in a position to judge the situation as a whole. Yes, some US commanders did not like doing it (or at least said so after the fact) but they are not everyone.
I can buy it was the alternative is much more horrible according to all sources and the only retort you can give is so weak it would make a 9/11 truther embarrassed.
I disagree that we should have dropped the bomb. I vehemently hate the dropping of the second one. It was inexcusable and it takes a lot of tap dancing around reality to justify it. To this day only one country has used nuclear weapons and they did it twice.
By definition it was not inexcusable. The valid justification is that all the other alternatives would have resulted in more civilian deaths. It takes a naive ignorance of the Pacific Theatre and Imperial Japan to think otherwise.
…in war, right?
Oh, and you still haven’t answered the question. You can only put off the answer for so long - if the use of the bombs was completely inexcusable, what should we have done instead?
Accepted their upcoming surrender. You do know we were aware they asked the USSR to help us take their surrender, aren’t you. They just wanted to keep the emperor . They were in no position to make demands, and they knew it. I suppose the fact they knew they were whipped and were trying to give up is beyond your ability to understand. The threat that we will have our women and children fight against your soldiers and tanks is not a very big threat. But it was all they had. Now you can convince yourself it was a credible threat. Sure those kids and women would have killed a million soldiers. Damn ,we should have waited until we had more bombs and just fried the whole island.
That is so sick.
The ‘surrender’ wasn’t even close to a resolution. The treaty ending WW1 resolved more than what that alleged ‘surrender’ would have entailed.
But the USSR wasn’t taking them seriously, why should the USA.
Oh HORSESHIT! You’ve had the terms put right here IN THIS THREAD. It was WAY more than just keeping the Emperor.
Yet they kept on making them. In fact their entire defense plan from before Iwo Jima was not so much to win as to cause so much attrition to the allies that they would get favorable terms.
It might be, given that they fought so hard at Okinawa, and at Iwo Jima - I guess understanding how a country that is working hard to cause as many casualties in defense is going to just roll over when we step on their soil.
But yet it shows their desperation as a people. If you think women and children are completely not a threat, have a look at the Russian Partisans some time - if you ever get around to reading anything about the war you complain about.
No. They had a lot more than that. Hundreds of thousands of troops, thousands of aircraft, and much, much more. This has been spelled out for you several times in this thread, why are you ignoring that? Does it make you too uncomfortable?
I think we struck a pure vein of cognitive dissonance folks.
No, what is sick is you trying to pretend that Japan would happily bowl over or give a surrender with meaning in the face of the multitude of evidence presented in this thread and elsewhere.
What upcoming surrender? It’s been cited numerous times that the Japanese were preparing for a fight to the death, to bloody the nose of the Allies so badly that they would have no choice but to make peace on Japanese terms. Speaking of which:
Togo, who was behind the attempted negotiations with the Soviets, had this to say on the Japanese taste for surrender as necessitated by Potsdam;
The request for Soviet mediation was quite the joke - the Soviets were never going to dance to the Japanese tune. I’ve quoted the exchange above, and it bears repeating, where it’s made clear in no uncertain terms that unconditional surrender was furthest from the minds of the Japanese, rather they wanted an unacceptable peace:
The Soviets had absolutely no interest in this nonsense, just as the Western Allies dismissed out of hand German attempts for a separate peace:
The fact that it took two atomic bombs and a Soviet declaration of war for them to consent to surrender speaks volumes. If they were so desperate to surrender, we gave them ample time, opportunity and multiple warnings to do so.
As has been pointed out to you repeatedly with reputable cites, their surrender was little more than a rollback to 1935–withdrawal from conquered territories, no foreign occupation, and they supervise their own disarmament. “Keeping the emperor” means “Keeping the Imperial System”, not just allowing the Emperor to keep wearing his fancy hat. It means the people who started the war remain in power.
That’s not surrender. That’s looking for a do-over.
You’re being wilfully obtuse. You know very well that no one here is arguing that.
Three days to react. Three days. A nuclear bomb goes off in their country and we give them 3 days. One,two,three. We were dropping the Nagasaki bomb .The plans were made. It was just a field experiment.
gonzomax, all your postwar armchair quarterbacking ignores what ACTUALLY happened. They were not deterred by the threat of a nuclear weapon and they were not deterred by the devastation of a nuclear weapon. They were committed to fighting house to house using civilians and suicide squads. This is not conjecture. The civilian population was already conscribed to fight a homeland invasion. They had already suffered tremendous losses from conventional bombing.