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The REAL Reason America Used Nuclear Weapons Against Japan
Atomic Weapons Were Not Needed to End the War or Save Lives
Like all Americans, I was taught that the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end WWII and save both American and Japanese lives.
But most of the top American military officials at the time said otherwise.
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey group, assigned by President Truman to study the air attacks on Japan, produced a report in July of 1946 that concluded (52-56):
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
General (and later president) Dwight Eisenhower – then Supreme Commander of all Allied Forces, and the officer who created most of America’s WWII military plans for Europe and Japan – said:
The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.
Newsweek, 11/11/63, Ike on Ike
Eisenhower also noted (pg. 380):
In [July] 1945… Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. …the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude….
Admiral William Leahy – the highest ranking member of the U.S. military from 1942 until retiring in 1949, who was the first de facto Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and who was at the center of all major American military decisions in World War II – wrote (pg. 441):
It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
General Douglas MacArthur agreed (pg. 65, 70-71):
MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed …. When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.
Moreover (pg. 512):
The Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face ‘prompt and utter destruction.’ MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General’s advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary.
Similarly, Assistant Secretary of War John McLoy noted (pg. 500):
I have always felt that if, in our ultimatum to the Japanese government issued from Potsdam [in July 1945], we had referred to the retention of the emperor as a constitutional monarch and had made some reference to the reasonable accessibility of raw materials to the future Japanese government, it would have been accepted. Indeed, I believe that even in the form it was delivered, there was some disposition on the part of the Japanese to give it favorable consideration. When the war was over I arrived at this conclusion after talking with a number of Japanese officials who had been closely associated with the decision of the then Japanese government, to reject the ultimatum, as it was presented. I believe we missed the opportunity of effecting a Japanese surrender, completely satisfactory to us, without the necessity of dropping the bombs.
Under Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bird said:
I think that the Japanese were ready for peace, and they already had approached the Russians and, I think, the Swiss. And that suggestion of [giving] a warning [of the atomic bomb] was a face-saving proposition for them, and one that they could have readily accepted.
***
In my opinion, the Japanese war was really won before we ever used the atom bomb. Thus, it wouldn’t have been necessary for us to disclose our nuclear position and stimulate the Russians to develop the same thing much more rapidly than they would have if we had not dropped the bomb.
War Was Really Won Before We Used A-Bomb, U.S. News and World Report, 8/15/60, pg. 73-75.
He also noted (pg. 144-145, 324):
It definitely seemed to me that the Japanese were becoming weaker and weaker. They were surrounded by the Navy. They couldn’t get any imports and they couldn’t export anything. Naturally, as time went on and the war developed in our favor it was quite logical to hope and expect that with the proper kind of a warning the Japanese would then be in a position to make peace, which would have made it unnecessary for us to drop the bomb and have had to bring Russia in.
General Curtis LeMay, the tough cigar-smoking Army Air Force “hawk,” stated publicly shortly before the nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan:
The war would have been over in two weeks. . . . The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.
The Vice Chairman of the U.S. Bombing Survey Paul Nitze wrote (pg. 36-37, 44-45):
[I] concluded that even without the atomic bomb, Japan was likely to surrender in a matter of months. My own view was that Japan would capitulate by November 1945.
***
Even without the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seemed highly unlikely, given what we found to have been the mood of the Japanese government, that a U.S. invasion of the islands [scheduled for November 1, 1945] would have been necessary.
Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence Ellis Zacharias wrote:
Just when the Japanese were ready to capitulate, we went ahead and introduced to the world the most devastating weapon it had ever seen and, in effect, gave the go-ahead to Russia to swarm over Eastern Asia.
Washington decided that Japan had been given its chance and now it was time to use the A-bomb.
I submit that it was the wrong decision. It was wrong on strategic grounds. And it was wrong on humanitarian grounds.
Ellis Zacharias, How We Bungled the Japanese Surrender, Look, 6/6/50, pg. 19-21.
Brigadier General Carter Clarke – the military intelligence officer in charge of preparing summaries of intercepted Japanese cables for President Truman and his advisors – said (pg. 359):
When we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs.
Many other high-level military officers concurred. For example:
The commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations, Ernest J. King, stated that the naval blockade and prior bombing of Japan in March of 1945, had rendered the Japanese helpless and that the use of the atomic bomb was both unnecessary and immoral. Also, the opinion of Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was reported to have said in a press conference on September 22, 1945, that “The Admiral took the opportunity of adding his voice to those insisting that Japan had been defeated before the atomic bombing and Russia’s entry into the war.” In a subsequent speech at the Washington Monument on October 5, 1945, Admiral Nimitz stated “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war.” It was learned also that on or about July 20, 1945, General Eisenhower had urged Truman, in a personal visit, not to use the atomic bomb. Eisenhower’s assessment was “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing . . . to use the atomic bomb, to kill and terrorize civilians, without even attempting [negotiations], was a double crime.” Eisenhower also stated that it wasn’t necessary for Truman to “succumb” to [the tiny handful of people putting pressure on the president to drop atom bombs on Japan.]
British officers were of the same mind. For example, General Sir Hastings Ismay, Chief of Staff to the British Minister of Defence, said to Prime Minister Churchill that “when Russia came into the war against Japan, the Japanese would probably wish to get out on almost any terms short of the dethronement of the Emperor.”
On hearing that the atomic test was successful, Ismay’s private reaction was one of “revulsion.”
Why Were Bombs Dropped on Populated Cities Without Military Value?
Even military officers who favored use of nuclear weapons mainly favored using them on unpopulated areas or Japanese military targets ... not cities
For example, Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy Lewis Strauss proposed to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal that a non-lethal demonstration of atomic weapons would be enough to convince the Japanese to surrender … and the Navy Secretary agreed (pg. 145, 325):
I proposed to Secretary Forrestal that the weapon should be demonstrated before it was used. Primarily it was because it was clear to a number of people, myself among them, that the war was very nearly over. The Japanese were nearly ready to capitulate… My proposal to the Secretary was that the weapon should be demonstrated over some area accessible to Japanese observers and where its effects would be dramatic. I remember suggesting that a satisfactory place for such a demonstration would be a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood… I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height above such a forest… would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. It seemed to me that a demonstration of this sort would prove to the Japanese that we could destroy any of their cities at will… Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation…
It seemed to me that such a weapon was not necessary to bring the war to a successful conclusion, that once used it would find its way into the armaments of the world…
General George Marshall agreed:
Contemporary documents show that Marshall felt “these weapons might first be used against straight military objectives such as a large naval installation and then if no complete result was derived from the effect of that, he thought we ought to designate a number of large manufacturing areas from which the people would be warned to leave–telling the Japanese that we intend to destroy such centers….”
As the document concerning Marshall’s views suggests, the question of whether the use of the atomic bomb was justified turns … on whether the bombs had to be used against a largely civilian target rather than a strictly military target—which, in fact, was the explicit choice since although there were Japanese troops in the cities, neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki was deemed militarily vital by U.S. planners. (This is one of the reasons neither had been heavily bombed up to this point in the war.) Moreover, targeting [at Hiroshima and Nagasaki] was aimed explicitly on non-military facilities surrounded by workers’ homes.
Historians Agree that the Bomb Wasn’t Needed
Historians agree that nuclear weapons did not need to be used to stop the war or save lives.
As historian Doug Long notes:
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission historian J. Samuel Walker has studied the history of research on the decision to use nuclear weapons on Japan. In his conclusion he writes, “The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisors knew it.” (J. Samuel Walker, The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Historiographical Update, Diplomatic History, Winter 1990, pg. 110).
Politicians Agreed
Many high-level politicians agreed. For example, Herbert Hoover said (pg. 142):
The Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945…up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; …if such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the [atomic] bombs.
Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew noted (pg. 29-32):
In the light of available evidence I myself and others felt that if such a categorical statement about the [retention of the] dynasty had been issued in May, 1945, the surrender-minded elements in the [Japanese] Government might well have been afforded by such a statement a valid reason and the necessary strength to come to an early clearcut decision.
If surrender could have been brought about in May, 1945, or even in June or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the [Pacific] war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the gainer.
Why Then Were Atom Bombs Dropped on Japan?
If dropping nuclear bombs was unnecessary to end the war or to save lives, why was the decision to drop them made? Especially over the objections of so many top military and political figures?
One theory is that scientists like to play with their toys:
On September 9, 1945, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, was publicly quoted extensively as stating that the atomic bomb was used because the scientists had a “toy and they wanted to try it out . . . .” He further stated, “The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment . . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it.”
However, most of the Manhattan Project scientists who developed the atom bomb were opposed to using it on Japan.
Albert Einstein – an important catalyst for the development of the atom bomb (but not directly connected with the Manhattan Project) - said differently:
“A great majority of scientists were opposed to the sudden employment of the atom bomb.” In Einstein’s judgment, the dropping of the bomb was a political – diplomatic decision rather than a military or scientific decision.
Indeed, some of the Manhattan Project scientists wrote directly to the secretary of defense in 1945 to try to dissuade him from dropping the bomb:
We believe that these considerations make the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan inadvisable. If the United States would be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race of armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons.
Political and Social Problems, Manhattan Engineer District Records, Harrison-Bundy files, folder # 76, National Archives (also contained in: Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 1987 edition, pg. 323-333).
The scientists questioned the ability of destroying Japanese cities with atomic bombs to bring surrender when destroying Japanese cities with conventional bombs had not done so, and – like some of the military officers quoted above – recommended a demonstration of the atomic bomb for Japan in an unpopulated area.
The Real Explanation?
History.com notes:
In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective …. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S. President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War.
New Scientist reported in 2005:
The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.
Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.
“He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species,” says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, US. “It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity.”
***
[The conventional explanation of using the bombs to end the war and save lives] is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US.
***
New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman’s main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.
According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was “looking for peace”. Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.
“Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan,” says Selden.
John Pilger points out:
The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.” The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success” of “the experiment”.
We’ll give the last word to University of Maryland professor of political economy – and former Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and Special Assistant in the Department of State – Gar Alperovitz:
Though most Americans are unaware of the fact, increasing numbers of historians now recognize the United States did not need to use the atomic bomb to end the war against Japan in 1945. Moreover, this essential judgment was expressed by the vast majority of top American military leaders in all three services in the years after the war ended: Army, Navy and Army Air Force. Nor was this the judgment of “liberals,” as is sometimes thought today. In fact, leading conservatives were far more outspoken in challenging the decision as unjustified and immoral than American liberals in the years following World War II.
***
Instead [of allowing other options to end the war, such as letting the Soviets attack Japan with ground forces], the United States rushed to use two atomic bombs at almost exactly the time that an August 8 Soviet attack had originally been scheduled: Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. The timing itself has obviously raised questions among many historians. The available evidence, though not conclusive, strongly suggests that the atomic bombs may well have been used in part because American leaders “preferred”—as Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Martin Sherwin has put it—to end the war with the bombs rather than the Soviet attack. Impressing the Soviets during the early diplomatic sparring that ultimately became the Cold War also appears likely to have been a significant factor.
***
The most illuminating perspective, however, comes from top World War II American military leaders. The conventional wisdom that the atomic bomb saved a million lives is so widespread that … most Americans haven’t paused to ponder something rather striking to anyone seriously concerned with the issue: Not only did most top U.S. military leaders think the bombings were unnecessary and unjustified, many were morally offended by what they regarded as the unnecessary destruction of Japanese cities and what were essentially noncombat populations. Moreover, they spoke about it quite openly and publicly.
***
Shortly before his death General George C. Marshall quietly defended the decision, but for the most part he is on record as repeatedly saying that it was not a military decision, but rather a political one.
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Thank you. I'm a Maui man myself. I love Oahu as well. Gas prices still below the "mainland"?
Kind of restating the obvious. This is nothing new.
Pretty much the same motivation as the joint effort on Dresden.
This diatriabe has been on the "History Channel", for years! It ended loss of American Lives! Period/ end of story!
You are an ignorant idiot! When you tie down a human being, and let bamboo grow through their major organs, give me a call!
The REAL Reason America Used Nuclear Weapons Against Japan is simple.
It's a weapon. We gave it to the military. That's what they do....
You can be sure that the armchair assholes criticizing Truman's decision to use nuclear weapons on the enemy weren't in the invasion force or (like me) had loved ones (my father) in the invasion force.
How easy to sit here in 2012 and spout off your mindless bullshit. But I remember WW2:
I remember my father leaving for Japan after fighting in Europe for three years, and my mother & I not knowing if he would fall to the implacable fanatics conducting a defense in depth of their home islands - far worse than Okinawa, Iwo Jima or Guadalcanal.
I remember my mother crying as our young neighborhood recruits marched to war and, in some cases, to their death, past our Brooklyn apartment on an almost-daily basis.
I remeber the huge V for Victory sign on the side of an apartment building in our neighborhood with the names of our local fallen, the colors faded now but still there, in silent rebuke to the craven assholes on this website.
How easy to be an armchair asshole with nothing at stake. THANK GOD FOR TRUMAN AND THE ENOLA GAY.
Yes, and I especially like the use of the word, craven. Most excellent.
An armchair asshole is what you are. Your lack of respect and decency to humanity is unparalleled. How
retarded to sit here in 2012 and be a mindless dumbshit.
Go write a comic book. No one is right in war. No one.
A good friend of mine who graciously shared his homewith me was a decorated WWII fighter pilot. Several nights a month he would wake up screaming - not because of some weepy, patina bullshit about faded colors and marching youths - but because he could see the faces of the children in oxcarts he was ordered to strafe as they fled firebombed German cities.
If you want to paint a good guy/bad guy picture, pick up some crayons or a Stephen Ambrose book.
I have a very good friend who suffered through the early days of Iraq. He got knocked unconscious by IED's over 20 times. The stories he has of the nastiness of the combat are pretty alarming. He joined under the pretense of being patriotic. Reality put that pretense under a lot of scrutiny.
Today the crying of his own childredn upsets him - he thinks it is because when they got done with battling the enemy, the only thing left in the village were crying women and childtren. And he gets to deal with this forever. Think Rummy does? W? The Israel lobby?
War blows in a very big way and pitching a flag on vets day and 4th of July aint enough. Hug a vet. Talk to them. Hire them. Listen to them.
And if you weren't there you really have no business telling people how it should have been.
Who knows how an invasion of Japan would have turned out. Thats as hyperbolic as Obama's prediction of unemployment with the bailout (wrong, by the way). Or suggesting a normal BK would have lost every detroit auto job. Nonsense.
I find it enormously flawed to suggest that the Japanese were about to surrender, seeing that we nuked them and they still refused to surrender. Or their performance on Saipan - no surrender....ever. Why would Japan be different?
Your friend's experience and my friend's experience would appear to be similar in significant ways. That's my part of my point here. People who brutalize are themselves just as affected as the victims, even if their brutality is by proxy.
I DO have a business telling people how was. I have devoted most of my adult life to gaining a complete picture of these events in 1945, from all sides and perspectives, experts and primary documents. My rational, reasoned analysis counts because it is taking into account the broader picture.
Do you KNOW what was being said in the Japanese war cabinet? I do. Have you READ the decrypts that US and Soviet intelligence we receiving fromTokyo? I have. Do you know the discussions between military men and politicans after the Potsdam Declaration, after the bombs? I do. I know that there were many options being floated besides an immediate (1945) invasion of the mainland. You want to know in one sentence what was different about Japan between Saipan and Aug 45? The emperor's views had begun to change. The Japanese were ready to start negotiations on the basis of Potsdam when the Allies changed the wording, softening it thinking that might prod Japan, but it simply caused them to think that the Allies had had some setback that had forced them to reissue the declaration.
So that's it in a nutshell. Here I sit in the ME talking to the broken lads and lasses that return from yet another pointless attempt to exert US hegemony over the world and you'll forgive me for being a little pissed off that these idealistic kids are being used and spat out, their broken minds or bodies a testament to how IMPORTANT it is that American politicians be able to tell other people what to do and who not to hit.
I appreciate your reasoned response. Thanks. If the Japanese were close to surrender, then why didn't they do so after the first bombing? Surely, they weren't thinking there was any "setback" then.
I realize the Russians complicated the decision a great deal.
It boggles my mind how manial folks get....whether its the nazis, japanese, or tsa...nuts.
The short answer is that only 3 days separated the two bombs and as anyone familiar with Japanese group decision making can attest, the process is very slow and deliberate, especially when dealing with the Emperor. They simply didn't have enough time to gather the evidence, process and come to a decision between the two.
Events were very compressed including the declaration of terms of surrender by the allies, the first bomb drop, Russian entry into the theatre, and the second bomb only a few days later. It takes time for people running nations in the 'fog of war' to find out what has happened and to respond to that.
These events over which none of us had any control - - took place almost 70 years ago. The key players in those events are now dead. Its remarkable the emotional response of so many. What happened, happened. Why not look at historical evidence with a view toward learning the truth as much as is possible ?
I am amazed that the conventional moral justification for WWII has such vehement adherents in 2012. The practical effect of WWII was to make the world safe for communism. NAZI atrocities were real, but then the mass execution of Russia's gentile intelligencia began with Lenin, not Stalin. This slaughter began in 1919 and was well known by the diplomatic corps serving in Russia. Twenty million had perished by the time that German attacked. The real threat of Germany was to the globalist vision of Wodrow Wilson embodied in the League of Nations and the international banking empire. America consciously chose to prevent Germany from destroying bolshevism and halting the disgenic slaughters of high IQ Russians.
The fact that we chose to intervene to prevent the destruction of the bolshevic program speaks volumes.
The same agenda continues today directed at U.S. citizens through wildly disgenic immigration policy that admits and then demands support of tens of millions of low IQ arrivals who will be the willing allies of the elites carrying out the policy of dramatic and deliberate lowering of the living standards of the Euro American population.
We lost WWII!!
The other point that the author misses is that we were broke. Ten years of Roosevelt throwing money into the wind and then four years of global war had left us with huge debts and the savings of the public had already all but completely invested in war bonds. With the war in Europe over we were facing monumental rebuilding costs and an increasingly belicose Stalin.
I don't know what the authors agenda is pumping out this crap is, and I don't care to know.
the author
quotes somebody as stating "war was gonna be over within months"...really? i'm sure Hitler thought the same thing!
5-8 more months, let's say..is that 50k-100k more American lives?? also let's ASS-U-ME that it would be over within months...would that alone have guaranteed peace?
Netflix has "Downfall" on it. Great movie, based on personal journals. Hitler thought he would win up until about 15 minutes before the cyanide and suicides happened. He had a plan in place, just as the allies were still shelling the Berlin bunker. "No problem" It was hopeless and many were defecting....but not the leaders....
suggesting surrender is revisionist nonsense.
Also, if the military leadership was so certain that surrender was on the way, why did Truman's advisors suggest that an invasion would take a couple million US troops and 30-35% casualty rate?That is well over half a million more dead Americans, based on Okinawa, Iwojima experience, not out of your butt hyperbole....
I don't know what the agenda is here, but truth is not one of its pillars.
Don't get in fights you are not willing to commit yourself and your own children to.
Finish the fights as quickly as possible to spare as many as possible..
Of course, both of these tennets benefit neither the politician nor the war profiteers....
this author
is trying to revise history...he quotes someone as saying "the japanese were about to capilulate within MONTHS"....
is that 2 or 8 months?..How many more American lives would that cost?..another 25k? 100k?
I'm sure Hitler ALSO thought the war would be won within "months"
also IF war was won within months (say 5)...and no nuke was detonated....would we have had ANOTHER war with the japanese OR maybe the Russians???? Had they not seen the Power?
The Japanese were fanatical to the death, and had every intention of fighting on even after any likelyhood of military victory was nil. To those who actually fought the Japanese firsthand for 3+ years (and not the comfy armchair commenters/historical revisionists on this site), the atom bombs were a Godsend that allowed them to go home. End of story.
I don't think you get it, at least not the guilt-driven revisionism that has reared its head periodically in the last 67 years. I'll try to simplify.....
18-year old Nebraskan farmboy, whose primary goal in life before being DRAFTED was to schtupp some local curly-haired lass and maybe scoff down a few cold beers = GUILTY, and his death in a war is acceptable punishment for being male, even if he was bombed from above and had no chance to defend himself.
40-year old Japanese housewife, who read newspaper accounts of contests between brave Yamato warriors seeing who could bayonnet the most kids in a day = INNOCENT civilian victim of a war crime.
Better a million of those drafted farmboys die than have even one "innocent" die, just because we don't have the stomach for another couple of years of heroic war. Where's the glory?
War is glorious, so long as we fight in a "civilized" manner. Got to have rules, you know. Men fighting men. Free and fair. Bred to die, men are. Oh, and since we're here...Samurai are great, honorable and noble, while their modern day equals, Crypts and the Blood---perhaps by virtue of inferior attire---bad and decadent.
Or...killing is killing. War sucks, even if one is attacked first. Get it over with as fast as possible by whatever means available. Nothing "civilized" about it.
Finally, we all know damn well that if the US had had the bomb and not used it, and the war had lasted another few years, George would today be writing how the "MIC purposely prolonged the war for reasons of profit".
And the fall-out conveniently blew over the Pacific. Notice that we didn't use it on Germany.....
Rewriting history is so much fun. With enough re-weaving of history Mother Teresa was a closet sadist. TIm Bernanki learned that if you have a bazooka you can not just carry it around.
Even let's nuke China during the Korean war McArthur agreed? Damn.
Whom needs nuclear weapons these days when a few clicks on a computer-Ipad-smart phone can bring a modern tech country back to a "Little House on the Prairie" era.
From the Manhattan Project report itself: http://www.dannen.com/decision/targets.html
It was agreed that for the initial use of the weapon any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb.
Make sure any military target is as small as possible. Check.
Two aspects of this are (1) obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan and (2) making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released.
Remember, the more people we kill the bigger dick everyone will think we have. Check
... possible targets possessing the following qualification: (1) they be important targets in a large urban area of more than three miles in diameter, (2) they be capable of being damaged effectively by a blast, and (3) they are unlikely to be attacked by next August. Dr. Stearns had a list of five targets which the Air Force would be willing to reserve for our use unless unforeseen circumstances arise.
Find large cities that have been spared any bomb damage so we can see what this sucker can really do. Check
In an address to a joint session of Congress the day after Roosevelt's funeral, Truman stated that "Our demand has been and it remains- UNCONDITIONAL surrender". (His emphasis, not mine)
Guess what? Even after two atomic bombs, the Japs still had to be allowed to keep their emperor before they would surrender. So it was not in any sense of the word "unconditional". Those who say the Japs were about to surrender before the bombs were dropped invariably neglect to specify "under what conditions". They also apparently have a case of selective amnesia as well with respect to the staggering number of casualties suffered immediately beforehand in the back-to-back bloodbaths of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Unconditional Surrender caused millions of casualties for the Axis, and the allies. Normally wars are negotiated after an armistice when the outcome is certain. Both the Japanese and Germans had put out peace feelers but were always turned down flat.
The dropping of the atomic bombs was the greatest war crime in the history of war crimes.
I fully expect to be junked by infantile "we're #1" "we saved the world from nazis and communists" idiots.
No down votes here either dolph.i have a signed copy of a book on the this very issue.
Paul Ham, An Aus journalist has researched this and has come to the same conclusions as yourself and Vlad.
Gentlemen, I applaud research.
Not from me, dolph, not from me. General LeMay told his statistical chief, Robert S McNamara, that if they'd lost the war. they all would have been prosecuted as war criminals...a fact McNamara agreed with.
First off, war criminal is a name that gets successfully applied to the losers. The Nuremberg Trials violated our own legal tradition of expost facto. The Enabling Acts passed by the Nazis made all of their war crimes legal under their own legal system. Had they won the war or negotiated a peace none of the alleged offenders would have stood before the docket. So don’t expect the title of war criminal to be applied to any president living or dead until we are defeated and occupied.
I had two uncles in the Pacific War. One was a cook and the other was a machine gunner for the Marines. The machine gunner told me there were times when the sun came up you could walk a hundred yards on the bodies of dead Japanese in front of his gun. He did not think the Japanese were about to surrender and directly credited the nukes for his still being alive.
The author might want to research the dirty bomb project the Japanese were pursuing and the plague bombs they were building. Consider also, that the Japanese Army attempted to arrest the Emperor to prevent him from announcing the surrender of the Japanese Nation.
Revisionist history at best.
Hmmm, Patriot Act indemnified all Zio-Israeli security companies invloved with 9/11. The act then
went to shred the 4th Amendment. As America is defeated and occupied, war criminals standing
on every corner in Wash DC.
Whatever. War crimes were a form of jurisprudence that were devised, as you say, ex post facto. I'm just telling you what LeMay and McNamara thought about themselves and how they adjudged their own behavior.
All of the beastliness of the Japanese Army doesn't come one inch closer to justifying American beastliness towards their people.
It's not like Eurpeans live in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.... So they got what they deserved..... Next!
Even if they did have to drop it to end the war as claimed - there is no reason I can think of why they couldnt have detonated off shore of one of the cities - or over an unpopulated forest area for all to see - it would have been obvious to the japanese and russians its power and there would have been no need to kill, maim and traumatise so many..... it was obviously a warfare and medical experiment to see its effect on live humans who were treated as labrats. Shit look at all the experiments they were doing on their own populations at home.
I agree Pampalona.
For an example of a government treating its own citizens as labrats see:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2002/apr/21/uk.medicalscience
Britain's biological weapons trials between 1940 and 1979
The excuse? "Saving lives"
gee I don't know
how about because it could have sent a freaking TSUNAMI to Hawaii and the entire West Coast...you freaking "GENIUS"
also the japanese would have said it was ONLY a 100 foot tsunami... mild compared to the march 2011 tsunami.
dbl post.
Pure BULLSHIT.
It's so easy to sit back in your armchair in 2012 and post drivel like this; it was another thing to be involved in the planning for Operation Downfall in 1945 - which involved America's top strategists, including Marshall, Nimitz, MacArthur, LeMay and others, who had to report their anticipated casualty figures to Truman. Half a million Purple Hearts alone were made for the invasion!
And please don't quote Eisenhower, who was out of it and mouthing off from the ETO. In addition to our high command in the Pacific and their superiors in Washington, the GIs in the PTO (including my father, a front-line ambulance driver) also knew what to expect, especially if the enemy conducted a defense in depth that included civilians. There wasn't a GI in the invasion force who didn't bless one of our greatest Presidents for his compassionate decision - one that saved millions of enemy lives also, civilian and military.
Only those who want the truth, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall
What flavor of Koolaid do you prefer? I bet you scored very high on those government written and provided tests. The government captured education system is designed purposely to reinforce the the propaganda fed to the masses via corporate TV with selected historical myths, social engineering gibberish. The government creates the standardized tests and approves the textbooks. What version of history do you think they "taught" us?
piceridu - - Huh ? And didnt Lincoln go to war to 'free the slaves' ? Youre not gonna burst that bubble for them too, are you ? Miss Smith the grade school teacher told them that back in the day, and she couldnt have been wrong. (They had a schoolboy crush on Miss Smith, you know.)
Exactly....reading these posts reminds me that there are still many that are still under govt, mind control.
Hey, flag wavers, if nukes end wars so quickly and save the lives of so many soldiers why didnt we use them in vietnam? korea? iraq?
If nukes are so humanitarian maybe they should have named them peace and love boom booms
Its the Zionist kikenvermin version.
Hindsight is always 20-20.
Not always. "George Washington" is a disinfo tool, sometimes echoing irrelevant or obvious truths, sometime essays like this one, whitewashing the world whatever shade of psycho fits his masters' sales pitch. Run out of proofs of current conspiracies, Faux GW?
Throughout history, what the banks invest in, politicians and business carry out. What the banks do not fund seldom happens, or lasts. To propose that the administrative tools of the US government in 1945 did this on a lark is idiotic. The money interests that orchestrated the 'world wars', and every other crime against humanity to the present reveals the real shot callers. Don't follow this guy, follow the money.
Think for yourself.
I generally like ZH. Everybody gets to write their opinion here...Even the propagandists.
Right...Monday-morning quarterbacking at its worst. Put that SOB George on a troop ship bound for the invasion of Japan in '45, and he would be crapping his pants trying to find a way out of it.
"... You can't look 60 years later and decide the right and wrong of something.... "
not only you can, but you must.
Don't start a fight you can't finish!