Japan Should Say, "Thank YOU" for The Bomb!

Can we get "real" here?

Japan was broken. The population was malnourished, starving and experiencing major epidemics they were more susceptible such as tuberculosis and typhus.
And mobilizing what ever civilian force they could with spears to fight the invasion would have just led to how many more Japanese deaths?

Yes, 1 million American lives would have been sacrificed for the invasion of Japan,
but no one seems to consider how many more Japanese lives, military and civilian would have been sacrificed had it not been for a rude awakening, the bomb. Violent deaths. Deaths from disease and famine.

And then there was MacArthur's benevolent administration that managed the epidemics and nutrition problems as well as rebuild Japan to a modern, competitive nation.

It is therefore concluded Japan should say,
"Thank You for the Bomb" that saved Japanese lives! ​

Moi

r > g

View attachment 43365
Across an immense, unguarded, ethereal border, Canadians, cool and unsympathetic,
regard our America with envious eyes and slowly and surely draw their plans against us.​

 

Hasn't Japan been doing exactly that?

Most Japanese who were alive then understand that the two bombs were an unfortunate necessity brought about by an out-of-control military. Since then, Japan has been one of America's staunchest allies.

 

Japan was ready to surrender and gave terms. The US rejected those terms and demanded unconditional surrender. The US, committing a war crime, dropped two atomic weapons upon Japanese civilians. Japan agreed to the unconditional surrender. Later, the US gave Japan the terms they had asked for anyway, the main one being that the Japanese got to keep their emperor and that he wouldn't stand trial for war crimes.

There was never any need to drop the bombs. The US was never going to lose one million men invading Japan. The Japanese would never have had to recruit children to fight off the invasion. Peace could have been achieved on reasonable terms.

Now war is hell and civilians often suffer the most, and WW2 was no different in this respect, so the US doesn't need to feel any special guilt. However, let's not ignore the facts and pretend like one side of the conflict were demons and the other angels.

 

Remember that Japan attacked us first, they had no right to dictate the terms of their surrender.

 

You're the one ignoring the facts. Japan didn't surrender after the first bomb. This was a country whose defense was kamikaze. They also so brainwashed their citizens that women on Saipan jumped off cliffs rather than surrender to American soldiers. Some solitary WWII Japanese soldiers on Pacific islands didn't come out of hiding until the 1970's not knowing the war ended!

 

This is about the most blatant piece of parochial jingoistic nonsense I have ever read.

Next, you'll be saying that Poland should be thanking Germany for getting rid of all those Jews.

 

Agree 100%. Additionally this absurd 'one million lives' would have been saved myth has become so ingrained in the US collective psyche that it has become 'truth'. America lost a total of slightly over 400,000 in ALL theatres during the entire war, so where this '1 million' number came from is a mystery-the Department of Scaremongering, Excuses and Propaganda, perhaps?

 

You rebut my argument nor did you question the facts I presented. Japan wanted to surrender. They wanted to surrender with conditions, and the US wanted unconditional surrender. My point is that there never was going to be an invasion of Japan. The US was never going to lose one million men attacking the island. Japan was never going to send children to attack invading US troops.

The only issue to debate is whether it was worth dropping the bombs just to get an unconditional surrender, especially when the US gave the Japanese the conditions they were asking for anyway. I'm not saying the US is some evil country or anything, since, like I said, war is hell and civilians often get the worst. My point is that the truth should be told so that we can learn from the past. This myth that Japan would never surrender until overwhelming force was demonstrated to them is false. The only thing at issue was the conditions of the surrender.

 

Even if I accept your logic, who cares? Why kill those civilians over nothing? The US gave them the terms they wanted anyway. The US committed a war crime. Yes, war is hell and pretty much every side in every war does terrible things. That doesn't mean we should pretend they never happened or that they were necessary.

 

Japan had by then been firebombed into ash, had no fuel to power her military and was effectively starving. The bombs were dropped to impress Stalin with American (imported) technological prowess. He had outlived his usefulness and had reverted to 'enemy' status-what better way to show him who the real boss was but with a couple of really loud bangs?

"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds" Robert Oppenheimer.

 

Pablum. Anyone advocating surrender was in very real danger of being assassinated. (Even after the two bombs, the Emperor nearly was!)

 

If anyone is really interested in the casulty estimates back in 1945, I recommend looking at a memorandum written on 15 June 1945 by the Joint War Plans Committe. This memo was then discussed with Truman.
There were three different campaigns open for debate. Depending on which campaign would be given the ok, the casulties were estimated as follows.

Memorandum For The President
Subject: Campaign against Japan
[...]
Southern Kyushu followed by Tokyo Plain: Killed in Action 40,000 (including WIA & MIA total number: 193,500)
Southern Kyushu - Northwestern Kyushu: Killed in Action 25,000 (including WIA & MIA total number: 132,500)
Southern Kyushu - Northwestern Kyushu - Tokyo Plain: Killed in Action 46,000 (including WIA & MIA total number: 220,000)

Said memo can be found in:
Martin J. Sherwin: A World Destroyed, Stanford 2003.
Sherwin is a professor em. of American history and an internationally respected expert on the history of the A bombs.


The one million is a myth.
What we are dealing with here in this thread is the power of a state narrative.
Very often the results of (sometimes decades of) historical research and public opinion differ significantly.

 

It comes from research, deductive reasoning, and common sense...therefore, I understand why you are not capable of figuring it out.

 

You mean 'guesswork'. Yep, that works every time.

 

I don't feel especially strongly about this issue but I've heard the argument, that Japan wanted to surrender, many times and it's always the same (all they wanted was to keep their emperor...which is only partially true) and these claims are never substantiated. There isn't even an attempt to document any of this.

The story behind the supposed Japanese surrender is somewhat different as the real historical record shows (http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/52502)
The issue is contentious, though moot at this point, but I just want to present an alternative to a hoary old claim (not fact, but a claim) that Japan wanted to surrender and America wouldn't let them, all because it wanted to demonstrate to Russia the power of it's atomic bombs (I'm sure this was a side consideration
when considering the coming Cold War with the emerging Soviet Union, who soon enough, had their own A-bombs).

But the prospect of the loss of many, many American lives (a million lives? probably not but that's immaterial) in a long protracted siege of Japan (a super Okinawa situation, if you will) was the main consideration in a war that had already gone on too long and cost too many American lives.
Any other suggestion is mere unsupported conjecture and ignores the context in which the decision was made. That Japan refused to surrender and it
actually took a second bomb on Japan to bring them to surrender, without a hope of dictating any terms, is proof the decision to end the war this way
was the right one to make.

I hope this meme that Japan would have surrendered if we'd let them finally goes away but I bet it never fully does as there is too much invested in finding
fault with the U.S. no matter what the facts suggest.

 

Doesn't make any sense. We could have simply annihilated large portions of Russia with them if we wanted to do that.

 

why did they not surrender after the first bomb then? They had 3 days.

 

I totally agree. Millions of Japanese and Allied lives were saved by the atomic bomb.

 

what many liberals like to forget in their bid to demonize the US is that there were two factions in Japan at that time. The Imperial faction was so weak that the emperor had to meet in secret with his advisers in order to even discuss surrender as they would have been killed by the military.

Liberals will also not mention that WW2 only happened less than a hundred years after the meiji restoration after centuries of tokugawa rule. Culturally Japan was still used to a figurehead emperor while real power was held by the warlords (a.k.a. shogun). This is what the situation had devolved into towards the end as the military wanted to keep on fighting. They would have just vince fostered the emperor and had his son take his place.

 

Suggestion to ALL regarding this thread.

Go find a WW2 Marine who fought the Japanese and ask him about the war, if they will even talk to you about it as most have buried the horror and won't. Until then you don't know JACK SH!T about the enemy.

 

Sorry, but it's well documented that the Japanese were ready to surrender as early as May of 1945. In the book The Decision to Use the Bomb by Gar Alperovitz, he documents that OSS Chief William Donovan reported to Truman in May and June that the Japanese were willing to surrender. Allen Dulles, subsequent Director of the CIA wrote in his 1966 book, The Secret Surrender, "On July 20, 1945, under instructions from Washington, I went to the Potsdam Conference and reported there to Secretary [of War] Stimson on what I had learned from Tokyo — they desired to surrender if they could retain the Emperor and their constitution as a basis for maintaining discipline and order in Japan after the devastating news of surrender became known to the Japanese people."

 

Revisionism at it's finest. Japan never offered terms for surrender before the bombs were dropped. They didn't offer surrender after the first one was dropped. After the 2nd one they weren't going to surrender until the Emperor intervened. If they wanted to surrender, why were the battles of Okinawa and Iwo Jima fought?

 

We didn't treat the Japanese like the Nazis treated the Jews. We treated Japan for what they ACTED as.. our mortal enemy. Today, Japan is a strong ally. Obviously we have NO issue with them as a race or a nation as such like Germany had with the Jews who were no threat to anyone.

 

More accurately, the US should say "Thank YOU" to Germany for starting WWII. Without the war, the US would have stayed in recession.

- - - Updated - - -

Japan attacked the US because they imposed an economic embargo on Japan. Japan had no oil of their own and had no real choice but to declare war on the US - the US attacked Japan first (economically and prosperity)
.

- - - Updated - - -

Look up cia japanese feelers. They are in the cia archives

- - - Updated - - -

All the generals who were fighting in the far east stated that there was no need to drop the bombs. Your emotional outburst is irrelevant.

 

Jeebus did that one guy directly cause a lot of Japanese to lose their lives with his farting around.