Did you know that Hiroshma and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets?

Theres absolutley NO justification for an attack of that ferocity on ANY city whether the enemy of not. The US government of the day knew the power of the atom bomb , and knew that its a city filled with civilians and maybe a few military personnel. Every city has at least one base and its always been the same.
The US knew the power of the atom bomb due to testing , what they should have done is notify the Japanese that they will drop the bomb off shore to show them what one bomb can do, and if they don't withdraw their troops they will drop it on a major city like Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
To just drop it is an act of terrorism in the extreme no matter that your at war, The civilian population is an easy target for the military as they have no real way of defending themselves, at least the military have bunkers and such. and its easier to go for the soft targets.

BUt with hindsight war is war, decisions are made and the outcome can swing from good to bad in the blink of an eye , and its great that we can look back and argue the toss over something we have no control over today.

Originally posted by FlyersFan
Hello? You forget that THEY are the ones who started the war. THEY are the ones who were trying to take over soverign nations. OF COURSE they would have used those weapons on us, anywhere they wanted.

AGAIN -

The fact is that the Japanese started the war.
The fact is that they wouldn't surrender.
The fact is that Hiroshima was one big war machine - everyone was in it.
The fact is that the US dropping the bomb SAVED AMERICAN LIVES.

In a war against another country that attacked you that's all that matters.
Saving the lives of your own and winning the war.

Ah, the Japanese started WWII. I'll remember that the next time someone offers America's role in WWII as an example of American altruism and kindness.

Heh. So the fact that America was involved in lend-lease &c wasn't really an issue? That some of Pearl Harbour's fleet were on delivery missions to the Philippines really wasn't a sign that America had 'back door' involvement in the war?

Most of the countries that were involved in WWII before 1941 were 'war machines' with civilians involved in various aspects of the war effort. How is Japan any different than this? It's funny, but during pro-gun arguments on here, I see the quote attributed to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto used a lot. So post-1941, would Japan have been justified in frying Rosie the Riveter and the American population in general if given the opportunity?

They were one big machine aggressively trying to take over our country.

So I take it you'll support any Middle Eastern country's attempt to bomb Washington DC then?

[edit on 12-11-2008 by Merriman Weir]

My opinion on this matter is as follows.

For all the suffering and death that befell the people of Hiroshima And Nagasaki , i think the world would have been a far worse place with out the US having had dropped the bombs.

I think the Soviets would have carried on westwards , they had the biggest army the world had ever known and I dont think that a shattered Europe and a war weary US army would have been able to stop them, I happen to think that the H bombs did, not to mention countless lives of the allies and japanese if an invasion of mainland japan took place.

I also hasen to add that I have no doubt what so ever that had the japanese had such weapons that they would have thought twice about using them against the allies, not justification in itself but a sign of the times.

That what Total War is. You bomb and kill anything and everyone that affects your enemies ability to conduct war. In total war EVERY single aspect of a country is put towards the war effort and is a target. If that means targeting civilians with the intent to break the will of the people to fight thats what you do. Unless you lived through the times of WWII or WWI there is no way to make personal comparisons to modern times.

There are no rules. It is disgusting and savage. There is no morality in total war.

We will never know the results if those cities were not bombed. Maybe the war would have continued, maybe not. Maybe the USSR would have used nukes or prehaps the US would have been more willing to drop a bomb on moscow.

[edit on 12-11-2008 by drock905]

Originally posted by stinkhorn
reply to post by prototism

 

It was not atrocious, it was neceessary and justified. So civilians died, so what, that is war. War is necessary as well, it allows the winner to call the shots and thus make peace and prepare for the next war.

Why dont you look at stalins peacefull reign and his killing of 60 million disadents that would not follow communism, he killed civilians without dropping a single bomb, does that make it better?

Peacnik hippys make me laugh with their ignorance. War is never going to go away, people are greedy animals that always want more power and they will use others, start wars and murder civilians to see those ends always.

Thanks for reading through my other posts, to better allow your self to come to a rational conclusion on the type of person you assume me to be.

But you obviously either don't have the intelligence level to read though things fully, or don't want to, so you could have an excuse to patronize me and imply that I'm a "peacnik hippy". But if I had to bet, I would guess its the latter.

But Ill break it down for you. What my original statement DIDN'T say, is that, I agree; it was necessary. And I agree, it was justified. But where we disagree, is in the notion that it was not atrocious. The opinion that it "was justified, yet atrocious nonetheless", is a realistic opinion to have about the issue, because it accounts for both side of the coin.

Don't believe me? You can [attempt] to read through the rest of the thread, specifically noting my stance in my posts following the one you quoted.



[edit on 11/12/2008 by prototism]

[edit on 11/12/2008 by prototism]

reply to post by RKWWWW




What's your point ? Do you think McArthur and friends picked random targets ?

More, even if killing thousands of people was quite dirty, it saved nearly as many american liveS. The Japs were so fanaticized by their government that they thought they'd be tortured and killed one by one. In order to save your people, you sacrifice the others, right? That's the logic of a military commander, and whether you like it or not, it's too late to judge. War has been 6 months shorter this way, and who knows what could have happened ? don't try to rewrite history

Please, can you at least try be a little precise :
When you say that "saved american lives", you should say "american soldiers".
The point here beeing trying to differenciate the ones that agreed to kill/get killed from the civilians.
one side soldiers, other side civilians.

The allies had already drawn plans for the invasion of Japan and were anticipating it would go well into 1946.

Now, here, we're talking about 2 bombs. But according to their plans, by the end of october 1945, they would have dropped 8 more.

And who knows when they would have stopped. If Japan didn't surrender, they would have been the first country on the face of the earth to be completely wiped out.

As Drock905 previously said, it was a total war. Japanese civilians were participating in the war effort. Soldiers are needed to be at the front lines, not helping to building warships and warplanes. One less warplane assembly can save American soldiers, sailors, Marines, etc. Not to mention other Allied military personnel. Not to mention civilians being occupied by the Japanese which China suffered the most. At the last stage of the war when the American forces were nearing to the Japanese home islands, the Japanese children were being trained with bamboo sticks and armed with explosives to target American tanks that would land on the beaches of Japan. Children are taught to run to the tanks and blow themselves up. Think of it this way, America helped them kill themselves.

72 Million in total died because of two different groups of people. So if 200,000 people were needed to be sacrificed then so be it. Some one once quoted that "Hindsight is a good and a bad thing."

What happened has happened. No matter what decision you make someone is not going to like it.

One of my uncles fought in the pacific for nearly five yrs (My father and 6 other uncles fought in both the Pacific and Europe), and to the day he died he had no sympathy for the Japanese. Some of you talk about people from the war being more grown up and adult. I married into a dutch family who lived on the border by Germany. To this day they and many in there area hate the Germans with a passion that is unbelivable ( Personally I don't understand it). Like my father-in-law tells me till you have lived through the horrors of war and the brutallities of it you will never understand.

So watch out for the boggy man called HINDSIGHT.

Originally posted by deltaboy
As Drock905 previously said, it was a total war. Japanese civilians were participating in the war effort. Soldiers are needed to be at the front lines, not helping to building warships and warplanes. One less warplane assembly can save American soldiers, sailors, Marines, etc. Not to mention other Allied military personnel. Not to mention civilians being occupied by the Japanese which China suffered the most. At the last stage of the war when the American forces were nearing to the Japanese home islands, the Japanese children were being trained with bamboo sticks and armed with explosives to target American tanks that would land on the beaches of Japan. Children are taught to run to the tanks and blow themselves up. Think of it this way, America helped them kill themselves.

However, post-1941 American civilians were also participating in the war effort helping to build warships and warplanes. One less warplane assembly can save Japanese soldiers, sailors, Marines &c.

Again, the quote that many Americans seem so proud of "a gun behind every blade of grass" - where's the difference between that and the Japanese civilians being trained?

So, would the Japanese been justified and right in bombing America if given the opportunity? After all, an American surrender could have ended the war sooner and saved a lot of lives (both Allied and Axis) too.

What is most sad is that we were forced to choose between letting the aggressor, Japan, continue to slaughter people by the hundreds of thousands or drop the bomb.

Remember, we were not the aggressors, we were defending against an enemy who wanted to take over much of the world and would stop at nothing to do it.

In the end, that atrocity may have saved millions. Imagine if Japan had somehow gotten the upper hand and taken over the West at a time it was weakened by Hitler. The real atrocity was Japan attacking the West in the first place. They caused the bombs to be dropped. No not caused but guaranteed that they had to be dropped. Place the blame where it belongs which is with the aggressor.

It is a REAL atrocity that Japan directly caused so much suffering for its own people.

Japanese got nuked twice and it's their fault...

Ok...

I won't draw any parallels, but this argument is so flawed it's not even worth arguing over.

reply to post by Merriman Weir


O yeah thats their choice if they wanted to win. Look what they were doing in China and other parts of Asia. They have no qualms killing civilians. We showed that we don't either.

Originally posted by deltaboy
reply to post by Merriman Weir

 

O yeah thats their choice if they wanted to win. Look what they were doing in China and other parts of Asia. They have no qualms killing civilians. We showed that we don't either.

If you agree that it would have been right for Japan to have done so, then that's fair enough.

However, over the years I've found many Americans I've spoken to about Pearl Harbour and Nagasaki/Hiroshima to be strangely one-sided about whether it would have been right or justified for Japan to have, if the possibility arose. It's that kind of hypocrisy I'm trying to pin down - and it is hypocrisy.

When I read stuff about how all the civilians were being trained and were armed and yet America boasts of how it had 'x amount' of rifles and handguns in the hands of civilians at that time, and how Japan was this war machine that had civilians (gasp!) contributing to their war effort, which is no different than what the Allied civilians were doing, that just smacks of hypocrisy too and the idea that it's OK for America to do things but not anyone else.

Also, I think the idea of Japan actually being the aggressors as if America was an innocent party pre-Pearl Harbour is pretty misleading given the involvement America already had at that point in time.

Originally posted by DataWraith
Theres absolutley NO justification for an attack of that ferocity on ANY city whether the enemy of not.

Kinda like the Rape of Nanking, huh? Japanese Army did a real number on the population of that city.

Link to source.

BEIJING, March 6 -- The Japanese government should acknowledge that thousands of foreign women were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japanese troops in World War II, Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said Tuesday.

"I believe the Japanese government should face up to this part of history, take the responsibility and seriously view and properly handle this issue," Li said at a news conference on the sidelines of China's legislature, the National People's Congress. "History in my view is a strong progressive force. It should not become a burden that impedes progress."

Source.

Researchers who have been investigating Japan’s germ warfare experiments on Chinese civilians during World War II visited Los Angeles on Monday to urge the U.S. to release documents that they say would shed light on that chapter in history.

Survivors of those experiments have endured six decades of suffering...

...as many as 12,000 people died in Japanese laboratories after they were infected with anthrax, cholera, typhoid and plague, and that more than 250,000 civilians were killed as a result of Japanese field tests in the Chinese countryside...

Source.

From the invasion of China in 1937 to the end of World War II, the Japanese military regime murdered near 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most probably almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese...

...How many Indonesian forced laborers were actually conscripted by the Japanese is unknown. Estimates run as high as 1,500,000..

...We do know that 5,400,000 Koreans were conscripted for labor beginning in 1939 (line 119), but how many died can only be roughly estimated...

...From diverse sources it is clear that Japan conscripted over a 1,000,000 forced laborers from Manchuria... 100,000 to 200,000 Manchurian dead ...

...For the Burma-Thailand railroad, and for Indonesia, Korea, and Manchuria, 600,000 to 1,610,000 Asian forced laborers died...

... the overall Japanese democide in World War II can now be estimated ... This gives a total democide of 3,056,000 to 10,595,000 with a likely mid-total of 5,964,000 people killed.

Source.

In the past forty-five years, China and other countries have allowed the Japanese war crimes to be forgotten. In fact, the only constant reminders of the victims of World War II in Asia were the events commemorating the Japanese who were killed by the atomic bomb dropped by the United States...

Nanking fell to the Japanese. In the next six weeks, the Japanese committed the infamous Nanking Massacre, or the Rape of Nanking, during which an estimated 300,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed, and 20,000 women were raped...

...During the Nanking Massacre, the Japanese committed a litany of atrocities against innocent civilians, including mass execution, raping, looting, and burning... the chilling evidence of this historical tragedy is indisputable...

...a large number of refugees tried to escape from the Japanese by trying to cross the Yangtze River. They were trapped on the east bank because no transportation was available; many of them tried to swim across the river. Meanwhile, the Japanese arrived and fired at the people on the shore and in the river. A Japanese soldier reported that the next day he saw an uncountable number of dead bodies of adults and children covering the whole river. He estimated that more than 50,000 people were killed at this tragic incident of the Nanking massacre...

...the streets were crowded with more than 100,000 refugees or injured Chinese soldiers. The Japanese relentlessly fired at these people. The next morning, tanks and artilleries entered the city and killing of people continued. Dead bodies covered the two major streets of the city. The streets became "streets of blood" ...

...In some cases, the Japanese poured gasoline onto the captives and burned them alive. In some cases, poison gas was used...

...the victims were largely civilians. Japanese soldiers invented and exercised inhumane and barbaric methods of killing. The brutalities included shooting, stabbing, cutting open the abdomen, excavating the heart, decapitation (beheading), drowning, burning, punching the body and the eyes with an awl, and even castration or punching through the vagina...

...An estimated 20,000 women were raped by the Japanese soldiers during the six weeks of the Nanking Massacre, most were brutally killed afterwards..

...The Japanese looted all the storehouses and seized virtually everything from the civilians...

...The denial of the Nanking Massacre started around 1972, when the right-wing political force in Japan began to rise...

Source.

NANKING MASSACRE (December, 1937) ... Over a thousand men were rounded up and marched to the banks of the Yangtze river where they were lined up and gunned to death to give practice in machine-gun traversing fire. Thousands of captured Chinese soldiers, many wounded, were simililary murdered. In the following six weeks, the Nanking Red Cross units alone, buried around 43,000 bodies. Between December 12 and January 10 six different charity groups buried a total of 195,249 bodies. About 20,000 women and girls had been raped, most were then murdered...

...HONG KONG ATROCITIES (December 25, 1941) ... Intoxicated with the spirit of victory, the Japanese troops showed no mercy to their victims. At Eucliff, fifty-three prisoners were shot, bayoneted, some beheaded and their bodies rolled down the cliff...On Christmas morning, around 200 drunken Japanese approached St. Stephen's College, now a sanctuary for ninety-six wounded soldiers. Barring the front door was the head medic, Dr. George Black. 'You can't come in here' he called out, 'this is a hospital'. With deliberate aim, one of the soldiers raised his rifle and shot the doctor through the head. As the drunken mob surged into the hospital ward, the body of Dr Black was repeatedly bayoneted as he lay at the door...

... (The Chinese Department of Defence claims that 1,319,659 Chinese soldiers were killed between 1937 and 1945. It estimates the number of Chinese civilians killed during this period at over 30,000,000)...

Source.

Pearl Harbor Raid, 7 December 1941 --
The 7 December 1941 Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor was one of the great defining moments in history. A single carefully-planned and well-executed stroke removed the United States Navy's battleship force as a possible threat to the Japanese Empire's southward expansion. America, unprepared and now considerably weakened, was abruptly brought into the Second World War as a full combatant...

...Within a short time five of eight battleships at Pearl Harbor were sunk or sinking, with the rest damaged. Several other ships and most Hawaii-based combat planes were also knocked out and over 2400 Americans were dead. Soon after, Japanese planes eliminated much of the American air force in the Philippines, and a Japanese Army was ashore in Malaya...

I wonder if any of this influenced the decision to end this slaughter by the brutal Imperial Japanese forces? I wonder how the Japanese apologists of today would have viewed the Japanese and the bombing to stop them had they actually been the victims of the Japanese aggression?

...

Originally posted by Chrysalis
Japanese got nuked twice and it's their fault...

You must be totally unfamiliar with their history? You should study it before passing judgment. Just saying

reply to post by RKWWWW


You imply that the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima was an atrocity. I'd really like for you to think about that a bit.

Which part of that do you find offensive? What part of bombing these cities constitute the atrocity part?

The numbers of people who died?

The instants in which they died?

Do you fully realize what you're suggesting?

Let's look at a battle for perspective. The battle of Okinawa, just weeks prior, cost 38,000 Americans wounded, 12,000 killed or missing, 107,000 Japanese soldiers killed, and 100,000 Japanese civilians killed. You'll recall the citizen survivors, especially women who would gather their baby in their arms, take a child by the hand, and jump off the cliffs to their certain death, to the horror of Americans who witnessed this insanity.

Now look up the total number killed in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There were more killed during the 81 days on Okinawa that both nuclear bombs together killed.

The most accurate estimates of invading the Japanese homeland was to cost the Americans one million casualties, and untold millions of Japanese.

Now you sharpen your pencil and tell me if a couple hundred thousand dead is the greater atrocity, or is untold millions of certain deaths on the same people the greater atrocity?

For a change-up, use pure logic.

Which?

"It was very difficult to do one's duty. I was considered a barbarian because at the storming of Praga, 7,000 people were killed. Europe says I am a monster. I myself have read this in the papers, but I would have liked to talk to people about this and ask them: is it not better to finish a war with the death of 7,000 people rather than to drag it on and kill 100,000?" Alexandr Suvarov 1794

I can assure you that had you been one of the one million casualties-to-come, you'd not think this as an atrocity.

And if you do, then by preferring maybe fifty-fold deaths done more deliberately, then that is what I would call an atrocity.

Sometimes, to be most merciful, one must be most ruthless. Saves lives, ends conflicts quickly with minimal casualties, while extending the war will cost much more suffering.

"Unlimited war means limited casualties, limited war means unlimited casuaties." Michael Riggs Edicts of Ares

Originally posted by Chrysalis
Please, can you at least try be a little precise : When you say that "saved american lives", you should say "american soldiers".

How about YOU try to be more precise: Dropping the bomb saved American lives .. Americans who volunteereed to be soldiers to fight an invading force from Japan that attacked America. The Americans that were saved were just that .. AMERICANS.

For you to try to insinuate that somehow saving Americans was less important because they were soldiers is pathetic. These were Americans who signed up and went to war because they had to - because we were attacked.

Originally posted by Merriman Weir
Japan was this war machine that had civilians (gasp!) contributing to their war effort, which is no different than what the Allied civilians were doing, that just smacks of hypocrisy too and the idea that it's OK for America to do things but not anyone else.

Unfreak'n believable. :shk:

If you can't see the difference then you seriously need to get a new pair of glasses.

The Americans and allies were working TO DEFEND THEMSELVES against a country that had invaded. The Japanese were working to INVADE AND TAKE OVER a soverign country.

Originally posted by Merriman Weir
an American surrender could have ended the war sooner and saved a lot of lives (both Allied and Axis) too.

:shk: We were invaded. We kicked their butt. It's THEIR OWN FAULT. There is no reason for us to have surrendered to help them out.
They caused the problem. We ended it.

The end.