Hiroshima Remembered.

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by frankychan

BTW, have you seen survivors from a ground-zero detonation? I have in pictures and I'll tell you, when you realize that some of them are family members, you wanna kick someones @**. When you see the survivors skin's blackened and charred, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Personally no. In photos yes. It was still better for the US than an invasion would have been. A demonstration may or may not have worked. There simply is no way to know. The US only had two bombs. Only one was a tested design. They had to make it count.

[redbaron]

Originally posted by Ethelred
The US only had two bombs.

According to Tibbets, they had 3.


PT: Unknown to anybody else - I knew it, but nobody else knew - there was a third one. See, the first bomb went off and they didn't hear anything out of the Japanese for two or three days. The second bomb was dropped and again they were silent for another couple of days. Then I got a phone call from General Curtis LeMay [chief of staff of the strategic air forces in the Pacific]. He said, "You got another one of those damn things?" I said, "Yessir." He said, "Where is it?" I said, "Over in Utah." He said, "Get it out here. You and your crew are going to fly it." I said, "Yessir." I sent word back and the crew loaded it on an airplane and we headed back to bring it right on out to Trinian and when they got it to California debarkation point, the war was over.

ST: What did General LeMay have in mind with the third one?

PT: Nobody knows.

[Boris Godunov]

Re: Remembering Hiroshima..

Originally posted by faded glory
umm...no. I dont give a flaming bobcat ******* about the city or its people.

I love how every statwh0re, queerboy, and freckled face loser come here and waste there time physco-analzying every little historical detail about my country history.


grow up and get a life. fight over somthing else

If you were as smart as you say you would be out doing somthing else.

What a disgusting post.

You and Darthveda can go around spitting on folks whom you disagree with, but that doesn't make you mature. You seem to be the one who needs to grow up here.

[Boris Godunov]

Ethelred, but, IMO, and invasion was not necessary. Japan was already ready to capitulate and had communicated the desire to do so.

And if the goal was to secure surrender, why drop two? Why on earth was Nagasaky deemed necessary? Surely we didn't think the Japanese would be dumb enough to assume we only had one such weapon, especially since we could have detonated the other on a non-civilian target to get that point across.

But if the goal is to show Stalin we have the bomb, we have more than one, and we're willing to use it on cities, well that makes more sense, and I believe that was the underlying rationale. It wasn't the last shot of WWII, but the first of the Cold War.

[Q Classic]

frankychan:

You know, having relatives on BOTH f***ing ends (receiving and giving) I find this last part of the statement FULLY INSULTING. I'm mean, I'm freeking raging.

I have family members that were part of the invasion force (Japanese) and family that were dodging the Nihongin's bombs and bullets while they were strafing the streets in Hawaii.

Ok, how about this....why don't I drop an atomic bomb on your ENTIRE families @**, watch them burn, then say "Oh, that sucks.....but hey, you deserved it." HUH?!

I have relatives WHO DIED AT HIROSHIMA because of an American president's decision to drop an atom bomb on a CIVILIAN POPULATION CENTER instead of Tokyo Bay, where the blast could still be seen and no lives would have been lost.

Now, if your thinking that I am against America, you are wrong! I had family members who went to Pearl Harbor to save their comrades lives, but they were military personnel. All my family members I have talked to say that even though the attack was unprovoked, they were military, not civilian. I've seen pictures of CHILDREN baked because of the blast.

Can any of you say that you've had family members hit by an atomic bomb blast?! (I'm sorry, I'm soooo mad right now I could rip apart my damn computer...but I won't) My point is, until you've actually seen or experienced something, don't say it was deserved.

you know, i have relatives (two, specifically) that were never seen again because of the japanese occupation force. one of them would have become my great aunt-- but no, she was taken away as a "comfort woman". she probably died after what, maybe a few months of repeated gang rape by one of the imperial japanese soldiers, no?

she was civilian. she wasn't part of any army. did she deserve it? no.

another one of my family members disappeared because he was part of a non-violent resistance movement. he fired no gun, he killed no jap. but they took him and shot him in a midnight arrest, gestapo style.

did he deserve it? no.

you ask me to feel pity for the japanese who died in hiroshima, you ask me to think they did not in some way suffer because of some twisted cosmic retribution for their countries sins, without so much as a second consideration for the mass murders, the brutality, the cruelty the japanese heaped upon the koreans for no better reason than wanting to be like the white man?

you ask me to feel much grief over those hiroshima folk, innocent civilians, after what the japanese military did to nanking? the death toll at nanking was twice that of hiroshima. and unlike your relatives who were baked, their deaths were a long, drawn out process. they didn't die mercifully quick in a matter of moments, no. the chinese there suffered through four months of utter hell.

and you want me to say that the japanese, in some way, did not deserve it?

look. i'll grant, maybe those individuals there didn't deserve to die. but the japanese people as a whole... i can't see it any other way than karma.

when you see what the japanese did to korea, and then see how the japanese are whitewashing their history, you want to kick someone's @$$.

[Ethelred]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Ethelred, but, IMO, and invasion was not necessary. Japan was already ready to capitulate and had communicated the desire to do so.

Not too clearly apparently.

And if the goal was to secure surrender, why drop two? Why on earth was Nagasaky deemed necessary?

Failure to surrender. Whether that was the right decision or not is another thing but this pure speculation that it was to cow Papa Joe is just that, speculation. I don't think a bomb on Moscow would have intimidated Stalin. It would just confirm his desire for a bomb of his own.

[Q Classic]

ethelred, someone did goof. on that same page, though: the paragraph right after, attributed directly to a korean source:

The lifestyle of the Japanese sex slaves, called "comfort women," would be considered by many unfit even for farm animals. First, the Japanese police would seek out young, single, socially isolated and economically disadvantaged girls from religious families in Korea (80-90% of sex slaves to the Japanese army were Korean). With strong Confucian ideals, the girls were likely to value virginity and chastity, thus reducing the possibility of spreading venereal disease. The girls were lured to Japan by false promises of high-paying jobs and steady food supply; or, they were threatened at gunpoint and kidnapped. Once the girls arrived in Japan, they were forced into sexual slavery, which meant servicing up to 100 men a day for low pay or no pay at all. There was inadequate housing, long hours, limited freedom, and insufficient medical care, and those who tried to escape were killed. (An estimated 75-90% of comfort women became casualties of war.) (Chai 70-71)

[MOBIUS]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
The general population did not know the whole story, true, but they did know about the occupation of Korea, the invasion of Nanjing, etc. And they thought those were good things. Many Japanese thought they were superior to other Asian peoples. A number of them still do today.

Well as far as I can tell the Army and/or government legitimised their conquests as wars of ‘self-defense’. I’m not too sure about the Korean conquest, as has been noted, my knowledge isn’t the best on the subject. However I am guessing that it stems from the time when the Koreans had their own empire threatening the Japanese…

As for China, I believe the pretext of Japanese aggression was the Manchurian Incident in the early thirties – Japan was acting in ‘self-defence’ against the Chinese aggressors, or so the papers would report in the days before CNN…

That is untrue also. All this invasion and occupation stuff was planned long before Tojo came into power. Hirohito himself had to share the responsibilities.

Right, and what was Tojo before he became Prime Minister? C in C of Japan’s Kwantung army in China perhaps? Actually wasn’t he in charge during the Nanking massacre? Sounds like a career kind of guy to me – slaughtering his way to the top before he was even the Prime Minister…

They were supportive of the invasions dammit! Do you have a clue of what was going on?

Because in a World without the instant reportage of CNN or the internet, it is easy to keep the truth from the people, to twist the truth and feed the people what they want to hear. Now as far as the Japanese people are concerned, with for example the Manchurian Incident, they were attacked first, because that is what they were told. It is understandable therefore that they might support those invasions… How are they going to verify it independently? Go there and see for themselves? Now if Tojo is in control of the Nanking theatre of war, it goes without saying that he is also in control of the Media in the Nanking theatre of war…

Does that mean civilians deserve to be incinerated just because they believe the propaganda of a government they are conditioned to believe because of the rigidly hierarchical nature of their society?

Hell, it was only a few years ago when that movie came out portraying Tojo as a hero – some people are still spewing the same propaganda now even when the truth is there for all to see!

Again untrue. The Japanese prepared "total defense." They even planned on moving to Korea if Japanese fell to the Allies.

Sure they prepared for it – so imagine how utterly powerless they’d feel if the US said ‘watch this’ and detonated a nuke on a military installation somewhere uninhabited by hundreds of thousands of civilians. If after a week or so, perhaps then threaten to destroy a major city – that way the onus of the deaths of civilians is at least in part on the shoulders of the Japanese Leadership.

The thing that always gets me is that it is claimed that millions of lives were saved by the detonation of these bombs – well why not another few hundred thousand???

Two things sicken me about these two bombings:

1) That they were both used on major civilian centres

2) That only three days were given for the Japanese to surrender after the first - most politicians need at least a week just to wipe their arses!

I can't get past the fact that it appears like calculated cold blooded murder that just happened to also end WWII...

[Faeelin]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Ethelred, but, IMO, and invasion was not necessary. Japan was already ready to capitulate and had communicated the desire to do so.

And if the goal was to secure surrender, why drop two? Why on earth was Nagasaky deemed necessary? Surely we didn't think the Japanese would be dumb enough to assume we only had one such weapon, especially since we could have detonated the other on a non-civilian target to get that point across.

But if the goal is to show Stalin we have the bomb, we have more than one, and we're willing to use it on cities, well that makes more sense, and I believe that was the underlying rationale. It wasn't the last shot of WWII, but the first of the Cold War.

Japan wouldn't capitulate unconditionally, which is what America wanted. America wanted the Emperor to be removed from office, and the hawks were against this. Towards the end, though, the emperor favored stepping down for the good of the nation, but lacked the power.

The Japanese actually didn't believe in the bomb initially. They were confused for more than a day as to what exactly had happened at hiroshima.

Nagasaki was to prove we'd keep on using them, and that they weren't wonder weapons of the sort the Germans were using. Actually, after word spread in Japan, the military still refused to surrender if it would mean dethroning the emperor. But after Nagasaki (and the Russian invasion of manchuria; which was more important is debatable) the emperor surrendered.

Even after this, there was still an attempted coup by the military to prevent the surrender, and an incredibly unrealistic plan to ram a kamikaze into the ship which the Japanese surrendered on.

I agree that hiroshima stands as an example of the horrors of world war II. But put yourself in truman's shoes.

You've just become president. Your nation is about to invade a nation of millions who are ready to fight with spears and use carriages to hide bombs. Children are being trained to commit suicide rather than surrender to Americans in the enemy nation. You have three choices:

You can blockade the islands. This will cause millions to die, as most food in japan was imported by sea (and starvation was expected by the japanese to cause a complete and total collapse by the end of 45). Bear in mind you still have to occupy the islands even after the mass starvations. Remember also that you have soldiers there as prisoners of war.

You can invade. You know your casualties will be in the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, and does not include the civilian casualties on the enemy side. In addition, the Russians will take the oppurtunity to grab northern japan at little or no cost to themselves.

Now, you have a third option. You've been informed that your government has secretly built a bomb, which may terrify the enemy into surrendering. Many will die, but how does it compare to the other choices?

What, pray tell, would you have done in Truman's shoes? (And quite frankly, I think the japanese have done a really horrible job acknowledging their atrocities in that war. I feel sorry for the people at hiroshima, but the most of the japanese high command should've gone up at nuremburg.)

[Q Classic]

Well as far as I can tell the Army and/or government legitimised their conquests as wars of ‘self-defense’. I’m not too sure about the Korean conquest, as has been noted, my knowledge isn’t the best on the subject. However I am guessing that it stems from the time when the Koreans had their own empire threatening the Japanese.

what korean empire? if by a korean imperial threat you mean a nation that was constantly being besieged by the chinese and the japanese...?
the largest korean empire never even gave a second thought to the japanese. let's get this straight-- the occupation of korea by japan was committed without reason, through assassination of the entire royal family, through manipulation of political forces, and by military force.

let's get one thing straight.

i'm not saying, rah, rah, let's nuke all those jap bastards. i'm saying, it's a horror that it happened, let it not happen again. but let us also remember that hiroshima is not something to cry about, either, not the way we are now.

that being said-- i think nagasaki was overkill, in terms of war. i'm quite sure the japanese would have done themselves in after hiroshima, given time. but while i agree that it too was a horror, i can't say i'm altogether too aggreived that it was in japan.

[DanS]

I think it's pretty clear, Faeelin. You drop the bomb in a place that would get the Japanese attention. And you demonstrate that you are fully prepared to wipe the country off the map.

The balance of terror throughout the Cold War was also based on the proposition that we we had used the weapons once and were fully prepared to use them again, destroying all human life on planet Earth.

We have grown soft in 12 years, it seems.

[Stefu]

To achieve unconditional surrender, the US should've had a demonstration, with Japanese observers, of an atomic bomb. It's hard to imagine that the Japanese would continue fighting afterwards.

No, it isn't. Remember that the hotheads in Japanese cabinets planned to carry out a military coup to keep on fighting *even after* the Emperor's speech and surrendering.

Besides, America had three (3) nukes. None to be spared for a 'demonstration' that might not have had any effect at all.

Incidentally, if 'demonstration' hadn't worked out, would you folks then have supported an use of a nuclear weapon against a Japanese city?

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by DanS
You drop the bomb in a place that would get the Japanese attention. And you demonstrate that you are fully prepared to wipe the country off the map.

We only had two-three bombs (This is the first I have heard of the third bomb.). We couldn't have wiped the country off the map even if we had wanted to. Why would you waste a bomb on a demonstration that was likely to achieve any effect?

[Boris Godunov]

If I had been president, I would have actually listened to the Japanese. Considering they ended up keeping the emperor anyway, I wouldn't have had a problem accepting that as the only condition for their surrender. I certainly, as frankchan said, would have considered detonating the bombs on a non-civilian target to show them what we were capable of before even considering using it on a civilian area.

Consider this: the bombings may be what allow many Japanese to stay on a high horse of moral indignation about the war and not acknowledge Japanese atrocities. They can point to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as extremely visible, potent examples of civilian massacre, whereas Nanking and the like are much less visible (no big, purty mushroom cloud). Certainly, in the interest of world opinion, I believe it would be best that the U.S. had never used the bombs. We could at least maintain a bit more credibility in our vehemence of "rogue nations" not obtaining nukes.

Frankly, the notion that we would have to blockade Japan and that more deaths might have occured is less troubling to me, as then we can clearly say these deaths were on Japan's own head for not surrenduring.

But again, they were willing to surrender, we just didn't listen (and, IMO, Truman didn't want to).

[DanS]

Dino: I didn't make myself clear. Hiroshima was a pretty good demonstration. And thank God Japan didn't know we only had 3.