OK, was it wrong to bomb Japan?

Whilr you wait our allies are dying by the tens of thousands and Japanese civillians are dying or starvation and disease by the tens of thousands.

I don't for a second beleive that China and Russia would be cooperative very long sa rificng their blood and gold knowing we had the power to stop the war but 'waited' to save Japanese lives. Not to mention the American voters who would wonder what the heck you spent all that money on if you were so concerned about using it against the enemy not to mention what you would tell people how you could have ended the war but didn't and cost half a million US lives in the event of an invasion.

 

Again you make a lot of claims without evidence. Dropping the bomb on uninhabited ground would have had the same effect as dropping them on cities.....especially if we told them toyko was next. But you seem to feel that the killing of thousands of women and children was very important.

 

If it didn't go off the Japanese leadership would use it to rally the naton for a long term seige as the would know they didn't work reliably and we didn't have vrry many of them. As for the fifty thousand figure, are you now going to say that your blockade did no damage to Japan yet the waiting killed twenty thousand of our allies per month??????????????????


You seem to have your priorities in the wrong place. You should be saving the lives of your allies not the e emey when you have a blockade.

Wondering, since you now say the blockade should be kept in place, why are you now saying it s ineffective?

So, the millitary minds say it would only take a month more. Prove it

They had been under a blockade for a year already so yes, it would have taken a long time.

 

You can't tell them where and when because the bomb was unreliable and if it didn't work would lengthen the war sustantially. I also explained why you could not drop it on Tokyo - there would be nobody to surrender and enforce same scince you in your wisdom just took out the leadership who would be controling the pist war population

 

How does the japanese leadership know if it went off or not if it is unannounced? If it went off the entire forest is leveled....if not you would be in the same situation you would be if it did not go off in Hiroshima.

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We wouldn't tell them where and when.....but they would sure be able to see the cloud.

 

I already gave you Curtis LeMays account of where he said it would take less than two weeks (he even revised that downward in later years).

 

Zeros were easy to shoot down. Many reached the fleet - many more got close. Close would be too close.

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Well, shame on you for checking.

 

Now Tom, do you really want to compare the threat posed by Imperial Japan to Iraq?

 

What those quotes represent are people answering the legal notion of "military necessity" which does not mean what you think it means. You ( or the author), are then taking the misunderstanding of that term, and using the misunderstanding to falsely imply they are all saying that we should not have used a nuclear bomb. Aside from a few of them, that isn't what they are discussing at all.

This is a really fringe opinion you are trying to pass off as mainstream, and regardless of how cleverly the author tries to present that fringe opinion, it still remains a fringe opinion. The military establishment was ECSTATIC that the war was ended without shedding another drop of American blood.

 

Good points. I believe the Japanese always had about 2 million troops in China. Knocking out China was their principal war objective from start to finish. They were not a passive force.

 

That is your opinion. They spoke in plain language and now you want to tell me"what they really meant." If this is a fringe opinion please show me quotes of the mainstream opinion of military experts. Please show me SOME evidence of this ECSTATIC opinion.

 

Us dropping the A-bombs probably saved my older brothers life. He was on a Destroyer that was very venerable to japanese kamikazis.

 

This thread should have been a poll. We DID bomb Japan and that can't be undone. It no longer matters who supported or opposed the bombing as that decision was made long ago and with elections coming up there are much more important issues we should be tending to.

 

So Japan is going to build a swarm of hundreds of bombers capable of carrying a nuclear bomb while having their industry bombed round the clock?

 

There were no zero's flying around by that time. The US had total air superiority

 

This does a good job of explaining it (note the part that I emphasized in bold):

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/pacific-online-forum/2/

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We actually backed off from unconditional surrender when we issued the Potsdam Proclamation, which was a list of generous surrender terms.

We didn't have any opportunity to open negotiations because Japan was refusing to talk to us. Japan only wanted to negotiate after getting the Soviets to agree to mediate and gain "terms acceptable to Japan". In the absence of that Soviet collaboration, Japan was refusing to go anywhere near negotiations.

And really, there wasn't much to even negotiate. We had told Japan the surrender terms when we issued the Potsdam Proclamation. We were just waiting for Japan to accept those terms.

 

Uh huh. You do realize that the blockade had been going on since April right? So, two weeks after April makes it April 15 and still, four months later no surrender. Methinks somebody is full of it. Besides, the leaders were fed, the military were fed, the people were starving buyt no surrender. And there wouldn't be until the military began to starve which means one heck of a lot longer than April and, after a lot of people died but, having fifty thousand people die per month is a lot better than forcing surrender with the bomb which killed one hundred fifty thousand people counting one hell of a lot of soldiers and war material.

You still never explained what you would tell the Russians and Chinese who were sending men into the meat grinder to be killed at a rate of twenty thousand per month. How you had a weapon that would make it so their people would not have to die but didn't want to use it on the poor Japanese. When would you do that and how long would it take for them to attack you for reneging on your position of being an ally.

And last, if you were Truman, and were waiting out the blockade that was killing the Japanese civillians and they had so little food, your POWs would be the first to be executed one after the other. What would you tell the 140 thousand families who had their loved ones executed in retaliation when they discover that you could have ended the war prior to their men being executed?

Please, stop dodging the questions and answer. I'm very interested how you reason when faced with the reality that it was a political decision not a military one.
?

 

So you think Lemay and all the military leaders were wrong. Interesting. I think they knew more about this than you and were in a better position to decide what was the best course of action. But we do have your opinion which is nice too.

 

On warm summer nights in Hiroshima, one can still detect the faint smell of roasted Japs in the air.

 

Yes I do. Now, scince we know he said the bomb was dropped to make scientists happy we can surmise he was wro g about that so, si ce he had no spies in the Big Six we can further surmise he had no way of knowing what the situation inside Japan was at the time.

Other than now being asked to tell us how on earth he would know please address the other points in my post.

 

He would know because he was a military genius that had access to the best military intelligence available.
I would tell the russia and China that in the US we will decide when and how to use a weapon of this magnitude. And if they don't like it they don't have to be our BFF. Are you kidding with this? Hilarious. I can't even tell what you are talking about with americans POW's? If we demonstrated the bomb in an uninhabited area they would kill the POW's? What???

 

There is no way to guage how many lives it has saved since. The theory is that the Japanese were like frogs in a slow heating pot. We had to make it hot instantly to get them to surrender. The point was to save Americans troops lives. It may have saved many more Japanese and help prevent future world wars.

 

We certainly know how many lives it took. Over 225,000.

 

Didn't we incinerate around 200,000 in Tokyo using simple incindiaries.

 

Did we. That's horrible