67 years ago yesterday

[Little-Acorn]

67 years ago yesterday, Aug. 5, 1945 U.S. time, the first atomic bomb ever used in combat was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, on August 8, another was carried over Kokura, Japan. Kokura was found to be obscured by a 70% cloud cover, so the plane was diverted to Nagasaki, where the bomb was dropped. Approx. 200,000 Japanese, and zero Americans, were killed as a result of the two bombings.

Less than 2 weeks later, Japan surrendered, ending WWII. As a result, the planned Allied invasion of the Japanese homeland was called off. The half million American deaths that were expected, plus more than a million Japanese deaths, never happened as a result.

 

[Gipper]

67 years ago yesterday, Aug. 5, 1945 U.S. time, the first atomic bomb ever used in combat was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, on August 8, another was carried over Kokura, Japan. Kokura was found to be obscured by a 70% cloud cover, so the plane was diverted to Nagasaki, where the bomb was dropped. Approx. 200,000 Japanese, and zero Americans, were killed as a result of the two bombings.

Less than 2 weeks later, Japan surrendered, ending WWII. As a result, the planned Allied invasion of the Japanese homeland was called off. The half million American deaths that were expected, plus more than a million Japanese deaths, never happened as a result.

Just posted something on this in another thread. The 500,000 American deaths is complete fiction and a lie I unfortunately believed until recently. The real number was around 40k. The lie was fabricated to convince us that the war criminal Truman was right in murdering 100,000 Japanese women and children in cold blood...really not any different than what the Nazis did in their death camps.

But really, is it right to murder women and children to prevent the deaths of your soldiers? I think not.

Its all right here:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/denson7.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/raico/raico22.html

 

[dogtowner]

Just posted something on this in another thread. The 500,000 American deaths is complete fiction and a lie I unfortunately believed until recently. The real number was around 40k. The lie was fabricated to convince us that the war criminal Truman was right in murdering 100,000 Japanese women and children in cold blood...really not any different than what the Nazis did in their death camps.

But really, is it right to murder women and children to prevent the deaths of your soldiers? I think not.

Its all right here:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/denson7.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/raico/raico22.html

their deaths were avoidable and after Pearl Harbor unconditional surrender was a reasonable demand.

 

[Cruella]

their deaths were avoidable and after Pearl Harbor unconditional surrender was a reasonable demand.

How many theatres were we in at the time? Did we really have the manpower and equipment to fight a multi-front war?

 

[dogtowner]

How many theatres were we in at the time? Did we really have the manpower and equipment to fight a multi-front war?

two and a half.

yes as we were working our way north in the pacific and would be coming to Japan proper soon enough. having to fight on their island would have been very ugly given the mindset of the people.

 

[Gipper]

The Japanese government and military wanted to surrender in late July 1945. They made overtures to the US government several times. They only wanted their emperor to stay on the throne...their only condition....which Truman allowed AFTER he destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why did he refuse this condition in July only to accept it after the bombings?

Nearly all of Truman's senior staff demanded he NOT drop the bombs. Eisenhower was among those who said do not do it. They knew it was wrong to murder women and children of a nation already completely destroyed and defenseless.

It was done to scare the Soviets and prove to the world that the US was the preeminent power in the world. I do not think those reasons are sufficient to murder thousands in cold blood particularly when Japan wanted to surrender.

At the time of the atomic bombings, the war in Europe was over. Germany had surrendered. We were only fighting the Japanese by July '45 and they were essentially defenseless. Their air force and navy were completely destroyed by that time. They could not fight the US in any significant way. They were done. Yet, Truman still dropped those bombs. It is very sad.

 

[Johnny Tremain]

The Japanese government and military wanted to surrender in late July 1945. They made overtures to the US government several times. They only wanted their emperor to stay on the throne...their only condition....which Truman allowed AFTER he destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why did he refuse this condition in July only to accept it after the bombings?

Nearly all of Truman's senior staff demanded he NOT drop the bombs. Eisenhower was among those who said do not do it. They knew it was wrong to murder women and children of a nation already completely destroyed and defenseless.

It was done to scare the Soviets and prove to the world that the US was the preeminent power in the world. I do not think those reasons are sufficient to murder thousands in cold blood particularly when Japan wanted to surrender.

At the time of the atomic bombings, the war in Europe was over. Germany had surrendered. We were only fighting the Japanese by July '45 and they were essentially defenseless. Their air force and navy were completely destroyed by that time. They could not fight the US in any significant way. They were done. Yet, Truman still dropped those bombs. It is very sad.

Revisionist History.
Do better research--if the truth matters to you.
Avoid MoveOn.

 

[Gipper]

Revisionist History.
Do better research--if the truth matters to you.
Avoid MoveOn.

I thought like you, but not any longer. Just spend a few hours researching the bombings. You will find what I have stated is accurate. Even if you know very little about the war, you have to know that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. Japan was ready to surrender and had no fighting capability left by late July. Nearly all in Truman's administration and our high military command disagreed with the bombings.

And MoveOn.org is not a source I would ever use and likely believes the big lie you still do.

 

[Johnny Tremain]

I thought like you, but not any longer. Just spend a few hours researching the bombings. You will find what I have stated is accurate. Even if you know very little about the war, you have to know that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. Japan was ready to surrender and had no fighting capability left by late July. Nearly all in Truman's administration and our high military command disagreed with the bombings.

And MoveOn.org is not a source I would ever use and likely believes the big lie you still do.

On this matter, I know an extraordinary amount about WW2, especially the Russo-German side.
The Japanese would have fought to the death every mile of the home islands--they would have lost--but many more would have died.
I share that opinion with most others in the field on that.
For example--far more died in the Jan. 1945 incediary bombing of Tokyo-Yokohama, Kobe, Kawasaki--than did in Hiroshima.
The atomic attack was deemed worthwhile to save lives and STOP the war--which it did--abruptly. Few dispute this today.

 

[Gipper]

On this matter, I know an extraordinary amount about WW2, especially the Russo-German side.
The Japanese would have fought to the death every mile of the home islands--they would have lost--but many more would have died.
I share that opinion with most others in the field on that.
For example--far more died in the Jan. 1945 incediary bombing of Tokyo-Yokohama, Kobe, Kawasaki--than did in Hiroshima.
The atomic attack was deemed worthwhile to save lives and STOP the war--which it did--abruptly. Few dispute this today.

I can't agree, but I use to hold the same opinion. This from experts is more realistic.

The stark fact is that the Japanese leaders, both military and civilian, including the Emperor, were willing to surrender in May of 1945 if the Emperor could remain in place and not be subjected to a war crimes trial after the war. This fact became known to President Truman as early as May of 1945. The Japanese monarchy was one of the oldest in all of history dating back to 660 B.C. The Japanese religion added the belief that all the Emperors were the direct descendants of the sun goddess, Amaterasu. The reigning Emperor Hirohito was the 124th in the direct line of descent. After the bombs were dropped on August 6 and 9 of 1945, and their surrender soon thereafter, the Japanese were allowed to keep their Emperor on the throne and he was not subjected to any war crimes trial. The Emperor, Hirohito, came on the throne in 1926 and continued in his position until his death in 1989. Since President Truman, in effect, accepted the conditional surrender offered by the Japanese as early as May of 1945, the question is posed, "Why then were the bombs dropped?"http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/denson7.html​

​

Great controversy has always surrounded the bombings. One thing Truman insisted on from the start: The decision to use the bombs, and the responsibility it entailed, was his. Over the years, he gave different, and contradictory, grounds for his decision. Sometimes he implied that he had acted simply out of revenge. To a clergyman who criticized him, Truman responded, testily:
Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.88
Such reasoning will not impress anyone who fails to see how the brutality of the Japanese military could justify deadly retaliation against innocent men, women, and children. Truman doubtless was aware of this, so from time to time he advanced other pretexts. On August 9, 1945, he stated: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."8
This, however, is absurd. Pearl Harbor was a military base. Hiroshima was a city, inhabited by some three hundred thousand people, which contained military elements. In any case, since the harbor was mined and the U.S. Navy and Air Force were in control of the waters around Japan, whatever troops were stationed in Hiroshima had been effectively neutralized.
Thus, the rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency: that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that was needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.93 The ridiculously inflated figure of a half-million for the potential death toll – nearly twice the total of U.S. dead in all theaters in the Second World War – is now routinely repeated in high-school and college textbooks and bandied about by ignorant commentators. Unsurprisingly, the prize for sheer fatuousness on this score goes to President George H.W. Bush, who claimed in 1991 that dropping the bomb "spared millions of American lives."94he bombings were condemned as barbaric and unnecessary by high American military officers, including Eisenhower and MacArthur.96 The view of Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman's own chief of staff, was typical:​

the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. . . . 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 wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.97
By early summer 1945, the Japanese fully realized that they were beaten. Why did they nonetheless fight on? As Anscombe wrote: "It was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of all evil."101
Today, self-styled conservatives slander as "anti-American" anyone who is in the least troubled by Truman's massacre of so many tens of thousands of Japanese innocents from the air. This shows as well as anything the difference between today's "conservatives" and those who once deserved the name.
Leo Szilard was the world-renowned physicist who drafted the original letter to Roosevelt that Einstein signed, instigating the Manhattan Project. In 1960, shortly before his death, Szilard stated another obvious truth:
If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.109
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila. If Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was. http://www.lewrockwell.com/raico/raico22.html

 

[Johnny Tremain]

No one likes nuclear weapons. They are ugly and do ugly things.
But my opinion remains as stated.
And is simply--my opinion--worth about what it costs.
Perhaps we differ on the depth of our convictions.

 

[PLC1]

When you go to war, you do it to destroy the enemy.
The bombs utterly destroyed the enemy and brought an end to the war.

but, the atomic Genie was out of the bottle, and the world has not been the same since. So far, the massive numbers of atomic weapons have not been used in any other wars.

So far.

 

[dogtowner]

mainly its a case of surrender or dont. husdein is a good example.of the folly of halfway terms.

 

[Gipper]

When you go to war, you do it to destroy the enemy.
The bombs utterly destroyed the enemy and brought an end to the war.

but, the atomic Genie was out of the bottle, and the world has not been the same since. So far, the massive numbers of atomic weapons have not been used in any other wars.

So far.

America should not murder women and children in large numbers FOR NO GOOD REASON. How is our bombing of civilian areas in Japan and Germany any different than the atrocities committed by the enemy?

Truman defended his heinous act by claiming the Japs attacked us at Pearl Harbor and killed our prisoners. How absurd. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not military installations. Pearl Harbor was. Killing prisoners of war while wrong, does not compare to killing thousands of defenseless women, children, and old men.

What we need is a policy of isolationism as our great Founders advised. History shows Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Truman, LBJ, Bush (all stinking progressives) wanted war rather than peace. War allows progressives to gain more power, which limits the people's liberty. Allowing stinking progressive politicians to take us to war will only lead to horrific acts, such as the atomic bombings of Japan.

 

[dogtowner]

America should not murder women and children in large numbers FOR NO GOOD REASON. How is our bombing of civilian areas in Japan and Germany any different than the atrocities committed by the enemy?

Truman defended his heinous act by claiming the Japs attacked us at Pearl Harbor and killed our prisoners. How absurd. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not military installations. Pearl Harbor was. Killing prisoners of war while wrong, does not compare to killing thousands of defenseless women, children, and old men.

What we need is a policy of isolationism as our great Founders advised. History shows Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Truman, LBJ, Bush (all stinking progressives) wanted war rather than peace. War allows progressives to gain more power, which limits the people's liberty. Allowing stinking progressive politicians to take us to war will only lead to horrific acts, such as the atomic bombings of Japan.

as pointed out not defenseless. they eere warned.
every city was involved feeding the war effort. blame the japenese for riskkng it all over one guy.