Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bad choices-only bad no good choices in WW2.

My view always has & will be that President Harry S. Truman should've dropped the atom bomb(s) elsewhere in Japan with fewer civilian deaths, he did what ended the war. Had it gone to a ground war with Japan, many American & Allied soldiers would've been killed or wounded & more Japanese civilians would've been killed & wounded. The Japs would've used women & kids in combat, armed with pitchforks & sticks-they were using teenage boys in kamikaze missions. Most Hiroshima & Nagasaki survivors have said that they don't blame the U.S. for dropping the atom bombs because they understand why it happened. President Harry S. Truman had no animosity towards those killed in Hiroshima & Nagasaki-he did what would end the war. If Japan & Germany had the atom bombs, they would've used them against us. Japanese had Bushido code or Samurai way. Japs would fight to the death & for most surrender was dishonorable. Sometimes Japanese soldiers would pretend to surrender & when American soldiers tried to take them prisoner,the Japanese soldiers would drop grenades in suicide missions. If you see WW2 footage, Japanese POW were often wearing only their underwears when taken prisoner so as to delete possibility of grenades being used. Japanese famliies sometimes committed suicide by jumping off of cliffs. Hara-Kiri was committed by Japanese soldiers & captains who rather commit suicide than surrender.

Imperial Japan used biological warfare against China such as plague, typhoid, anthrax, along with Shiro Ishi's parachuted flea bombs-similar to daisy cutters used during the Vietnam War only that they had fleas which carried diseases. There was the Bataan Massacre, Rape of Nanking, bayonetting Allied POW, etc. Hiroshima & Nagasaki were a continuation of the policy both sides had in believing would end the war which was bombing cities with the hope the other side would surrender. Tokyo, Kobe, Yokohama & other Japanese cities were firebombed & so many civilians were killed because homes were made of paper & wood. Hiroshima & Nagasaki continue to get most of the coverage so long after the war.

Yes, the children killed in Hiroshima & Nagasaki with their moms are innocent war victims. With WW2, there were only bad no good choices regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A worse decision would've been to go to a ground war with Japan because more Japanese civilians would've been killed and wounded in house to house fighting and many Americans would've been killed and wounded in ground war. Regardless of whether whether 1 believes as I do that President Harry S. Truman should've dropped the atom bomb(s) elsewhere in Japan with fewer civilian deaths & woundings or believe President Harry S. Truman's decision's right, we must not harbor animosity towards the victims. Hiroshima & Nagasaki survivors have said that they don't believe we need to apologize for the atom bombs being dropped but that we should not harbor animosity towards them. See article by Patrick J. Buchanan, Hiroshima, Nagasaki & Christian morality

 

As long as wars have been with us, it's people who do not want to be part of wars who often end up being the 1s killed and wounded as happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If people want to say that dropping the atom bombs ended the war, then that's 1 thing. But again, let's not call it a good or right decision because there were no good or right choices, there were only bad choices. Making decisions which kills and wounds hundreds of thousands of people ends the war but again they remain bad decisions. Catholicism is a minority faith in Japan as majority are Shinto and Buddhist. The Shoguns had expelled the Catholic missionaries & Christianity didn't get many in Japan. The 2 Asian nations with most of Christians especially Catholics would be India and China but % wise-Korea if not mistaken, 2nd to the Phillipines has most # of Christians and think Taiwan and Vietnam are others. The city in Japan with the largest Catholic population was Nagasaki-among the group killed in the atom bombings were Chinese and Koreans (some Catholics) who were often slave laborers in Nagasaki as Korea had been a Japanese colony from 1910-45. Catholic survivors of Nagasaki have usually said that while they believe the atom bombs should've been dropped elsewhere in Japan with fewer civilian deaths, most don't blame President Harry S. Truman for dropping the atom bombs with belief he did what he believed would end the war, that war alone is a sin and that there were only bad choices no good 1s in WW2.

 

I think saying all choices of war are bad is possibly true on a moral scale but in a realistic one certain decisions are better than others, many people in Nazi Germany chose to fight back against the Nazis by killing them now even if you think killing is wrong calling a rebellion against authoritarian regimes could hardly be considered wrong. We could go for days arguing if dropping an atomic bomb was the best course of action but we cannot predict accurately other scenarios. What we do know is that the Japanese military at the time was killing many innocent civilians by either sending people to act as Kamakazis or starving the Chinese people, people made a choice to end this as quickly as possible, America could of committed mass genocide but they chose not to, hell even the British dropped bombs on Nazi Germany to put up a fight and this was a time when they were getting blitzed routinely. I wouldn't knock anyone's methods as it was a dark time with a relentless enemy that would of possibly done worse to their citizens if intervention wasn't taken.

 

Don't disagree with you on results as atom bombs did end the war and if Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had them, they'd have used them. Main point here isn't to discuss the atom bombs per se but to say that it ended the war as a ground war would've been a worse choice and let's not call it a good or right choice because there were no good choices only bad 1s in this war. Yes killing some1 who is trying to harm you is self-defense and you're right that we must not have authoritarian regimes in power and have them destroyed. When something results in innocents being killed as what almost always happens in wars, we must not celebrate it. We can agree that the atom bombs ended the war, but the killing of 180,000 + people including children to end the war is not something to celebrate and we should be troubled by the deaths of civilians.

 

Dropped them where in Japan?

Those were very expensive and hard to make bombs. Saying they should have been dropped somewhere else in Japan is silly. They were dropped on military targets. Both cities contained troop formations, military HQ, factories, etc.

 

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were attacked as both cities had been untouched by war. There were many places in Japan where the atom bombs could've been dropped with fewer civlian deaths but that is non-topic. My choice would've been a less bad choice as there'd be several thousand civilians killed as opposed to 180,000+ but it makes no difference. Main point again is that there were only bad no good choices during WW2. Allies had considered dropping atom bombs on Germany but Germany surrendered in May 1945-if the war with Germany had continued into August 1945 as it did with Japan, then nuclear/atom bombs would've been dropped on Germany. Both Allies ande Axis cities such as London, Coventry, Dresden, Tokyo, etc. had been bombed and many civilians were killed and wounded. Hiroshima and Nagasaki continued policy of bombing cities with surrender hope only that it involved atomic/nuclear weapons.

 

President Harry S. Truman's grandson Clifton Truman Daniel visited Hiroshima in August 2012 and with survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Media reported that he had visited Japan to understand what his grandfather's decision was but media didn't report his opinion. My guess would be that Mr. Clfiton Truman Daniel believes his grandfather had bad no good choices available to him. If President Harry S. Truman had decided to drop the atom bombs elsewhere in Japan with few thousand deaths, whether it would have ended the war won't be known now. Again, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were attacked mainly because both cities had been untouched by the war before August 6 and 9, 1945. There were last battles after August 6th & 9th including in Manchuria where the USSR had declared war on Japan and took over Manchuria but Japan surrendered on August 12, 1945. War is a bad thing and while the dropping of atom bombs helped end the war, again it was a bad choice and there were no good only bad choices.

 

Three days after Hiroshima the Emperor was holding a meeting with top military and political leaders. One of them was arguing that the Americans couldn't possibly have another atomic bomb. At that moment one of his aides walked in and announced that Nagasaki had been hit. The Emperor quietly told them to contact the allies and tell them that Japan would surrender immediately, that his people had suffered enough. This is one of the big reasons he was able to keep his throne. That and MacArthur understood that he needed the Emperor if he was going to be able to reconcile the Japanese people to what had happened.

 

the Japanese were building their own bomb. to use on who????

 

In an ideal world, your comments are 100% correct. In the real world, this was the first attempt at delivering a nuclear bomb. Practicing an event is always a lot easier than “real life”. The variables increase exponentially. There wasn’t a Youtube in 1945. If you bomb a forest and there was no one to see it, did you really bomb a forest? Hopefully, mankind has learned from the experience should there ever be a next time.

 

Americans dropped the bomb on Japan to show the Soviet Union what's up.

 

they were already making their own bomb from spies inside Alamogordo

 

Truman was following his Talmudic beliefs by nuking the biggest Christian city on East Asia.

Japan had tried to surrender many months before.

The whole war with Japan was a scam by the super-rich who made out like bandits on the war.


The top headline reads, "Japanese May Strike over Weekend!"
The article even predicted the timing of the attack accurately - eight days before it happened! The rest of the story shows how our government was aware of the oncoming attack.

The war people managed to destroy almost all the evidence, including going into the Hawaii hospitals and ripping off the front page of this newspaper. However, private Paul Brown, seeing what was going on, reportedly managed to save his own front page of the Advertiser and hide it from the government. This is one of the very few known copies of that paper. It is supposedly hanging in the Punta Gorda Florida Military History Museum. At least it was, as of March of this year, I am told.

Joseph Leib, a former New Deal bureaucrat and retired newspaper correspondent, wrote an article which appeared in Hustler magazine, "Pearl Harbor:
The Story the Rest of the Media Won't Tell," in which he claimed that his friend, Secretary of State Hull, had confided to him on 29 November 1941 that J. Edgar Hoover and FDR knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor withing a few days, and that the President, over Hull's strident objections, was going to let this happen as a way to get the country into war.



On November 28th, 1941,( Saturday 8 days before the attack) Admiral Halsey with two task forces with Aircraft Carriers left Pearl Harbor and “gave orders to shoot down any plane seen in the air that was not known to be one of our own. We went into Condition 3, as I remember it, and kept that the entire way out until we got close to Wake and then I went into Condition 2. In other words, I tried to make full preparations for combat”
(Admiral Halsey, Hart Inquiry 1944.)
Also see USS Enterprise Battle Order Number One


“Admiral Standley: Then, then the reason for radio silence was that you suspected or you thought it possible that there might be a Japanese attack?
“Admiral Halsey : (Commanding the Aircraft Carrier Enterprise): Exactly.”
(Proceedings of the Roberts Commission, pp. 619-620 (Roberts))

 

I was curios so I did some math, 60,000,000 million people dies in WW2, two A-bombs 250,000, that is .004% of the total war dead. The fire bombings of tokyo that lasted for 30 days killed about a million. Of course most liberals want to forget about the Potsdam Ultimatum.

 

Hiroshima was picked as a military target because the city was unscathed by the bombing campaigns which had already destroyed most major Japanese cities and its geography was perfect to demonstrate the power of the atomic bomb because the city was surrounded by mountains. But even after Hiroshima, Emperor Hirohito still could not make up his mind about how to make peace with the US because he was only concerned about the preservation of his status as a divine god despite the large number of reported civilian casualties in Hiroshima and it took another bomb to have a desired effect on the Japanese leadership and Hirohito was ultimately responsible for the two atomic bombs dropped on the two Japanese cities.

 

As a historian I think I might give you guys some insight on what our scientific community thinks. First of all, when they tested the first nuklear weapon, nobody was sure, what was gonna happen. Some scientists back then thought, that there is a good chance of the entire world blowing up. Either way the first nuklear weapon would have been dropped or tested at some point. WW2 just made it happen faster. So the idea that this fear was gonna stop everything is a myth.

Secondly you have to understand that back then the bombings of cities casualty rates were relatively low. Fatality rates of 1 - 5% usually during bombings. Germany, Britain and other major superpowers were prepared for attacks, hence the "low" numbers. One of the worst fatality rates in WW2 in Europe was Hamburg. It actually had a fatality rate slightly higher with 7% (if I remember correctly), which was one of the worst bombings of WW2 because the citizens were not prepared for such a massive attack.

Although the fatality rate was unreal because of the use of nuclear weapons, most historians agree - as sick as it may sound - that it probably saved Japanese lives because the war came to an end so soon. You have to keep in mind that the bombing of Berlin or Hamburg was much worse than the bombing of Tokio. Also because of the nuklear weapons the UdSSR declared war on Japan shortly after, and Japan was forced to give up even quicker. A little note: Japan and the UdSSR (or now Russia) are officially still at war. They never signed a piece agreement.

The thing is, that we are smarter after it's done and can determent only rater late, whether any presidents decision was good or not. In the Korea conflict Truman said, after his generals told him to use nuklear weapons, "all those children" and he therefore decided not to use nuklear weapons in Korea. Many historians believe now that this was a mistake, because of the continues bombings and the fact that Koreans were not prepared for such a war, and it lead to even more people dying than necessary. Keep in mind the (relatively small) fatality numbers from WW2 due to bombings, and now think about the fact that 20 - 25% of the Koreans (on average) died because of bombing.

Now we believe that actually in Korea less people might have died if Truman wouldn't have thought of the "children" and simply done what his generals said. But imagine what a hard decision it must have been back then.

The truth is this: In war nobody can really make a right decision and in the end there are no real winners. In the end everybody looses something and wars ought to be avoided at all costs.

 

Worse than Tokyo? The Firebombing of Tokyo was the most destructive bombing raid in history.

The USSR didn't declare war because of the nukes. The US had paid the USSR to attack Japan.

 

in essence your right. there were 4 cities consided that day. Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama and Kokura.The possibility of bombing the Emperor's palace was also discussed. Hiroshima was the only target CAVU. that's why it was chosen. The results of the Targeting Committee's deliberations were presented to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Chief of Staff George Marshall on May 30, 1945. Stimson objected to the inclusion of Kyoto and vetoed its inclusion. General Lesley Groves attempted to get Kyoto reinstated but ultimately substituted Nagasaki.
the Army was in charge. not Hirohito. after the first bomb the Army didn't believe the US could mass produce this weapon. and blew it off. so to speak. after the 2nd bomb attitudes changed
the famous (or infamous) surrender radio broadcast to the nation was not live. it was taped. the night before Army hot heads broke into the palace and tried to sieze it. but an air raid shut off the lights and it was not found.

 

The SU had just come out of a devestating experience in Europe. 25 million Russians/Soviets died because of the war against Germany. As you can imagine their first interest was not engaging in anther war with another super-power on the other side of their country. The nuklear weapons showed the SU that the US was about to win the war, and if they joined they could get back the islands they lost to Japan a couple years before. If I remember correcty Japan surrendered to the US (not the SU) unconditionally just one week or 10 days after the SU decleared war.

Any war-type scenario has many layers, and this is just one I thought I'd mention. I could imagine it's one not mentioned everywhere.

Bombing of any WW2 city was bad either way. No doubt about that, but if you'll research you'll find out that the casulties percentage wise are relaitvely low - especially compared to Korea. The problem is: If you bomb a city with 1 million inhabitants (or more) and you have 1% casulties, we're talking about a 10,000 people. So horrific numbers either way.

As bad as the bombing of Tokyo was, the percentage numbers are simply not as bad as the numbers later seen in Korea, because the Japanese were prepared for attacks...

 

I believe the bombs were dropped in the right places.
Tokyo would have been a major mistake as it may have killed the Emperor, this guaranteeing the war going to a bitter end.
Low casualties would probably have meant the same.
These bombs may well have been terrible, just not as terrible as what would have been.

 

Hirohito was rehabilitated in the post-war era and it's hard to imagine from his Gandhi-like image but he was the "decider" in the entire course of the conflict from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and he always agreed with the fascist faction of the army but his apologists claimed that he was mentally too weak to understand what was going on around him and he was misled by his evil advisers to perpetuate a myth that he was a pacifist who only wanted peace and non-violence.

 

the second one was unnecessary for sure. World War II was just awful all around everyone committed atrocities. That's why war should always be the last option, more often than not too many of the wrong people are held to pay.

 

New Details Emerge About Japan's Wartime A-Bomb Program

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — When a captured Nazi U-boat arrived at Portsmouth, N.H., toward the end of World War II, the American public was never told the significance of what was on board.

The German submarine was carrying 1,200 pounds of uranium oxide, ingredients for an atomic bomb, bound for Japan. Two Japanese officers on board were allowed to commit suicide.

from the LA Times.................http://articles.latimes.com/1997-06-01/news/mn-64618_1_atomic-bomb

[video=youtube;F1PvA6LOlhM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1PvA6LOlhM[/video]

IMO the 2nd bomb dropped was necessary

 

The US insisted on keeping the war going despite Japan's repeated efforts to stop it, so that they could nuke the biggest Christian city in East Asia.

The US president was a Talmudist, and killing Christians is of high importance for such people.

 

You said it well, especially the last sentence. Wrong people are often the 1s who are held to pay. President Harry S. Truman while the rest of his life believing he did what ended the war was troubled by the lives lost esp. the kids killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end war as again, he only bad choices to choose from.