Collateral Murder (merged)

[tater]

Originally Posted by Fader_Berg

Well, I can't get closer to a better world than the worst of idiots, obviously.

The bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, togehter killed almost 200.000 people instantly? The death toll to this day is totaling ~400.000 people who died in the consequence of the bombs because of radiation. Far most of them civilians.

"Imperial Edict", yeah right... That's one sorry excuse.

Raptor beat me to it. Your numbers are flat out wrong. The total approaches 200k including all deaths after war to cancer, etc (not sure if that is all, or only "excess" deaths to cancer that would not have normally happened).

The 2d firebombing raid was ONE raid. At the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (you seem to be pretty ignorant of the air war vs Japan, so I'll educate you), we were engaging in such raids a few times PER WEEK. Had the a-bombs not been dropped on those two cities, they would have instead faced large fire bombing raids by B-29s. The only functional difference between the normal "day at the office" B-29 raids and the a-bombs was vastly fewer planes, and a more certain outcome per attack. For regular raids sometimes they got a firestorm going, other times not so much. As I recall a large % of the a-bomb casualties were actually attributed to the firestorm that ensued. Unlike a conventional version, it started everywhere all at once, and left no avenue for escape, exacerbating the effect.

As for the Imperial Edict, it's a fact, not an excuse. It's explicitly not an excuse because as I said that the USAAF did not know about it. I specifically said it was NOT an excuse, and that our intent was in fact to bomb civilians. The excuse at the time was that Japanese industry had been farmed out to cottage industry within homes (which was in fact true). Ie: woman worker goes to factory, and takes home gun parts, assembles them, then brings finished receiver to factory and gets more parts to bring home.

A suggestion for further reading on the final days of the Imperial Japanese Empire would be Richard Frank's excellent book, Downfall.

On topic, Oberon and CaptainHaplo both make excellent analysis of the situation. Myself, I neither really defend nor condemn the actions, I wasn't there, I've not been in that situation, and I don't have all the information required to form a definition opinion other than the video, and the gunship crew certainly seemed to think they were engaging combatants—it's not like they said "let's slaughter some raghead civies!" on the radio, quite the opposite.

I have proved you wrong then, haven't I. We can dispute the numbers, but it is one hell of a impressive detah toll within hours. You've just got to admit that.
I disagree over the necessarity of it all. Japan was already defeated. There wasn't much more for them to do. They didn't pose any direct threat to the US or any surrouning countries since almost the whole country was in ruins. It might had been hard to invade Japan at the time. But they had no fair option other than to surrender in the long run. I think lives could have been spared if they choosed to wait them out.
Now, there is no news that USA makes their vengence and benefit priority number one. We've seen it time after time in history. No human life without a US citizenchip (or their allies) are worth ****. That's pretty much what this video shows.

Have a nice day.

Japan was not defeated. She would not have surrendered without an invasion, that was their entire point. A bloody invasion, THEN sue for peace with terms to their liking. Any text written before 1996 misses information only declassified in 1996 regarding some code breaking work we had done. We knew this to be true, because we had their communications (many cite a jap diplomat suggesting that they accept Potsdam, but they did not have the reply—using a higher level code—that said in no uncertain terms that this would NEVER be acceptable. Read Downfall. Regardless, every single day the war went on there was the chance of another 1000 B-29s flying over some city burning it to the ground.