Well, the key thing about an experiment is demonstrating repeatability…
Completely different kind of bomb. Needed to see if it worked.
They didn’t surrender. Next question.
And I don’t think many people think Hiroshima was a good idea (well, maybe the people of Nanjing, or the comfort women, or the families of those slaughtered on the Burma railroad, for example… maybe a few more than I thought). Just that it was the least bad idea available at the time.
Disclosure here: my father also was tagged to be part of the invasion of Japan, so he never had a moment’s doubt that the bombing was the right thing to do.
I agree with the posters who think the Japanese were not close to surrendering – or at least under any terms other than keeping the wartime government intact.
First, let’s remember that Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945 and Berlin was captured by the Soviets on May 2. Yet the Germans didn’t surrender until May 7-8 – only after Eisenhower warned Jodl and Donitz that if they didn’t surrender immediately, Eisenhower would close off the western frontier and let the Soviets capture the remaining German units.
So why would anyone expect the Japanese to give up before the home islands had even been invaded?
Secondly, I don’t believe it was the bombs alone that caused the Japanese to surrender: it was a combination of the bombing and the Soviets entering the war against Japan. IMHO, either one alone wouldn’t have been enough to force a surrender. Remember, there were 400 B-29s bombing Tokyo as late as August 14 and there was STILL an attempt at a coup to keep the Emeperor from ordering surrender. The Japanese forces in Southeast Asia didn’t surrender until September 12.
The bombs were the least bad option available.
The bombs were a terrible option. We killed men .women, children, dogs .cats ,rats .insects.worms and every other living thing. Then we were so proud of what we did that we sat on the pictures for 50 years.
Oh come now gonzo, I recall seeing lots of pics of Hiroshima back in the 60’s and early 70’s.
Sure some new shots have appeared in recent years:
http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=7517
But that hardly justifies your claim that we “hid the pictures.”
Please try to get a grip here, gonzo.
I was born in the 1970s and I remember seeing pictures of the aftermath, including pictures of deformed babies both alive and still born, as a child on PBS and in books. Hiroshima mon amour was released in the United States and received an Oscar nomination in 1961 and that movie contained pictures of survivors. Of course, the stories and pictures of the Hiroshima maidens was a major story in the US at the time, I believe around 1955.
So yeah, we covered up the pictures of the atomic bombs for 50 years…
Many more of all of those things would have died during an invasion. And, whether or not there were pictures, John Hersey’s **Hiroshima[/'b] made the devastation very clear. People thought about atomic war all the time in the fifties, when I was growing up, and I agree that the chance of an atomic war would have been much greater without the real example of what the bomb could do.
I’m willing to argue about Nagasaki, but Hiroshima was absolutely needed. Full disclosure: my father was on occupation duty in Southern Germany at the time, but his division was also on the list to go to Japan for an invasion.
http://www.fogonazos.es/2007/02/hiroshima-pictures-they-didnt-want-us_05.html I don’t need to get a grip.
Official U.S. history of atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is more fiction than fact - NaturalNews.com The story was carefully crafted by the politicians and the military. They were no more honorable when dealing with the people then. Hiroshima was populated by women , children and old men. It was just a big lab.
No, they didn’t know it. They’d suffered far worse casualties in conventional bombing raids prior to Hiroshima, and didn’t think they were whipped. They didn’t think they were whipped after Hiroshima–that’s why they bombed Nagasaki. Even after that second demonstration, enough of the military stillthought they weren’t whipped to launch a coup attempt that nearly succeeded.
American casualties in a land invasion were projected at half a million at least. Japanese were starving to death at a rate that, under full blockade, would have been 100,000 a month. How much higher than the death toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined should the allies have gone in order to avoid dropping the bombs?
The Great Hiroshima Cover-Up By Greg Mitchell Now here is the rest of the story.
The war was over. The Japanese soldiers were not there. We blew up women ,children and kids. There was no need for an invasion but if we did the soldiers were gone. We faced them in islands hopping .
Pictures of this sort were easily available back in the 60’s.
Perhaps this particular picture wasn’t, but claiming there was some sort of plan to cover up images of the effects of vaporizing a city are sheer bullshit.
Those of us who lived through the 60’s saw the shattered buildings, the eerie shadows on walls, the massively scarred survivors.
Heck, I took a class from a guy who was doing genetic studies on the victims back in the 70’s:
MORTALITY IN THE CHILDREN OF ATOMIC BOMB SURVIVORS AND CONTROLS Manuscript received July 15, 1973
You think those pix you linked to are some sort of new horror?
They’re not.
They’re a horror we lived with.
Claiming we didn’t know is disrespectful of an entire postwar generation.
It’s also untrue.
This thing has been beaten to death.
Yes, it was the right thing to do. The Japanese military didn’t give a damn about how many civilians would die-they were preparing the Japanese people to fight the Americans with bamboo spears and knives. The fact that upwards of 2-3 million civilians would die (in the invasion of Japan) bothered them not one bit.
In fact, the Japanese Navy had sent their finest battleship (the Yamato) on a one-way suicide mission, which would end with the deaths of the entire crew-the military leaders didn’t care.
We were faced with fanatics who would willingly condemn the Japanese people to death. Dropping the atomic bombs finally convinced them to quit.
The bombs saved millions of Japanese lives.
If the information was completely hidden from the US public, can you explain John Hersey’s Hiroshima? The original version appeared alone in the New Yorker was published a year after the bombing. Radio stations read the full text of the magazine at the time. It was a Book-of-the-Month club book, when people actually read the books. The results of the bombings were not as heavily censored as you are claiming that they were.
Good grief.
War is a nasty, brutish business. It is horrible beyond anything most of us can truly comprehend without having witnessed it up close.
You can find pictures of the horrors of war from nearly any conflict you care to name. People get blown up, burned, stabbed, shot, lose limbs and eyes…the list is long and scary. Happens in all wars. Happens without nuclear bombs. The pictures of the aftermath of Hiroshima are not especially worse than those from other battles (frankly in many cases you could not probably tell which was a nuke and which wasn’t).
I actually started compiling some pics to prove the point but it is disturbing. A little bit of work with Google on war victims in various wars will net you plenty to make you ill and none have nukes involved.
As for kids and women and dogs what do you think the bombings of Tokyo mostly got? Or London? Or Berlin? Or Stalingrad?
Funny, none of those pictures look shocking or new compared to those I’ve seen in books published long, long before 50 years later in 1995. Oh wait, that’s because you’re cite doesn’t say anything at all about 50 years. It actually only says
So some of these particular photos were originally classified at some point but were later published (which describes most photos taken during the war), but the real uniqueness of this collection is that it’s unusual to see them all together. But they might have, so its not really unique. It’s just not usual.
Your
Aside from your statements being entirely wrong, none of them are to be found anywhere in this cite.
Absolutely categorically wrong. This is what the Allies would have faced in just Operation Olympic, the first part of Downfall (the planned invasion of Japan):
116 Area Army
General Reserve
216 Division
107 Independent Mixed Brigade
118 Independent Mixed Brigade
122 Independent Mixed Brigade (Located in Nagasaki incidentially)
126 Independent Mixed Brigade
56 Army - Northern Kyushu
57 Division
145 Division
312 Division
351 Division
124 Independent Mixed Brigade
4 Tank Brigade
46 Tank Regiment
57 Army - Southern Kyushu
25 Division
86 Division
154 Division
156 Division
212 Division
98 Independent Mixed Brigade
109 Independent Mixed Brigade
364 Independent Regiment
5 Tank Brigade
6 Tank Brigade
3 independent battalions
40 Army - Satsuma Peninsula
77 Division
146 Division
206 Division
303 Division
125 Independent Mixed Brigade
37 Tank Regiment
Over 600,000 soldiers. And this in just on Kyushu. There were still something in the neighborhood of 2 million soldiers in Japan. The soldiers were certainly not “gone.”
Not only was the military taught to fight to the death (literally) civilians were told to kill themselves rather than surrender.
This was a society that used kami-kazi’s to attack ships and had intended to use the same technique against tanks in a homeland invasion.
I have to disagree with you that Britain was ever close to collapse from bombing. The effect that bombing was predicted to have on civilians, particuarly regarding morale, had been grossly overestimated in some quarters before WW2. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey found that the actual effects of bombing on civilian morale was not that great, and what effect it did have on morale didn’t translate into lowered productivity or active opposition to the war. I doubt that similar bombing done today would have any different effect; there is nothing that civilians can do about the bombing and you can’t surrender to a bomb. Bombing has never broken the morale of an enemy whose morale wasn’t already broken or on the very verge of it. This hasn’t stopped nations from trying, the escalating bombing of North Vietnam from 65-68 was intended to break their morale but was no more successful.
It was more popular than you might think. Polls during the war found that 10 to 13 percent of the US public favored annihilation or extermination of the Japanese as a people. A poll in December 1945 found 22.7 percent of the respondents wished the US had had the opportunity to use many more atomic bombs before Japan had a chance to surrender. Cited from here.