Military Buffs I need your help.

[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.

[Narratio]

Isolated military bases?
Nope.
No room for them, no need for them. Pre WWII the military dominated Japanese society. Schools ran training classes for the military skills and conscription was in force. The military was a lifestyle with the noble Samuraii as the pinnacle of archetype good guy.

It was a different world then and Japan was / is a decidedly different culture. The Emporer was worshipped (still is an an offbeat manner) as an incarnation of god. Think of a Medieval European mindset but with modern technology. Xenophobia was (and still is) part of the culture. Japanese are human, everybody else isn't. How else could the "Beheading contest" have occurred in Nanjing?

No, the nukes were the easiest, cheapest way to go in terms of both human life saved and money spent. (And don't think that that had no influence in the matter.) Also remember that, as nobody had ever used these puppies before, there was no stigma to using them. The ingrained social horror we feel at these weapons is based upon the fact that they WERE used and the effects WERE seen.

[deccan]

Wow, never seen anyone post here from Thailand before.

[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.