I am not an apologist for the Japanese or Hirohito, but things are not as cut and dried as - "the bombs needed to be dropped - because...". Japan was making overtures to surrender - that is not a disputed fact. What gets lost in the hyperbole is terms, timing, intermediaries, and motives from a host of interested parties. I might accept the traditional telling of the tale more readily were it not for the fact the Establishment was hellbent on taking over China. In order to bring this about they needed to overthrow Chang Kai-shek. Which they were able to do by artificially prolonging the war and buying time for Stalin to organize and give assistance to Mao that was needed to defeat Shek. You also have to remember that the Roosevelt/Truman administration was teeming with communist traitors. Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, Harry Hopkins, Phillip Jessup, Lauchlin Curry, Owen Lattimore, et al. In no uncertain terms, many of the key leadership positions within our government, and especially in our State Department, were completely controlled by communists who had every incentive to ensure that the war was prolonged. The "official" history books need to be taken with a grain of salt. There were, and still are, a lot of subversive agendas in play.
Ding, ding, ding... The two events are not mutually exclusive - they are linked. As I said in the above post, the Establishment needed to prolong the war to aid Mao and expand communism. As Admiral James Forrestal said before he was murdered, "... if our disastrous foreign policy were simply the result of stupidity, they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor". There is "official" history; there is revisionist history; and, always an outlier, there is the truth.
Did he?? Again - There is "official" history, there is revisionist history, and there is the truth. No D, he was assassinated and staged to look like a suicide. His brother fought to expose the truth and was able to get some of the facts out, but of course the Establishment was easily able to bury it. The information is out there though.
Sure, just like the claim that he was killed as part of the effort to cover up the Roswell Incident. 1) People can claim anything. 2) Most relatives do not want to admit that a family member committed suicide and will grasp at any idiotic notion to prove otherwise.
The place to start isn't with his brother, his brother simply tried to shine a light on the facts. It isn't as if he was making baseless claims. The place to start to understand everything in context is with the writings of Chang Kai-shek.
That's a very interesting perspective and relates to another thread discussion I started: U.S. had a chance in 1911 to create stability in China but chose not to
Not in the way people think though. The Japanese had been counting on negotiating through the Soviets with the U.S. The Soviet entry into the war made that basically impossible.
. When antichrist Oppenheimer first saw his evil atomic bomb tested in the US desert, he mused: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds [from the Bhagavad-Gita] Then he wanted it dropped on Germany ! Reminds me of what Jeremiah called ancient Babylon = the hammer of the whole world Jeremiah 50 & 51 = prophecy of Babylon's demise. .
The Russians were never coming and we knew it because we had had to create their nascent amphibious capability from the ground up. We dropped the bombs because we thought we needed them to win. Please see Hell to Pay by D.M. Giangreco.
I think Truman and the military leaders at the time were in a much better position to make that judgement than you.
And they wanted to occupy Manchuria and support the communist in China and then occupy the northern island of the Japanese chain and I am amazed at those here who believe they know better the situation than did Truman and the DoW and DoS at the time. Was it the decideing factor, no but a key one to use the bombs as soon as possible and in a most decisive manner. The memorials at Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be celebrations of thanks to the United States for using them and ending the war and deposing the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy.
Giangreco's book was the first to draw on certain archives and documents, both U.S. and Japanese. His conclusion: U.S. military leadership feared that an invasion might not only have taken up to two years to succeed, but it might actually have been defeated. From their perspective the bombs were a military necessity.
Oh, yes, you are. The fact that it took 2 nuclear weapons to force Japan to surrender is not a disputed fact, either. If you can kill 200,000 people and end a war preventing Millions from dying and/or being injured and/or suffering, then that's what you need to do.
YEAH, that was part of it too, it wasn't for just one monolithic reason it was a combination of a variety of factors. And it was the correct decision.
Had they not tried taking over he world, this would not have happened. Should have left Pearl Harbor alone. They bit off more than they could chew.
Not much else as I said elsewhere Was it the deciding factor, no but a key one to use the bombs as soon as possible and in a most decisive manner. The memorials at Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be celebrations of thanks to the United States for using them and ending the war and deposing the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy.
This information is not easy to come by anymore as Google, Bing, YouTube, the government, our schools, et al, are all-in on full-blown Orwellian censorship. All of the information related to the Pacific theater needs be viewed as a whole. Japan was done for. Hirohito knew it, his Generals and senior staff knew it, and the Allies knew it. The Establishment had planned out the world's postwar map years before the end of the war - that included betraying most of Eastern Europe and China to the communists. While the allies were glad handing Chang Kai-shek with one hand, they were stabbing him in the back at Yalta with the other. Communizing China was of much greater importance to the Establishment than was ending the war on any terms. If more people needed to die?? So be it. If many, many more people needed to die, so be it. Don't make the mistake of thinking that anyone in a leadership position within our government or military at that time possessed any sense of humanity in the least. These people were hardcore psychopaths that had no qualms about killing and enslaving hundreds of millions of people. Operation Keelhaul anyone?? To contend that they would do anything for humanitarian reasons - even drop the bomb to ostensibly prevent further loss of life, is not in keeping with the character of these men. --------------------------------------------- https://thenewamerican.com/communist-china-made-in-the-usa/ Losing China Mainland China fell to Mao Tse-tung’s Communist forces in 1949, when the remnants of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army and such citizens as could escape fled to the island of Formosa, now commonly known as Taiwan. But the principal reason for the Communist takeover occurred not on the battlefield, but at the conference table, not in 1949, but four years earlier, prior to the end of World War II — and not in China, but many thousands of miles away at the Yalta summit meeting. On that occasion, unbeknownst to our ally Chiang, who was fighting well over a million Japanese troops, President Franklin D. Roosevelt promised Stalin the vast northern Chinese province of Manchuria and other concessions in exchange for Soviet entrance into the war against Japan. The Soviet army, poised along the Manchurian border and supplied with American lend-lease equipment, entered the war against Japan three days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. At that late stage, noted General Albert C. Wedemeyer in his book, Wedemeyer Reports!, “the Red Army naturally met practically no enemy resistance and was soon in complete control of Manchuria” — after which “the Russians received the surrender of Japanese arms and equipment [stockpiled in the region], which they overtly and covertly made available to the Chinese Communists.” With that the balance of power in China shifted to Mao Tse-tung and his band of Communist terrorists. But there were other significant steps along the way that insured Chiang’s defeat and the loss of China. Those steps included the cease-fires forced upon Chiang when he was making military progress, our insistence that Chiang form a coalition government with the Communists, and our 10-month embargo on the sale or shipment of arms to Chiang. When the embargo was fastened upon Chiang, General George Marshall boasted: “As Chief of Staff I armed 39 anti-Communist divisions; now with a stroke of the pen I disarm them.” As the end approached, Congress did pass a measure to provide some aid to China’s beleaguered anti-Communist forces, but the delivery was sabotaged. The Truman administration, wrote Wedemeyer, “succeeded in thwarting the intent of the [1948] China Aid Act by delaying the shipment of munitions to China until the end of that critical year.” Some arms were even destroyed. As recounted by Senator Joseph McCarthy in his book America’s Retreat From Victory, “Over the hump in India, the United States military authorities were detonating large stores of ammunition and dumping 120,000 tons of war supplies in the Bay of Bengal — much of it undelivered to China but charged to her wartime lend-lease account.” It was McCarthy’s assessment that U.S. policymakers lost China. Liberals who might dismiss this view as “McCarthyism” should consider the assessment of one young congressman, John F. Kennedy, who told the House on January 25, 1949, “The responsibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State. The continued insistence that aid would not be forthcoming, unless a coalition government with the Communists were formed, was a crippling blow to the national government.” Five days later JFK added: “What our young men had saved, our diplomats and our President have frittered away.”
That makes total sense, and I have never seen it explained that way. I had commonly read in the history books that the Chinese Communists had the upper hand over Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists because they had been fighting the Japanese. So that does seem to be true, indirectly. What these history books neglect to mention is that the Soviets ensured the defeated Japanese occupation force's weapons and supplies would fall into Chinese Communist hands. So what I previously read from the history books is more like a half-truth.
So it seems like you are claiming the US used a dirty trick on Chiang Kai-shek and lied to him, promising supplies if he would stop fighting the Communists, which weakened his position, but then those supplies were not sent.
You've obviously been reading much better history books than most, kudos. The conventional narrative doesn't hold up. Communizing China was a much higher priority than ending ending WW II. Indeed, it was necessary to prolong the war to achieve their goal of communizing China.
How exactly did prolonging the war help the Communists win in China? You did not really explain that part in your long post.
