Another piece of self guilt false logic ideological philosophical bull****.

I think that Sir Arthur Harris said it best, when refering to one of the other Axis powers of the time...

" They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind"

Would Germany or Japan have used it had they had it? I would think so.

Hell, it was war. The bombs were the reason the Japanese came to terms, and it took two of them to do that. The third bomb, if needed, was intended for Tokyo.

As an aside to my previous post the Atomic bombing of Japan saved many Allied and Japanese lives by ending the war and preventing an invasion.

A little historical what if for you all as well. What if Little Boy and Fat Man were not dropped? World War 2 against Japan drags on for many more months, hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides are lost. How many Subsimmers think the othed Allied power, USSR would have sat and watched? I believe we would have been looking at a jointly occuppied Japanese Home Islands in 1946.

Imagine the joys a defeated Northern Japan would have endured under the Soviets.

Imagine the Berlin Wall stretching accross Japan, even a Korea MK2.

Definitely yes.
Just add to this the ingenious ballistic missile program they Germans had.
London got its share of v1 and v2.
A bomb was originally developed with Germany in mind.

Shortly before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US forces made landfall on Okinawa.
They landed 183,000 soldiers against the Japanese garrison of 117,000.
At the end of the fighting, 95,000 Japanese soldiers were dead, 12,513 Allied soldiers were dead, 38,916 US soldiers were wounded, and 33,096 were lost through non-combat causes. Only 7,000-10,000 Japanese soldiers were captured, and between 42,000 and 150,000 civilians were killed during the fighting.

Okinawa measures 1,201km squared, so in terms of fatalities per km squared, that's about 169 (that is using a number of civilian casualties which is in the middle of the 42k to 150k estimate)...and in terms of casualties (that's fatalities and wounded) somewhere in the region of 229 per square kilometer.

So, if one was to scale that up to the size of Japan itself, you're looking at a fatality count of 63,872,536 and a casualty rate of 86,549,176.

Obviously this number is crazy high...so, let's take about, say twenty five percent off, and that still gets you about fifteen million dead.

However, when one looks at the plans for Operation Downfall, the invasion of Japan, you will note that the expected casualties for the Allied forces alone were in the region of half a million, which is why that number of Purple Hearts were manufactured...in fact the US is still using the Purple Heart medals which were made for Operation Downfall in Iraq and Afghanistan, that is the kind of casualty rate we're talking about here.

Furthermore, you think two bombs were bad? Operation Downfall called for seven atomic bombs to be made available to be dropped on defending forces, and for the use of chemical weapons to flush the Japanese out of their hiding places in cave networks.

There would have been no safe place for civilians for the civilians would be the front line, the Volunteer Fighting Corps meant that every single man, woman and child would be given a weapon, even if it was just a knife and told to kill at least one American soldier before dying. The Japanese high command wanted to make the invasion of Japan so bloody that the American forces would be forced to sign an armistice, and they would use every single life on Japanese soil to do that if they could.

From the air kamikazes would have had a devastating effect on cargo and transport ships, the High Command had learnt their lesson from Okinawa and were instructing the new wave of Kamikaze pilots to hit the transports, not the warships. Imagine a boat load of marines being hit by a kamikaze or two, that's going to be a lot of casualties right there.

So, when the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they killed some 246,000 civilians at first (that's using the maximum of the estimate) and let's say another 200,000 from side effects like cancer. So that's about 446,000 civilian fatalities. The invasion of Japan would have caused far...far...far...far...far more than that, I mean it was estimated in the Volunteer fighting corps that there was 28,000,000 men, women and children 'combat ready' by the time Operation Downfall was ready to go, maybe more...so even at a fifty percent fatality rate you're looking at a much much higher death toll than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

So, when Paul Tibbets and Charles Sweeney dropped their payloads, they actually saved lives (Charles Sweeney even more so because he didn't drop Fat Man directly on target). This is perhaps little comfort to the victims of the atomic attacks...however if they had not died through the atomic bombs they would most likely have died during the fighting to take Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So, TLDR? Yes, the bombing was necessary because if Operation Downfall had gone ahead the bloodbath would have been...unbelievable. :nope:

Thank you Feuer Frei! for the very interesting article.
This act of mass murder on the civilian population of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki will forever be a blight on the
history of the U.S. Government. There is a vital fact
that is so often left out when the false claim was made
"It was necessary to end the war" and that is the Soviet
Union's invasion of China. This invasion of China holds
the key when you learn how fast the Red Army defeat the
Armies of Japan in China where Japan had it's vast
majority of armed forces.
But there is another area of this evil act that needs to
be understood. Ant that goes back to who were the one's
who convinced President Roosevelt the need for the atomic
bomb. You will find if you study, that the intent and hope of
those who convinced Roosevelt was that their bomb be used
on Germany.

ZeeWolf

And before we get too carried away with the "It had to be done's":



SOURCE

Seems like every year at this time we have this same discussion. :doh:

I recall reading an article where a former Japanese Army officer was asked what he thought of the idea of a demonstration. Exploding the bomb on some deserted offshore island with a delegation of Imperial Japanese officers and scientists observing to witness the power of the bomb in the hope of inducing surrender. He said given the crazy bushido mentality running military affairs the time, such a demonstration would have been seen as a sign of weakness on the other side. The implication being the Americans were so terrified of a land invasion of Japan that they were hoping to induce Japanese to surrender by coercion. We were already destroying their cities anyway by firebombing. If anything it likely would have steeled the Japanese resolve to resist.

The irony is that despite the Emperor's radio broadcast of August 15 of an Imperial Rescript ending the war--he never used the term surrender-- senior officers overseas initially refused to comply. The Emperor issued a second Rescript on August 17 to bring these commanders to heel--with which they complied reluctantly.

Japan would not surrender after Hiroshima and I believe another conventional bombing took place before Nagasaki and still they would not until the second bomb.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BtDeKWfL1c I think this thread topic, question be more apt should it be put upon the families of the men whom fought at that time!! It is in my view not just, to lay it before me, for my considerations or opinions. :O:

Oh come on ZeeWolf, mass murder by the United States??

What a bunch of hogwash.

Ever hear of the good deeds the Japanese did in China plus scores of other places?

They killed many in Manila, I know some one who was there when they arrived and spent years living under their rule.

As for the first post, it refers to the Korean war as "Truman's Project". It makes it sound like he was painting his house or something.

IIRC the North invaded the South with tanks with no warning, so if it was anyones "project" it was the North Korean's.

I feel no remorse at all in us using the bomb. It is proven that it saved countless lives in the upcoming invasion--both allied and Japanese.

It had to be done. As Torplexed pointed out, the militarists were in control of the decision making and they were not going to surrender. Their attempts at surrender were conditional, and they knew we wouldn't accept them. MAGIC intercept, July 25th, 1945; The Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs (Togo) to the Japanese Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Sato): "The difficult point is the attitude of the enemy, who continues to insist on the formality of unconditional surrender. Should the United States and Great Britain remain insistent on formality, there is no solution to this situation other than for us to hold out until complete collapse because of this one point alone."

All the while they were in the midst of enacting plan Ketsu-Go. 18,000 kamikaze pilots and 13,000 planes were stockpiled along with fuel, ammunition and other supplies. It had to be done.

It must be due to the novelty and efficiency of the nuclear bomb that people object to its use. Conventional weapons are pretty awful too. How many millions died from firebombing? Dresden, Tokyo, Berlin, London? And if one questions the tactic of bombing civilian population centers, then I have to ask, how do you limit war to simply the battlefield, and why should you? Why should soldiers have to bear all the sacrifice and danger, when the society has most of the responsibility?

Indeed. the whole premise of Ketsu-Go (Operation Decisive) was that American morale was brittle, and could be broken by inflicting enormous bloodletting in the initial invasion of Japan. Even if that invasion succeeded, Japanese leaders believed that American politicians would recoil from the vast effusion of blood needed to continue the conquest of Japan. The Japanese also knew where this invasion must take place. Kyushu, as it was the only area of Japan in range of fighter support from Okinawa.

The Japanese assessment of US morale wasn't far from the mark. Many war-weary families in the US weren't anxious to see realtives who had fought and survived the war in Europe transferred to another fight for Japan.