Military Buffs I need your help.

[Atrocities]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
yeah? then where did 'revisionist history' come from?

and what does your comment have to do with anything anyway?

It is easy to look back into the past and say now what we should have done. Hense hindsight is always 20/20

Originally posted by rextorres:
That the bomb ended the war is a myth that we Americans like to tell ourselves. The US was already killing 100,000s of civilians every night from fire bombings in the capital cities so please don't give me any altruistic crap about saving innocent civilian lives.

The Japanese were actually ready to surrender - they just wanted a guarantee that Hirohito would not be tried as a war criminal. The US would not agree to this. The US, however, agreed to this condition AFTER the bomb was dropped mainly because we didn't want the Russians to know that we were out of them.

We simply dropped the bomb out of revenge as Atrocities inadvertantly and explicitly highlights AND probably more importantly to show the Russians that we were willling to use them.

RexTorres, that has got to be the most conspiritorial revisionistic comment that I have ever read. Seriously I am ROTFLMAO. Thanks for the humor man.

Narratio - Well spoken. Thank you.

[Gryphin]

I can't take a stand on this one. I'm a little biased. My father was being trained to place transponders on the beaches of Japan as part of the pre invasion. These transponders would be used to help the battleships targeting.
Survial rate of the pre invasion forses was not expected to be very high.
What I mean is I would not be here to post this if ....

[ December 11, 2003, 11:25: Message edited by: Gryphin ]

[Erax]

The two A-bomb attacks... you cannot really understand them unless you get into the mindset of the times. I can provide some related facts which you will weigh and judge to reach your conclusion, as I have reached mine.

First, the two bombs that were dropped on Japan were not the modern megalopolis-busting nukes. I believe they were in the 40-80 kiloton range (too lazy to do a web search right now). This is actually less than the destructive power that was being delivered to German cities (via conventional bombs) on a routine basis just a few months before... and the loss of life from the initial bLasts may also have been less than in some conventional attacks over Germany.

Second, no one who lived in those times was acting rationally any more. After six years of continous fighting (eight, in the case of Japan) the level of hatred for 'the enemy' was... hard to describe, except by example. I have a friend whose mother was a child in Japan during the war. One day, she was standing alone in a field, got shot at by a passing American plane, ran for cover and survived. What made this fighter pilot want to kill an six-year-old girl ?

Third, no one knew about fallout and the aftereffects of the bLast. Some people may have suspected them, but no one knew exactly what was going to happen.

Fourth, and perhaps most important, Japanese behavior was completely alien to Americans and on a certain level it terrified them. During the island hopping campaign - Tarawa, Iwo Jima and so on - the Japanese military on those remote bases had fought to the Last man, and the civilians (yes, the civilians) had committed suicide rather than face capture. Invading mainland Japan was a nightmare for the US military, because they did not know what to expect, and therefore expected the very worst.

Which leads to my conclusion... yes, the A-bombs may have been a bad decision judged by today's standards, but at the time they seemed like a reasonable one. We cannot judge the past by today's standards, instead we should be glad that those standards have evolved.

[Loser]

Erax you are officially my favorite Brazilian.

Thanks for that full and well-written post on the matter.

Narf, you are a walking, breathing red herring. You make things interesting. Thank you.

[oleg]

The use of A-bomb was totally unjustified.
Here are the thoughts of the people who new much more about the true state of WWII at that moment than anybody else:
__________________________________________________

~~~DWIGHT EISENHOWER
"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."

- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380

In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:

"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63

__________________________________________________

~~~ADMIRAL WILLIAM D. LEAHY
(Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman)
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

- William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441.

[minipol]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
aside from the invasion arguement, i hadn't heard most of that...but only the arguement that less lives, and less civilian lives would be lost, is important to me. i'm not suggesting that military lives are less important than military lives, but there's no children in the military. in addition, i have to wonder if the bombs had to be dropped on a city. weren't there any isolated military bases?

Well, if they wouldn't have dropped the bomb, IMO more children would have suffered. An invasion is preceded by areal bombardments (dumb bombs), shore bombardements, city being shot it ruins and eventually lead to big populations seeking refuge. I think this would have affected more children than what happened with the bombs.
Off course this would have all depended on how long the Japanese would have defended their country before they would have surrendered. If they ever would surrender...
And being the proud people that they are, i think it could have been a LOOOOONG war.

Edit: i just saw that Erax also referred to the German Cities bombardements. People shouldn't really forget those.
About the aerial bombings taking more toll than the A-bombs in the long run:
Quote from http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A1138385:
"...With the city's population swollen with refugees from the east, the death toll from fire and suffocation is unknown, but probably lies between 40,000 and 100,000. ... "
And that's just 1 city: Dresden. Not to mention people will have died later because of sustained wounds that where not properly looked after, hunger, drinking contaminated water of bodies floating in it and so on.

[ December 11, 2003, 15:40: Message edited by: minipol ]

[Puke]

Yeah, there really is no history, except as written by the victors. Some stories about the founding of America are downright comical, and we are still re-learing what the world was like just a few hundred years ago. odds are, we will never get it right.

alot of what we know is propaganda, not just revisionist propaganda, but propaganda from the times that has been adopted and believed. The firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden were brutally destructive, far beyond the nuclear devices we used in the war. Just as much contraversy surrounds those:

Dresden was esentially a civilian target, with some railroads that were used by the military. but every city had at least some reason to make it a target. the reason (in my opinion) that Dresden was targeted, was that it had no military importance, it was out of the way - far from our line of advance. we would have gone far far around it, and the city would never have been important in the war. By devoting massive ammounts of resources to destroying it, we were sending a message. that message was "look, we have all these resources to waste on a target that has no importance whatsoever. why dont you give up?"

and so we dropped blockbuster bombs on it to crack open all the buildings. then we waited for people to come out and inspect the damage, and bombed it again when everyone was outside. then we firebombed it, once it was cracked open and the flamable materials on the interior of buildings were exposed - and the place got hot enough to melt STONE. the next morning, we sent in dive bombers to shoot anyone walking through the streets, that might have survived.

Needless to say, Germany didnt take it well, and fought on until we reached Berlin. Tokyo was much the same, but their buildings were made of wood rather than stone. Now you can hear all sorts of arguements about why the firebombings were performed or why it might have been a crime, and it can get about as impassioned as with the nukes.

but the point (which i have strayed far from) is that even though we have this nicely composed history fed to us, there are not necessarily conspiricays and coverups everywhere. most conspiracy theories stem from the fact that you are looking for a rational explination for why people have done something stupid or unexplainable.

people, yes governments, are largely big, dumb, and uncoordinated. Some people probably thought we needed to drop the A-bombs - and perhaps we did. maybe it was a calculated show of force to the Russians. maybe it just seemed like a good idea at the time. maybe certain decision makers didnt think the Japanese were really going to surrender. nobody will know - but it probably isnt a plot, and theres about f*ck-all to be done about it now.

the only thing you can do, is assemble your own evidence, consider the sources, and form your own oppinion. relying on someone elses Version of history is never going to get you anywhere, becase its become such a subjective thing.

on a side note, i must applaud the rationality of this discussion, and how calm everyone has been. kudos to everyone providing historical sources and references and examples, and helping others to form their own opinions with information from multiple sources.