Hiroshima

[HunterICX]

Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen

Gah! Zombie thread! Braaaains. Braaaaains!

Seriously, what page did you have to go to in order to dig this one out?

And believe me I was stupid enough to do a quik look

this thread was somewhere between GT page: 126 - 127
:rotfl:

HunterICX

[August]

Holy thread necro Batman!

[AVGWarhawk]

Beautiful rant on the A bomb but I disagree whole heartedly. Just my thoughts as I look upon my uncles headstone who fought and died in WW2. Ripe old age of 21. Now that does not seem right either. We move on.

[Happy Times]

Many of the allied conventional bombings in Europe and Japan killed more civilians than those two. I consider them war crimes just like many things the Soviets did.
But winners write history and the allied countries will never officially admit comitting crimes.
Germany is still paying reparations, so even money is an issue.

[Dowly]

Originally Posted by Happy Times

Many of the allied conventional bombings in Europe and Japan killed more civilians than those two. I consider them war crimes just like many things the Soviets did.
But winners write history and the allied countries will never officially admit comitting crimes.
Germany is still paying reparations, so even money is an issue.

Agreed.

[AVGWarhawk]

Many of the allied conventional bombings in Europe and Japan killed more civilians than those two.

True.

I consider them war crimes just like many things the Soviets did.

Maybe. Need to look at London during the Battle of Britain. Axis told not to bomb the city, a pair of pilots did, all be it by mistake, as explained in "Where Eagles Dare'. Allies told not to bomb the civilians. It would seem it eventually turned into fighting fire with fire.

But winners write history and the allied countries will never officially admit comitting crimes.

To the victor goes the spoils? In most if not all cases, yes.

Germany is still paying reparations, so even money is an issue.

I believe reparations for the war concern the extermination camps soley. Please correct me if I'm wrong.


All of this aside, Truman knew the consequences of dropping the bomb. It was all mathmatical equations on how many American lives would perish attempting to storm the beaches on the main island of Japan. Based on that figure, Truman decided using the bomb was the best thing.

[micky1up]

Originally Posted by Letum

Bingo! That's what makes it immoral.

Hiroshima was not an act of defence.
Hiroshima was not in the interest of American soldiers as they could have been saved by the cease fire. It was not in the interest of humanity as a whole because...err...well it destroyed a whole city of humanity!
In fact, I can't think of a single person it did benefit* who would not have benefited more from a ceasefire. I can however think of many, many people who suffered and continue to suffer as a result of Hiroshima.

*politician's carers excluded

a common mistake here is to forget the warrior code of the japs in this case they would never ever surrender or entertain a ceasefire that in itsself would facilitate an invasion which would have cost more lives than the two bombings and let us not forget here which nation was the aggressor in this instance!

[Happy Times]

Originally Posted by micky1up

a common mistake here is to forget the warrior code of the japs in this case they would never ever surrender or entertain a ceasefire that in itsself would facilitate an invasion which would have cost more lives than the two bombings and let us not forget here which nation was the aggressor in this instance!

Maybe we should have bombed and shelled Leningrad, conquer it and burn it to the ground.
By this logic Finns could have killed, raped and burned everything they wanted in
Russia and it would have been ok.
But i wouldnt be very proud of it.

[AVGWarhawk]

Originally Posted by Happy Times

Maybe we should have bombed and shelled Leningrad, conquer it and burn it to the ground.
By this logic Finns could have killed, raped and burned everything they wanted in
Russia and it would have been ok.
But i wouldnt be very proud of it.

I quoted all as to not take out of context but your last line stands out, 'But I would'nt be proud of it'. Dropping the bomb is not part of national pride. It was a means to an end. May not have been the best answer but it was one possible answer. We can only talk in generalities concerning mainland Japan invasion and the casualties that could have occurred. Again , based on soldiers lost retaking island after island was examined through and through. These figures were applied to taking the island of Japan by land forces. The numbers looked staggering to Truman. His decision to use the weapon was based on these figures. It was Trumans best answer for the figures presented to him at the time. Let's be in Trumans shoes for a minute....do we send 350,000 American's to their possible death in a land invasion? So many have given up their lives thus far. Or do we implement this weapon, end the war and send these 350,000 boys home? I suspect I would take the second option myself. No offense but Japan attacked first. The US answered.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by U-96

Was the U.S's back against a wall? Were the Japanese close to setting foot on mainland U.S.A? Where they short of weapons and ammo? Where they suffering defeat? No, they were quite the opposite, in the strongest position of the war in the Pacific. Yes the bomb was dropped anyways. Trying to justify this is simply impossible.

Three words: Operational strategic considerations. Truman's responsibility was, ultimately, to his own Americans. So is every other President. it is amazing how the West always seems to forget this fact.

Given that the choices were b/w:
Seige: Somehow, the deaths of a million Japanese by slow seige doesn't look brilliantly better than that million by A-bombs. Plus you lose that shock effect. If seige was effective, the Japanese will have surrendered long ago.
Storming: The estimates say a bunch of Americans and even more Japanese. not exactly a real go by any measure.
Nukes: Shock effect at very low risk to American lives (effectively only a couple of bomber crews).

Truman's only responsible choice was arguably to accept the armistice on Japanese terms, which will make it an conditional surrender, or drop the nuke.

[Letum]

If Japan refused to surrender after the two bombs, except under the conditional terms,
how many nuclear bombs do you still think it would have been justified to drop after that?

Another 2?
Another 5?

Or is there no limit to the evil that can be justified in order to achieve a greater good?

[Kron161]

No war has ever been free of atrocities. Since the greeks battled persians to our days, civilian population always suffer. One way or another. Romans were able to keep the "pax romana" in their conquered territories because everybody knew that any attempt to revolt would be crushed in the most ruthless way. Not just fighters would be killed, but their families slaughtered or slaved, or at best be let alive but with all their housing burned to the ground and the fields poisoned with salt. That was deterrence.

WWII was different from wars fought centuries ago on the sense that a new tactic was used. Deprive the enemy of their industrial resources and bring them to their knees. Any company owner will confirm you that a worker is the most valued asset of an industrial company. And today, unclassified documents from the 8th air force or the RAF, clearly show that some of the bombings in germany, were adressed to deprive the german industry of their workers (even if by the expeditive method of reducing their housing and the core of their basic needs to rubble, which by the way, proved to be partly efective only).

From a win-loose logical point of view, the use of strategic bombing made sense for all parties involved. But bombing only did not bring victory. It took the ruskies to conquer Berlin and get Adolf to blow his head and on Japan it took the most devastating weapon ever to bring the country to its knees.

Japanese fighter pilots did not wear the parachute because they could not conceive being made prissoners. The staggering percentage of japanese casualties in the battles for the pacific islands was due because death was preferable to surrender. This mentality impregnated the country. Japan knew they could not win, but they knew that if they caused enough casualties to the enemy - at whatever cost- sooner or later, the allies would have to sit at the negotiation table with them, and the biggest bid of them all was the invasion of Japan. After Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the US new what to expect and they also understood quickly that they could not sustain the same percentage of losses experienced on Iwo Jima on a bigger scale as was demanded by the invasion of Japan.

True, strategic bombing had ruined the country, but the Japanese were far from defeated. They could have no homes, no industrial resources but they would still train the civilian population with sharpened bamboo sticks to use them as bayonets when the invasion eventually arrived. Nobody knows how much people would have died with an invasion, but certainly the numbers would have been terrible for both sides.

Futhermore, the finantial cost of a war is staggering and all the countries involved had had enough of it. Nobody did contemplate at the prospects of an endless attrition war with a sieged beligerant Japan.

Japanese needed to be shown that they were facing extinction in a literal sense if they did not surrended.

In this scenario, the use of the A bomb was the less of evils.

I think that the use of the A-bomb opened a pandora box and I wish it could be de-invented, but on the other side, The A-bomb also was the opening of an era where the main civilized countries in the world have lived (a part of minor local conflicts) in inequalled peace and prosperity. Deterrence has also been key for it, so I would assume that we are no longer living the "pax romana" but the "Pax Atomica".

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by Letum

If Japan refused to surrender after the two bombs, except under the conditional terms,
how many nuclear bombs do you still think it would have been justified to drop after that?

Another 2?
Another 5?

Or is there no limit to the evil that can be justified in order to achieve a greater good?

Quite frankly, why the Americans didn't just accept the conditional terms had always been a little mystery to me. They could always have accepted the terms and then do a Versailles from their superior position - once you've won you can always change the deal.

However, given that unconditional surrender is the correct option, the answer is indeed as many as necessary.

[Ducimus]

All im going to say, is some folks shoudlnt be too quick to judge the decision to drop the two A bombs on japan.

To fully understand, one must look at the entire pacific theater as a whole, from pearl harbor, to every battle ever fought against the japanese. Each is a sum of the whole.

I've read as much of this thread as i could stomach, but ive not seen one critic of the deicsion examine the situatioin as a whole. Only on the one event, not how we arrived at that event.

Being selective of history as an excuse to US bash, gotta love it.

[August]

Originally Posted by Letum

If Japan refused to surrender after the two bombs, except under the conditional terms,
how many nuclear bombs do you still think it would have been justified to drop after that?

Another 2?
Another 5?

Or is there no limit to the evil that can be justified in order to achieve a greater good?

I've never understood how people see nuclear bombs as somehow more evil than any of the other numerous methods man has for killing his fellow man.

The nukes you hate so much eliminated the need for a months long conventional bombing campaign in preparation for the invasion of Japan. A campaign that would have been orders of magnitude more intense, done far more damage, and this is the important part, killed many, many more civilians than what died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.