76 years ago today, on August 5, 1945, the first atomic bomb used in war was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan (activist, racist)

[BobNJ1960]

Originally Posted by paracord

Yep and then, in a world first, helped a former enemy we just buried to become a world power once again.

The USA is the only country in world history that doesn't plunder an enemy's territory and acquire its land mass. We help them back into the ally and world power that they are today.

We rebuilt many former enemy nations after WWii. Unprecedented move.

[Kracer]

And in 1946 scientists proposed dropping an A-bomb on the arctic to expose bare land, increase productivity and alter the climate as most of the extreme weather originated from the arctic. Cold nmeeting warm air, violent storms.

the only discussion was whether to set the bomb off on a platform or drop it from a plane.

"the science is settled"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Bureaucat]

Originally Posted by BobNJ1960

We rebuilt many former enemy nations after WWii. Unprecedented move.

I liked what Colin Powell said about America’s territorial demands after foreign wars.

“We only ask for enough ground to bury our dead”’

[Sprawling_Homeowner]

I posted this on August 7, 2020 in another Hiroshima thread

It got some unique reactions and it introduced me to some posters whose knowledge of history is impressive - maybe 1 or 2 persons.... which is rare around these parts.

Without further ado, a Sprawling_Homeowner re-run:

The war was essentially over. Japan had been sending peace feelers since the second half of 1944. Japan was willing to surrender and over time its conditions changed; earlier on it wanted to keep Korea but later it agreed to relinquish every square foot of Asian territory it had attained whether by annexation (Taiwan in 1895, Korea in 1910, Manchukuo in 1931/1937, the rest of its holdings in China, Southeast Asia, etc., through sheer military conquest).

Its ultimate condition was the preservation of the imperial house. For the Japanese of 1945 to see Hirohito arrested and tried and executed as a war criminal would have cause national revulsions not only 1945 heartland Americans would have reacted had they been present at the crucifixion of Christ.

Ultimately, the Allied occupation agreed to spare Hirohito and the imperial house, which means that this condition could have been agreed upon all along; "unconditional surrender" with Hirohito being left alone was what the Japanese had wanted and what the Japanese got in the end.

Japan's navy, by 1945, was no longer in existence. Its sources of raw materials almost wholly cut off. What the Europeans had tried to do to Nazi Germany but ultimately failed, the Allies - mainly, the United States - succeeded in doing to Imperial Japan: blockading it into a corner.

The Allied bombing campaign of the late stages of the war ensured by the spring of 1945, every Japanese city with at least 30,000 inhabitants had been struck by bombing, minus Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kyoto (the ancient Imperial capital), and Kokura. The March 9-10 firebombing of Tokyo caused at least 100k fatalities and Japanese civilians, desperate to escape the flames, jumped into the Sumida River, but the water was so hot the lucky survived with burns; other died, boiled alive.

Therefore, the argument that nuking Japan saved both U.S. and Japanese lives is a myth. There were pockets of resistance within the Japanese war cabinet that would have fought to the end, but there were rational voices which knew Japan would ultimately lose a war of attrition with the United States. The Japanese were also aware Germany had been defeated and that the Soviet Union, which had not yet entered the war against Japan, was not far from Japan's northernmost islands, and that the Soviets posed an existential threat to Japan far greater than even the might of the conventional military power of the United States did. Japanese culture at that time allowed for suicide over capture or surrender, but the Japanese leadership was never willing to let all of Japan be literally burned to the ground if that was the alternative to a negotiated surrender.

The Japanese leadership was not the only one paying attention to the Soviets. The United States was already sensing a new ideological conflict with the emergent superpower headed by Stalin. The Soviets had pushed the Wehrmacht back to Germany proper singlehandedly (on the battlefield; there was Lend-Lease, but it was the millions of Soviet troops which died in the eastern front that bore the brunt of the fighting that brought the German military machine to its knees) and already by Yalta and Potsdam, the United States was suspicious of Stalin and of its designs in the postwar world. The Allies met the Soviets at the Elbe, and Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" was already beginning to take shape. 45 years would elapse before the people of those eastern European nations would truly be free - a fate that the civilians who survived the war and lived beyond it in Berlin, London, Paris, and Amsterdam were spared.

Sensing Soviet designs on the Far East, the U.S. viewed the deployment of the atomic bombs not only to strike at Japan but to intimidate Moscow. It worked - until 1949.

There was also an element of revenge. Many posters have cited Pearl Harbor, but the civilian women and children - grandmothers and toddlers - living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki neither planned nor executed the strike of December 7, 1941. Other posters have cited Koreans and Korea, how America's future South Korean ally was oppressed by the Japanese during and before the war. That is factually correct - as is the fact that 1 of 7 residents of Hiroshima were ethnic Koreans, either those who came to Japan for work (and some by force) or their very young offspring, born in Japan.

There was also the element of racism. A President Trump-supporting conservative who considers Black Lives Matter to be a shameless and disgusting and hypocritical and deceitful scam, who derides "cancel culture," and who laughs at social justice warriors like myself does believe racism exists, but I also believe accusations of it should be used wisely.

Propaganda posters of the war can be easily found online. The Germans were depicted basically as a mongrel Hitler. Americans knew that Germans were almost a "brother people;" white, Europeans, Christians who had simply falled victim to an aberration known as Nazism. The Germans had produced Luther, Bach, Beethoven, and endless writers, philosophers, poets, composers, and other major contributors to European civilization, in the Renaissance, in the Reformation. And hundreds of thousands of Americans in the United States, notably in states like Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Texas, and Pennsylvania, were themselves ethnic Germans. General Dwight Eisenhower himself was born into a family of immigrants from Großrosseln, from which the Eisenhauer family departed en route to the New World.

But the Japanese were never depicted singly as Hirohito. The "***" was a slant-eyed, super-buck-toothed, subhuman creature designed to repulse, to confuse, and to evoke mockery. The Japanese were not differentiated between innocent civilians and the generals or the emperor. To the American mind of the 1940s, the Japanese were a mass, a monolith, a ubiquitous "other:" mysterious, inscrutable, and certainly untrustworthy oriental aliens speaking an unintelligible language, wearing strange garb, eating exotic foods, and following bizarre customs utterly unfamiliar and completely alien to Americans.

Many GIs of that time wanted to be deployed to Europe, because they thought that at least there they would be facing white Christian men "like us," soldiers who "look like us." They resented going to Asia as they viewed the Japanese as not human, as rat-like, as beastly, as unworthy of being opponents to the brave American soldier and Marine; once there, U.S. soldiers and Marines most definitely fought gallantly, bravely, and heroically. But the general attitude towards the Japanese was one of disdain, disgust, and of course, one desiring if not obsessed with payback for Pearl Harbor.

It is within this cultural, mental, and ideological context that the decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan was made. It has been debated whether President Truman would have authorized the nuking of Dresden, Berlin, or any other major German city. But the lens via which America viewed Japan in the 1940s was wholly different from the vantage point through which it viewed Germany.

As for the bombings, had Germany or Japan had an atomic bomb - only one, either country - and dropped it on Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Dallas, Houston, Boston, or New York - and yet, the United States somehow managed to win the war, would we all have learned that the German or Japanese nuking of an American city was a war crime or not?

[Roboteer]

Originally Posted by Sprawling_Homeowner

Japan was willing to surrender

Wrong as usual. Japan wanted to keep its warlike government in power and give them the power to restart the war when they were ready.

Many GIs of that time ... viewed the Japanese as not human, as rat-like, as beastly, as unworthy of being opponents to

Got any proof of this slur on our GIs?

[Ralph_Kirk]

Originally Posted by Kracer

And in 1946 scientists proposed dropping an A-bomb on the arctic to expose bare land, increase productivity and alter the climate as most of the extreme weather originated from the arctic. Cold nmeeting warm air, violent storms.

the only discussion was whether to set the bomb off on a platform or drop it from a plane.

"the science is settled"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Since neither happened, clearly that was not the only decision.

[Sprawling_Homeowner]

Originally Posted by Roboteer

Wrong as usual. Japan wanted to keep its warlike government in power and give them the power to restart the war when they were ready.

Another poster who hasn't studied history.

Originally Posted by Roboteer

Got any proof of this slur on our GIs?

Again: study history.

[Ralph_Kirk]

Originally Posted by Sprawling_Homeowner

I posted this on August 7, 2020 in another Hiroshima thread

It got some unique reactions and it introduced me to some posters whose knowledge of history is impressive - maybe 1 or 2 persons.... which is rare around these parts.

Without further ado, a Sprawling_Homeowner re-run:

The war was essentially over. Japan had been sending peace feelers since the second half of 1944. Japan was willing to surrender and over time its conditions changed; earlier on it wanted to keep Korea but later it agreed to relinquish every square foot of Asian territory it had attained whether by annexation (Taiwan in 1895, Korea in 1910, Manchukuo in 1931/1937, the rest of its holdings in China, Southeast Asia, etc., through sheer military conquest).

Its ultimate condition was the preservation of the imperial house. For the Japanese of 1945 to see Hirohito arrested and tried and executed as a war criminal would have cause national revulsions not only 1945 heartland Americans would have reacted had they been present at the crucifixion of Christ.

Ultimately, the Allied occupation agreed to spare Hirohito and the imperial house, which means that this condition could have been agreed upon all along; "unconditional surrender" with Hirohito being left alone was what the Japanese had wanted and what the Japanese got in the end.

Japan's navy, by 1945, was no longer in existence. Its sources of raw materials almost wholly cut off. What the Europeans had tried to do to Nazi Germany but ultimately failed, the Allies - mainly, the United States - succeeded in doing to Imperial Japan: blockading it into a corner.

The Allied bombing campaign of the late stages of the war ensured by the spring of 1945, every Japanese city with at least 30,000 inhabitants had been struck by bombing, minus Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kyoto (the ancient Imperial capital), and Kokura. The March 9-10 firebombing of Tokyo caused at least 100k fatalities and Japanese civilians, desperate to escape the flames, jumped into the Sumida River, but the water was so hot the lucky survived with burns; other died, boiled alive.

Therefore, the argument that nuking Japan saved both U.S. and Japanese lives is a myth. There were pockets of resistance within the Japanese war cabinet that would have fought to the end, but there were rational voices which knew Japan would ultimately lose a war of attrition with the United States. The Japanese were also aware Germany had been defeated and that the Soviet Union, which had not yet entered the war against Japan, was not far from Japan's northernmost islands, and that the Soviets posed an existential threat to Japan far greater than even the might of the conventional military power of the United States did. Japanese culture at that time allowed for suicide over capture or surrender, but the Japanese leadership was never willing to let all of Japan be literally burned to the ground if that was the alternative to a negotiated surrender.

The Japanese leadership was not the only one paying attention to the Soviets. The United States was already sensing a new ideological conflict with the emergent superpower headed by Stalin. The Soviets had pushed the Wehrmacht back to Germany proper singlehandedly (on the battlefield; there was Lend-Lease, but it was the millions of Soviet troops which died in the eastern front that bore the brunt of the fighting that brought the German military machine to its knees) and already by Yalta and Potsdam, the United States was suspicious of Stalin and of its designs in the postwar world. The Allies met the Soviets at the Elbe, and Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" was already beginning to take shape. 45 years would elapse before the people of those eastern European nations would truly be free - a fate that the civilians who survived the war and lived beyond it in Berlin, London, Paris, and Amsterdam were spared.

Sensing Soviet designs on the Far East, the U.S. viewed the deployment of the atomic bombs not only to strike at Japan but to intimidate Moscow. It worked - until 1949.

There was also an element of revenge. Many posters have cited Pearl Harbor, but the civilian women and children - grandmothers and toddlers - living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki neither planned nor executed the strike of December 7, 1941. Other posters have cited Koreans and Korea, how America's future South Korean ally was oppressed by the Japanese during and before the war. That is factually correct - as is the fact that 1 of 7 residents of Hiroshima were ethnic Koreans, either those who came to Japan for work (and some by force) or their very young offspring, born in Japan.

There was also the element of racism. A President Trump-supporting conservative who considers Black Lives Matter to be a shameless and disgusting and hypocritical and deceitful scam, who derides "cancel culture," and who laughs at social justice warriors like myself does believe racism exists, but I also believe accusations of it should be used wisely.

Propaganda posters of the war can be easily found online. The Germans were depicted basically as a mongrel Hitler. Americans knew that Germans were almost a "brother people;" white, Europeans, Christians who had simply falled victim to an aberration known as Nazism. The Germans had produced Luther, Bach, Beethoven, and endless writers, philosophers, poets, composers, and other major contributors to European civilization, in the Renaissance, in the Reformation. And hundreds of thousands of Americans in the United States, notably in states like Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Texas, and Pennsylvania, were themselves ethnic Germans. General Dwight Eisenhower himself was born into a family of immigrants from Großrosseln, from which the Eisenhauer family departed en route to the New World.

But the Japanese were never depicted singly as Hirohito. The "***" was a slant-eyed, super-buck-toothed, subhuman creature designed to repulse, to confuse, and to evoke mockery. The Japanese were not differentiated between innocent civilians and the generals or the emperor. To the American mind of the 1940s, the Japanese were a mass, a monolith, a ubiquitous "other:" mysterious, inscrutable, and certainly untrustworthy oriental aliens speaking an unintelligible language, wearing strange garb, eating exotic foods, and following bizarre customs utterly unfamiliar and completely alien to Americans.

Many GIs of that time wanted to be deployed to Europe, because they thought that at least there they would be facing white Christian men "like us," soldiers who "look like us." They resented going to Asia as they viewed the Japanese as not human, as rat-like, as beastly, as unworthy of being opponents to the brave American soldier and Marine; once there, U.S. soldiers and Marines most definitely fought gallantly, bravely, and heroically. But the general attitude towards the Japanese was one of disdain, disgust, and of course, one desiring if not obsessed with payback for Pearl Harbor.

It is within this cultural, mental, and ideological context that the decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan was made. It has been debated whether President Truman would have authorized the nuking of Dresden, Berlin, or any other major German city. But the lens via which America viewed Japan in the 1940s was wholly different from the vantage point through which it viewed Germany.

As for the bombings, had Germany or Japan had an atomic bomb - only one, either country - and dropped it on Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Dallas, Houston, Boston, or New York - and yet, the United States somehow managed to win the war, would we all have learned that the German or Japanese nuking of an American city was a war crime or not?

References?

[Sprawling_Homeowner]

Originally Posted by Ralph_Kirk

References?

The Decision To Use The Atomic Bomb

[Minethatbird]

Originally Posted by bus man

This is something that is often overlooked, the fact that Japanese civilian casualties would have been absolutely horrendous if the Americans had had to invade the home islands. Not only that, but if the war had ground on for another month or two (in the absence of the atomic bombs), Hiroshima and Nagasaki still would have been bombed, with incendiaries, and many of the people whom the atomic bombs killed would have been killed anyway. Not to mention, the extra time would have enabled the U.S. to also bomb Kokura as well as many other small cities and large towns throughout the country. If anything, the overall national devastation would have been even worse without the bombs than it was historically.

I have seen clips from some of the islands we attacked .... Japanese women jumping of cliffs with their babies.