Question about Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Commy

MrSmith wrote:

they didnt surrender after the first bomb was dropped.







who surrenders secretly? this theory is bullshit, sorry.

good response, eh its bullshit.

Songburst

tybird wrote:

The U.S. made mistakes in fighting WW II, but the Atomic bombs were not a mistake.

At the end of the day, the powers-that-be wanted to see what kind of damage these things could do. Japan was done well before the bombs were dropped and the US did not want the war to end without having dropped one of these bombs. That said, it saved some American lives by essentially preventing an invasion and it only killed a few more Japanese, who were fucking animals in WW2 (and 140k was a drop in the bucket by that point anyway). Sure it was unnecessary and excessive but if those bombs were not dropped there would have been a nuclear attack in Korea or Vietnam. Those bombs being dropped are the reason that you don't see these bombs being dropped anymore.

tybird

Commy wrote:

Everyone knew Japan was in a terrible state. The NY Times' military analyst, "The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position...", referrring to Japan.

But again, that's hindsight. fine.

The Japanese code had been broken at the time of the bombings, and Japan's messages were being intercepted. Japan had instructed their ambassador to start peace talks with the allies, through the soviets. This was known to the allies. Japan had even spoken of surrender a full YEAR before the atomic bombs were dropped. On July 13 Japan's foreign minister, Shigenori Togo, wired Moscow ,"...unconditional surrender the only obstacle to peace." This message was decoded and sent to Washington.

Small steps were all that were needed to end the war, instead they dropped 2 atomic weapons on civilian populations in an act many consider to be the first act of the cold war. They wanted to show the world, not only did we have nukes, but we have the balls to use them, a lesson counted in the hundreds of thousands of lives.

Produce a copy of the document..no official documents exist showing any desire for surrender by the Japanese government...none...Unconditional surrender were the only terms per Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the U.S. What part of the only terms are you missing out on???

tybird

Byrnzie wrote:

The second bomb was dropped 3 days after the first. The Japanese government still didn't know exactly what had happened at Hiroshima when the 2nd bomb was dropped.

Real brilliant folks...don't know what's happening in your own country...wow...three whole days. :rolleyes:

Byrnzie

tybird wrote:

Real brilliant folks...don't know what's happening in your own country...wow...three whole days. :rolleyes:

That's right. Communications in Japan weren't exactly functioning at full capacity at that point in time and after months of sustained carpet bombing by B29's. Also, the atomic bomb was a new weapon and hadn't been used before. Most Japanese had no idea what had happened until quite some time after the event.

BarkingDogs

tybird wrote:

Real brilliant folks...don't know what's happening in your own country...wow...three whole days. :rolleyes:

guess the japanese govt. shoulda sent out mass emails and called everybody's cell phone....told everybody to tune into cnn headline news to cathc up on the bombing...

Byrnzie

BarkingDogs wrote:

guess the japanese govt. shoulda sent out mass emails and called everybody's cell phone....told everybody to tune into cnn headline news to catch up on the bombing...

That's right. The Japanese could have simply phoned their embedded reporters on the ground at the epicentre of the explosion to ask them for details.

Byrnzie

Interesting article:

August 6, 2007
Remembering Hiroshima

http://www.antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=11405


'...Curtis E. LeMay, the Air Force general who led B-29 bombing of Japanese cities late in the war. LeMay once said, "There are no innocent civilians, so it doesn't bother me so much to be killing innocent bystanders." And he was as good as his word: in one night of fire-bombing Tokyo, he and his men killed 100,000 civilians. So we can be confident that any doubts he had about dropping the atom bomb would not be based on concern for Japanese civilians. But consider the following dialogue between LeMay and the press.

"LeMay: The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.

"The Press: You mean that, sir? Without the Russians and the atomic bomb?

"LeMay: Yes, with the B-29…

"The Press: General, why use the atomic bomb? Why did we use it then?

"LeMay: Well, the other people were not convinced…

"The Press: Had they not surrendered because of the atomic bomb?

"LeMay: The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all."

Nor was LeMay alone. Other Air Force officers, all documented in Alperovitz, had reached similar conclusions. And Navy admirals and Army generals also believed that dropping the bomb was a bad idea. Fleet Admiral Leahy, for instance, the chief of staff to the president and a friend of Truman's, thought the atom bomb unnecessary. Furthermore, he wrote, "in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages." Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and chief of Naval Operations, thought the war could be ended well before a planned November 1945 naval invasion. And in a public speech on Oct. 5, 1945, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, said, "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."

Many Army leaders had similar views. Author Norman Cousins writes of Gen. Douglas MacArthur:

"[H]e 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."

Byrnzie

tybird wrote:

Produce a copy of the document..no official documents exist showing any desire for surrender by the Japanese government...none...Unconditional surrender were the only terms per Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the U.S. What part of the only terms are you missing out on???

http://www.antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=11405
'There is ample evidence that the Japanese government was willing to surrender months before Aug. 6 if only it could keep its emperor. Much of this evidence is given in Alperovitz's book and much in Dennis D. Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996). Wainstock (pp. 22-23) tells of many attempts by the Japanese to clarify the terms and to make clear their willingness to surrender if they could only keep their emperor untouched. For example, on April 7, 1945, acting Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru asked Swedish Ambassador Widon Bagge in Tokyo "to ascertain what peace terms the United States and Britain had in mind." Shigemitsu emphasized that "the Emperor must not be touched." Bagge passed the message on to the U.S. government, but Secretary of State Edward Stettinius told the U.S. ambassador in Sweden to "show no interest or take any initiative in pursuit of this matter."[10]

So the Japanese government tried another route. On May 7, 1945, Masutard Inoue, counselor of the Japanese legation in Portugal, approached an agent of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Inoue asked the agent to contact the U.S. embassy and "find out exactly what they plan to do in the Far East." He expressed his fear that Japan would be smashed, and he emphasized, "there can be no unconditional surrender." The agent passed the message on, but nothing came of it.

Three times is a charm, goes the saying. But not for the hapless Japanese. On May 10, 1945, Gen. Onodera, Japan's military representative in Sweden, tried to get a member of Sweden's royal family to approach the Allies for a settlement. He emphasized also that Japan's government would not accept unconditional surrender and must be allowed to "save face." The U.S. government urged Sweden's government to let the matter drop.

But if you can't at first surrender, try, try again. On July 12, with almost four weeks to go before the horrible blast, Kojiro Kitamura, a representative of the Yokohama Specie Bank in Switzerland, told Per Jacobson, a Swedish adviser to the Bank for International Settlements, that he wanted to contact U.S. representatives and that the only condition Japan insisted on was that it keep its emperor. "He was acting with the consent of Shunichi Kase, the Japanese minister to Switzerland, and General Kiyotomi Okamoto, chief of Japanese European intelligence, and they were in direct contact with Tokyo."[11] On July 14, Jacobson met in Wiesbaden, Germany with OSS representative Allen Dulles (later head of the CIA) and relayed the message that Japan's main demand was "retention of the Emperor." Dulles passed the information to Stimson, but Stimson refused to act on it.

Interestingly, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy drafted a proposed surrender demand for the Committee of Three (Grew, Stimson, and Navy Secretary James Forrestal.) Their draft was part of Article 12 of the Potsdam Declaration, in which the Allies specified the conditions for Japan's surrender. Under their wording, Japan's government would have been allowed to keep its emperor as part of a "constitutional monarchy." Truman, though, who was influenced by his newly appointed Secretary of State James Byrnes on the ship over to the Potsdam Conference, changed the language of the surrender demand to drop the reference to keeping the emperor.

The bitter irony, of course, is that Truman ultimately allowed Japan to keep its emperor. Had this condition been dropped earlier, there would have been no need for the atom bomb. Rather than let Japan's government "save face," Truman destroyed almost 200,000 faces.

Why did this happen? Why did Truman persist in refusing to clarify what unconditional surrender meant? Alperovitz speculates, with evidence that some will find convincing and others won't, that the reason was to send a signal to Joseph Stalin that the U.S. government was willing to use some pretty vicious methods to dominate in the postwar world. My own view is that Truman and Byrnes wanted vengeance, plain and simple, and cared little about the loss of innocent lives. Let's face it: dropping an atom bomb on two non-militarily strategic cities was not different in principle from fire-bombing Tokyo or Dresden.

catefrances

just in case some of you missed it the first time.

Byrnzie wrote:

"LeMay: The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all."

'...Curtis E. LeMay, the Air Force general who led B-29 bombing of Japanese cities late in the war.

kenny olav

Eisenhower and MacArthur (remember them, the Generals during WWII?) both agreed that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unecessary.



"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..."

- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380

In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:

"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63


MacArthur biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur's reaction to the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan: "...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."

William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg. 512.

Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, "MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "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."

Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.


more

kenny olav

i'm sorry if all of the above was covered already. i didn't bother to read thru the whole thread.

Kann

tybird wrote:

The U.S. only had two bombs. Would they have continued to destroy cities until the Japanese surrendered??? What's the goal of war??? Should the Allies have stopped their European efforts at Germany's border and said that's enough??

That's a non logical argument. The US already were bombing japan, the question was : why were the a-bombs used? The answer is not so clear since you obviously seem to think they did not know what effect the bombs would have on the japanese government. And no the allies should not have stopped, and yes we are all grateful for their courag. And no I cannot judge the feelings of vengeance and payback looking back 60 years, I'm just saying things weren't so clear at that time.

MerkingBoy

SPEEDY MCCREADY wrote:

we should have dropped a 3rd bomb....

maybe even a 4th........

You sound like a Jap-hating racist with that remark.

I honestly think the Japanese recovered well and are/have been contributing significantly for the world, even more than us Americans.

Collin

PJ_Saluki wrote:

Comparing 9/11 to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is apples and oranges. They're not even close to each other. Last time I checked, we weren't in a declared war with those fundamentalist wackos who flew jets into buildings. But, we were at war with Japan. Not. The. Same.

The motives of the attacks were definitely not the same. But the victims were.

You're right about one thing, though: Dropping those bombs did end the war. It was a hardcore motherfucker move, but it accomplished the goal. It sucks for the Japanese that nobody believed they would surrender, but if you want to assign blame, assign it to their leadership, not ours. I guess you want Americans to tell you we're ashamed?

No, you can do or say whatever you want. I just think it's sick you think they deserved to die.

Good luck. It wasn't the high point of our nation's existence, but it sure as hell wasn't turning a blind eye to Nazism. Man, it must be nice to live in Belgium. While its citizens were being railroaded by Hitler and his goons, U.S. and other Allied troops were dying to save them. People in Belgium don't have to deal with people criticizing them for winning the worst war the world has ever seen. They sat back and took it up the ass from the Germans but their hands are blood-free.

Your ignorance is beyond belief. Both my grandfathers fought in WWII, one of them died because of a gun shot wound. Fuck your American ethnocentrism. Many Belgian people died fighting in WWII, we also had a great resistance movement, which helped countless British and American pilots escape, they gave them food (which was scarce), they harboured them and kept them out of the hands of the nazis. Just watch Last Best Hope, that's one example. And every country had its own resistance movement, which all played a part in winning the war.

You just keep believing the American fairy tales how the Americans single-handedly won the war and how the allied forces, and occupied countries sat back and did nothing.

edit: here's the trailer of Last Best Hope in case you want to watch it, which I doubt because it isn't the American ethnocentric bullshit propaganda you are used to. Go talk to that pilot and tell him what you told me.

http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=1gGplLk-0mI

Collin

tybird wrote:

whose innocents are more valuable...depends on your point of view, eh?

No, it doesn't. Unless you think of other people as less than yourself.

tybird

Byrnzie wrote:

http://www.antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=11405
'There is ample evidence that the Japanese government was willing to surrender months before Aug. 6 if only it could keep its emperor. Much of this evidence is given in Alperovitz's book and much in Dennis D. Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996). Wainstock (pp. 22-23) tells of many attempts by the Japanese to clarify the terms and to make clear their willingness to surrender if they could only keep their emperor untouched. For example, on April 7, 1945, acting Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru asked Swedish Ambassador Widon Bagge in Tokyo "to ascertain what peace terms the United States and Britain had in mind." Shigemitsu emphasized that "the Emperor must not be touched." Bagge passed the message on to the U.S. government, but Secretary of State Edward Stettinius told the U.S. ambassador in Sweden to "show no interest or take any initiative in pursuit of this matter."[10]

So the Japanese government tried another route. On May 7, 1945, Masutard Inoue, counselor of the Japanese legation in Portugal, approached an agent of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Inoue asked the agent to contact the U.S. embassy and "find out exactly what they plan to do in the Far East." He expressed his fear that Japan would be smashed, and he emphasized, "there can be no unconditional surrender." The agent passed the message on, but nothing came of it.

Three times is a charm, goes the saying. But not for the hapless Japanese. On May 10, 1945, Gen. Onodera, Japan's military representative in Sweden, tried to get a member of Sweden's royal family to approach the Allies for a settlement. He emphasized also that Japan's government would not accept unconditional surrender and must be allowed to "save face." The U.S. government urged Sweden's government to let the matter drop.

But if you can't at first surrender, try, try again. On July 12, with almost four weeks to go before the horrible blast, Kojiro Kitamura, a representative of the Yokohama Specie Bank in Switzerland, told Per Jacobson, a Swedish adviser to the Bank for International Settlements, that he wanted to contact U.S. representatives and that the only condition Japan insisted on was that it keep its emperor. "He was acting with the consent of Shunichi Kase, the Japanese minister to Switzerland, and General Kiyotomi Okamoto, chief of Japanese European intelligence, and they were in direct contact with Tokyo."[11] On July 14, Jacobson met in Wiesbaden, Germany with OSS representative Allen Dulles (later head of the CIA) and relayed the message that Japan's main demand was "retention of the Emperor." Dulles passed the information to Stimson, but Stimson refused to act on it.

Interestingly, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy drafted a proposed surrender demand for the Committee of Three (Grew, Stimson, and Navy Secretary James Forrestal.) Their draft was part of Article 12 of the Potsdam Declaration, in which the Allies specified the conditions for Japan's surrender. Under their wording, Japan's government would have been allowed to keep its emperor as part of a "constitutional monarchy." Truman, though, who was influenced by his newly appointed Secretary of State James Byrnes on the ship over to the Potsdam Conference, changed the language of the surrender demand to drop the reference to keeping the emperor.

The bitter irony, of course, is that Truman ultimately allowed Japan to keep its emperor. Had this condition been dropped earlier, there would have been no need for the atom bomb. Rather than let Japan's government "save face," Truman destroyed almost 200,000 faces.

Why did this happen? Why did Truman persist in refusing to clarify what unconditional surrender meant? Alperovitz speculates, with evidence that some will find convincing and others won't, that the reason was to send a signal to Joseph Stalin that the U.S. government was willing to use some pretty vicious methods to dominate in the postwar world. My own view is that Truman and Byrnes wanted vengeance, plain and simple, and cared little about the loss of innocent lives. Let's face it: dropping an atom bomb on two non-militarily strategic cities was not different in principle from fire-bombing Tokyo or Dresden.

Unconditional Surrender is pretty easy to understand...us red-neck Southerners understood it at the end of the American Civil War...does that mean we were smarter than the Japanese. This info stated that the Japanese were looking to avoid the ONLY terms being offered to the Axis powers....Unconditional Surrender...it's pretty easy to understand. Remember the Japanese were negotiating an end to the oil crisis in December of 1941 while the fleet was enroute to Pearl...really trustworthy group.

tybird

Collin wrote:

No, it doesn't. Unless you think of other people as less than yourself.

Valid question...you're at war...who's innocents are more valuable??

Byrnzie

tybird wrote:

Unconditional Surrender is pretty easy to understand...us red-neck Southerners understood it at the end of the American Civil War...does that mean we were smarter than the Japanese. This info stated that the Japanese were looking to avoid the ONLY terms being offered to the Axis powers....Unconditional Surrender...it's pretty easy to understand. Remember the Japanese were negotiating an end to the oil crisis in December of 1941 while the fleet was enroute to Pearl...really trustworthy group.

You can muddy the water all you like in an attempt to cling on to your baseless argument. The fact still stands, however, that the only condition the Japanese were asking for was that they keep their emperor. Not really a great reason to murder 200,000 civilians. And the fact is, the Japanese were permitted to keep their emperor in the end anyway.

RolandTD20Kdrummer

Vietnam muddies into Cambodia as well and is the prime catalyst for the Khmer rouge atrocity...some nice work there for Kissinger and Nixon...I must say.. Add in a dash of East Timor massacre on top as frosting. Nixon gets immediately pardoned after resigning...but those underneath him get fitted with orange jumpsuits and iron bars. Kissinger, a blatant war criminal, the Dick Cheney of his time goes on to provide political advisor services to this day and more recently is appointed to the 9/11 commission in spite of... Hows that for dem apples?

It's all in national interests mind you...blowback (cough terrorism) is akin to a cat playing with it's food before it gets devoured. Those stupid poor people never know what hit them.

In for a penny, in for a fortune.