Furthermore I don´t see what´s wrong to indeed condemn the use of the atomic bomb from our sensitive point of view of today? Sure, one could always say “But Hitler and Stalin were worse” or “It was just the sign of the times” and be right about it. However, we have a responsibility to the present and the future and excusing past actions, just because we (well, actually I don´t, but that is beside the point) happen to coincidently share the same home country (which isn´t even true as the USA of today are not the same USA of the 1940s, as I daresay there isn´t only a technological, but also a sociological progress) is a very dangerous path to tread, imho. After all, the repitition of past mistakes can only happen, if we are willing to actually learn from history.
Speaking as a time traveler from the year 10,500, Optihut, I can say with assurance that by my society’s standards, you should be hanged as a blasphemer and a disfigurer of the human soul. Using thinking machines for work and leisure!
We got rid of your ilk during the great Butlerian Jihad. Thank the Great Mother we can see clearly enough to condemn you traitors to the human race.
Tell you what, Doggy You show me where I said anything like “cakewalk”. Take your time. Read reeeeeeeal slow. If your lips get tired, I can wait.
Don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. If a bit of patience might have saved a couple hundred thousand lives, I suggest it would have been worth it.
An entirely plausible outcome, I do believe. Which is, in fact, pretty much what we did, isn’t it? And since thats what we did anyway I fail to see what harm would result from offering it.
You lost me there. Do you mean Potsdam? To me, following the lead of much more gifted readers of history, the lesson of Versaille is not to stomp on a defeated enemies face, unless a revenge scenario is your goal.
The late lamented Coll didn’t get away with this sort of thing. You won’t either. Word to the wise.
Actually elucidator said right away that an invasion was not necessary. Then he said that dropping the bomb to avoid an invasion was nonsense (to spell it out for those who don´t understand why: Because he stated before that the invasion wasn´t necessary in the first place.).
Doghouse, while it is always a nice twist to simply make up stuff when one is lacking real arguments, please don´t insult everyone´s intelligence by making up stuff in a 2 page long thread. We all can read and we all have longer attention spans, thank you very much.
Look…
This may be hard to understand, but there is something called reading in context. He wasn´t doubting that if (and that´s a BIG IF) the Japanese had insisted on fighting on by sitting on their island and suffering, they would have starved. He was doubting the claim that he would be now complaining about starving them to death.
What a lot of people here - including you - fail to see is the other possibility that Japan actually would have surrendered (they tried, but since it wasn´t “unconditional”…).
It´s really amazing that pro-atomic bomb debaters say “Ah, the Japanese would never ever ever surrender! They were so fanatical and kept fighting, even when they had already lost!”, but aren´t in the least surprised that after the a-bomb all that unbreakable will just evaporated. Look at the troop movement of the allies in Germany before their surrender, look at Japanese attempts at a conditional surrender and then reach your own conclusion about a government hell bent on testing their newest toy.
It can be concluded from historical evidence, yes. Of course not, if you just blindly subscribe to the “we (and again I cringe at that ‘we’, as it has nothing to do with present day people) had to drop the bomb!” propaganda.
To postwar sensibilities, yes, but at the time civilians were targets. The point that was being made is that “precision” bombing was impossible with the technology of the time, though the myth still survives somewhat today. In Europe, the US conducted daylight bombing of cities where the declared target had some military value - a factory, a rail yard, etc. That was not where most of the bombs would end up though, and everyone knew it, excepting perhaps the public which was still fed propaganda about the wonders of the Norden bomb sight. In Japan, this paper thin fiction was abandoned and the US switched to low altitude night bombing of Japanese cities with incendiaries, which due to the paper and wood construction of Japanese housing, was even more effective than the bombing of Germany.
The attitude of the US public at the time was far different than it is today, as was that of the soldiers involved. Polls during the war were consistent with 10-13 percent of the US public favoring the extermination of the Japanese people. The collection of gold teeth, bones and skulls of dead Japanese soldiers as trophies was fairly common practice amongst Allied soldiers. I don’t intend this as an indictment of Allied actions, Japanese atrocities during the war are legion and well known.
elucidator: During those six weeks or six months delay, the strategic bombing of Japan wasn’t going to come to a halt, Japanese civilians would still be burning to death or obliterated by high explosives. Even if the US were to quit the conventional bombing, deaths would still have occurred through starvation. Japan’s position was militarily hopeless, and had been for some time. Japan’s aim during the war was not for victory over the US, but to take a string of bases in the Pacific upon which the US would bleed itself until the (in their eyes) decadent American public could stand no more, allowing Japan to continue its war in China. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, however, laid this strategy futile if there was ever truly any hope of it working. From mid-1944, when the Japanese navy was soundly defeated in hopelessly lopsided battles and bases for the bombing of Japan had been taken, the writing was on the wall to all but the blind. Continued resistance was an exercise in protracted suicide, but the Japanese leadership chose to keep at it. I see nothing wrong with being offended with the concept of total war, I am myself, but sorting out the atomic bomb from the rest of it ignoring how brutal the rest of it was. Total war has receded into the background since World War II, but it still exists – if the cold war had gone hot, the US and the USSR would have carried total war out to its logical conclusion: mutual annihilation.
I object to this! I never used thinking machines. And if in the year 10,500 you got rid of distorted national pride clouding your judgement, I´ll face your trial there. But going by your posts here, I fear that my worst suspicions about the present and the future, the year 10,500 in particular, will come true.
Hundreds of soldiers were being killed daily. The Indianapolis was sunk AFTER it delivered the bomb. No one knew where the next attack might come from. Plus, you just don’t give the enemy the chance to catch its breath, regroup, plan new attacks, or just regain their composure and decide to fight on. Total war is about hammering away until one side capitulates.
Your opinions, elucidator, are hopelessly naive, and betray a lack of understanding of what that war was all about. You think the Americans should have stopped and just waited while thousands of POW’s rotted in camps, while Japanese subs patrolled the seas sinking all targets of opportunity, while daily kamikaze attacks were occuring? No serious scholar of that war would agree with you.
But if you want to make a case for waiting… How about Germany? Germany was in far worse shape than Japan. Germany had taken a hell of a beating. It was in full retreat. It was drafting 12 year old boys because of a manpower shortage. But the allies pressed on until that country had unconditionally surrendered. Not just negotiated a cease-fire, or withdrawn into its borders and said uncle. Total, unconditional surrender. Its’ army disbanded, its leaders dead or in prison.
Sam Stone, to believe that an economically crippled Japan (Hint: Island. Resource shortage) could still muster a super effective counter attack makes even less sense than invading some desert country for an alleged fear of a non existant nuclear threat.
As for Germany, the USA had no choice but to press on and accept a surrender there or else the GDR would have been much bigger. I guess in that light I should be grateful that the bomb was dropped there, rather than here. It still doesn´t make it right though
How else are we supposed to interpret this statement: “The Black Knight out of Monty/Holy Grail (“Come back here, I’ll bite yer legs off!”) was a more effective and credible enemy. The Japanese were preparing to resist an invasion with sharpened bamboo, fer Chrissake!”
Sure does sound like you thought–at that particular moment, anyway–that resistence to an American invasion would be ineffectual.
Maybe, maybe not. :rolleyes: And what kind of position would the allies have been in if Truman took the advice of sage advisor elucidator, and it turns out that hundreds of thousands starved and/or burned to death anyway? Just shrug and say “oh well, we meant for the best”?
You do understand that there’s a difference between being magnanimous in victory vs. hesitant in achieving victory?
Bravo, you know enough to parrot other people’s verdicts of Versailles. But the verdict I implied–it’s better to make a clean sweep in victory and make sure that your enemy is never in a position to threaten you again–hardly conflicts with the one you mention. Stomping on a defeated enemy’s face presupposes that his face is still intact enough to be stomped on.
Along with accusations of sock puppetry and discussions of “ignore” lists, I really don’t think threats of banning by a non-Mod have any place here. If a Mod or Admin feels that I’ve erred in pointing out your irrationality and historical revisionism in this subject, I’ll listen to them. But not you, twinkle toes.
nagasaki was the alternate site for the bomb to be dropped , it was one of a select group of citys that was left untouched to gauge the bda of the a-bomb.
You might want to reflect on the fact that even now, after Japan’s total defeat and after a peace clause has been inserted into its constitution for the past half century, its neighbors still live in dread of Japanese militarism. If Japan’s government of the time had been allowed to sustain its existence under the terms of a negotiated surrender, how much of a long-term threat to peace and stability would it have been then? Hell yes, Japan would have been a threat after it had been allowed to catch a breather, if not in six months then certainly within six years or more.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because they were major industrial centers and key to Japan’s warmaking capability. No one knew if Japan would surrender, and the U.S. was months away from having another bomb. If Japan hadn’t surrendered, the U.S. wanted to make sure that its warmaking capability was crippled.
This stuff about using those cities as an experiment has no basis in fact. It’s just conspiracy theory. Of course, I am willing to be proven wrong - please offer some credible cites.
Movie reels? We were in tents in Florennes, Belgium. As I remember it, someone in another squadron about half a mile away shot off a flare and my friend and I went back to our checkers game, but there was a great load lifted off us.
We hadn’t been really active in anything except make-work since a couple of weeks before the war ended in Europe. During the war there was a thing called the “bomb line” which marked the place where our forces could get to under the most optomistic scenario. Bombs weren’t dropped on our side of that line. For the last two weeks of the war, the German collapse in the west was so rapid that no one knew where to draw the line and so air operations came to a complete halt.
Our training in A-26’s were’nt yet organized and things were sort of haphazard. We flew regularly but were mostly just sightseeing and putting in time.
Not a bit and I didn’t really put in all that many combat hours. I got to the ETO late, in early December 1944. Actually, by the time I arrived a medium bomb group was the perfect spot for a lazy guy. You flew maybe two or three times a week and the rest of the time was your own. You could play cards, checkers, read, go to town or whatever suited your fancy.
Well, in spite of everything the odds were on my side by quite a margin. That’s why the GI insurance was so cheap.
Where do you get this notion? After they had two atomic bombs dropped on them and Tokyo had been firebombed into ashes (killing more people than in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki I might add) not to mention that their navy was essentially gone the military attempted a coup to depose the emperor and came close to pulling it off. Certainly there were people in Japan ready to surrender but there was a strong contingent that didn’t want to surrender under any circumstances.
It has already been posted right here in this thread (not to mention a bunch of similar threads) that Truman wrestled with this decision. “Hell bent” is not a word I would apply to the decison.
As a quick cite,The Oxford Companion to World War II:
I still defend that if the atomic bomb program had been a wash, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been burned to the ground in conventional bombing, but they were picked as cities that had not (yet) been firebombed.
In the book War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, the author suggests an interesting reason, aside from those advanced already, that went like this:
The government had spent million of dollars and years developing an atomic bomb. Suppose they don’t drop it and the war ends after a bloody invansion of Japan. How do you think that’s going to look to the average citizen of the times when news of the existance of the bomb becomes news.
“Okay, let me get this straight, Mr. Truman, You spent a lot of taxpayer money to develop a weapon that could have ended the months ago with far fewer American lives lost and you didn’t use it? What the hell were you thinking?”
That and I’ve also gotten the impression from various sources that in 1945, the Atom bomb was not considered to be an “End of the World” weapon it is now, but rather a really big bomb(as far as I know, the radiation effects were not known at the time. Not sure if it would have mattered to Truman). Considering you’re already destorying cities with fleets of firebombing B-29’s, why not use this weapon to make the job easier?
As the American President in 1945, you want to end the war as soon as possible. So, from that mindset, why not?
Those who defend the dropping of the atom bombs (and the fire-bombing of civilian areas) by invoking “total war” and “unconditional surrender” are missing the point. The debate is about the moral legitimacy of those concepts not about whether the bombings would have been justified assuming them.
Any principled analysis of war must start with the idea that it is wrong to deliberately target and kill civilians especially in the hundreds of thousands. The maximum possible care must be taken to fight war without huirting civlians. The US clearly did nothing of the sort; on the contrary it dropped fire-bombs on residential areas with the express purpose of killing civilians. That is a war-crime and it has been admitted as such by the likes of McNamara who was involved in planning the strategic bombing campaign.
As for alternatives to full-scale invasion, the US could easily have reversed Japan’s aggressions in East Asia and destroyed most of Japan’s navy without invading Japan itself. Since Japan was heavily dependent on overseas resources (one of the reasons it started the war in the first place) it was not a plausible long-term threat without its empire and in the face of the vastly greater naval capacity of the US.
As for WW1 and Versailles I think the main lesson was that the US needed to be actively involved in preserving the balance of power in Europe and Asia and that the democracies needed to be united and vigilant in preventing any hostile power from destroying the peace. You didn’t need “unconditional surrender” and the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians to apply this lesson after WW2.
BTW anyone who wants to get a sense of what these bombings meant to actual people should watch the great animated film Grave of the Fireflies. It is not a propoganda film at all but a stark look at the lives of two Japanese children who are orphaned by the fire-bombings.
Strange: I seem to be writing in invisible ink, and almost no one in this thread seems interested in reviewing the historical facts on this issue. For those here who have argued that the US had “no alternative” but to unleash the A-bomb, may I ask how you respond to Eisenhower’s and MacArthur’s assessments to the contrary, which I posted earlier?
xtisme:
There were a number of different casuality estimates floating around at the time. The most well-known is the “1 million” estimate, which no one took seriously, although estimates of up 500, 000 were seriously considered. But most believed even those were well over the top, and I’ve seen estimates as low as 50,000, which I’ve not been able to relocate thus far.
These estimates assume that the US would be invading on its own, and fail to take into account the fact that Russia had also declared war on Japan and opened up a front in Manchuria. But first things first: regarding the belief that Japan was on the verge of collapse. Here are a few citations:
That’s just a small sampling. So, in answer to your query:
It is, in all probability, revisionist history that has led you to believe the opposite. Regarding this:
Well, anybody who believes that the US dropped the bomb “just for fun” is seriously out to lunch. But there are strong arguments that alternatives to dropping it existed and that Truman knew this; naturally, the question then arises, “If not for military necessity, then for what reason was it dropped?”
I don’t have an answer to that question, as I am personally undecided as to whether or not Truman (and many on his staff) believed it to be necessary.
