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Former Hiroshima Mayor Takashi Hiraoka said, “From Hiroshima’s standpoint, the horror of nuclear weapons was not sufficiently depicted,” per a Japanese media outlet. “The film was made in a way to validate the conclusion that the atomic bomb was used to save the lives of Americans.”
The atomic bombs were used to save the lives of Americans. You are correct.
Curtis LeMay, again, had the right of it.
Paraphrased, "War is killing and if you kill enough of them, they stop fighting."
It should probably be pointed out that they fucking worked.
The war was over within days of dropping them.
That had a secondary, unintended, effect of saving Japanese lives too.
There's no compelling evidence that Japan was going to surrender any time soon before we dropped those two weapons.
The Japanese tend to conveniently forget a few things when they start playing the sad violins about the A-bombs. Like the way their armies acted everywhere they fucking WENT! Their soldiers routinely did things that would have got most soldiers in the Third Reich put straight up against a wall. Or the way they kicked everybody they conquered around and treated them like shit. To this day, the Japanese are far from popular in most of their former possessions. They also forget that even after the A-bombs, there were lunatics in their government that wanted to fight on, and if the Japanese people became extinct, so what?
ReplyDeleteThere were three plans to bring Japan to its knees.
ReplyDeleteThe Nukes. Which worked.
Invasion. Which would have had US casualties up to 10 times the expected number because we didn't know how prepared they were until 1946. Children, old people and everybody in between were literally ready to kill one Joe for every one of them. And there were huge amounts of weapons, manned torpedoes, suicide speedboats, kamikaze aircraft, artillery, mines and booby traps. Hard to disarm a citizenry who were willing to use sharpened bamboo spears. We would have had to kill 90% or more of the population to 'win,' basically removing the Japanese from the face of the earth by combat, and what would that have done to us? We'd have died morally and ethically just as much as they would have died physically.
The third? Complete Blockade along with Complete Destruction. Surround the isles. Shell and destroy every harbor, every boat, every fishing location. Destroy fishing stocks. Burn every habitat to the ground from the air, from the big cities to the smallest hamlet to individual houses in little hidden nooks and crannies. Deforest the forests using fire and herbicides. Destroy crops using herbicides. Destroying the streams and rivers using cloud seeding (you know, just like in Vietnam, which used techniques prepared for Japan.) What would have been left would have been a very reduced, starved population standing on a dead, blasted ground with no escape possible except by death.
The bombs? They were a blessing. A one-two punch that shook the Japanese into surrender.
And probably stopped them from having their own nuclear bombs. And from them unleashing biowarfare worldwide, which they were prepared to do. Both. Nukes and bugs. And they would have used chemical agents against any foreigner who came to their islands.
Side note. My dad was in Japan and Korea right after the armistice took effect. He talked to a lot of US and British officers who were involved in destroying, still, in 1952, all of the weapons and ammo caches and 'other' things that were being still discovered. Any attempt to step on the islands would have been a shit-show of epic proportions. Things that were just being quietly publicly released in the 70's and 80's because we needed Japan on our side and an open above-board release would have freaked the hell out.
To admit there was an alternative would be to admit the atomic warcrimes...two amongst many. No white hat guys amongst the nations in real history.
ReplyDeletehttps://ussslcca25.com/zach12.htm
Nothing is a war crime the first time.
DeleteSomething that is rarely considered when talking about using the atomic bombs is how close the American public was to saying, "Fuck this shit, bring the boys home and let the savages have the rest of the world!"
Like we've done repeatedly since...
There was dwindling will to keep up the fight as long as it would really have taken to secure Japan, or blockade and destroy. Time and money that, increasingly, America wasn't wanting to spend.
Admiral Zacharias is simply wrong in his overall assessment, I'm afraid, of the willingness of the leadership of Japan to actually surrender until the shock of what atomic weapons could to sunk in.
I would say that the atomic weapons allowed the movement he's talking about achieve the tipping point needed to win the debate and displace the "to the last man, at gunpoint if needed" factions running the place until then.
Something else that needs to be said, as well. Admiral Zacharias is writing years after the surrender.
DeleteYears AFTER the successful use of atomic bombs.
He is speculating that they didn't need to be used in a world where they both were and succeeded in doing what they were supposed to do... Oh, and the surrender was a bonus to the intended purpose of the weapons; destroy a city for the minimum risk of American lives was the goal.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
DeleteYou have a Google account, that means you can start a blog and have your very own soapbox.
DeleteThis one is mine. Shove off.
We were also very much running out of money and materials after 4 years of war. And the soldiers were tired from endless island hopping or fighting Germans (which was not like fighting the Japanese, whole different mindset would have to be taken by combat vets from Europe.)
DeleteFlip a switch and end the war or continue onward slogging through bodies? Hmmm... Flip the damned switch.
And, morally, how worse were the bombs in comparison to the firebombing of Tokyo? Shocking, yes, with some side effects, but overall damage was less in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than in Tokyo.
We could also have released all the chemical agents we had lying around. Now that would have been morally wrong, maybe. We were ready to do so if Japan opened up that can of worms. Fortunately nobody did on either side.
The bombs... were morally correct. Even by today's standards, morally correct vs firebombing and starvation and slow agonizing death foot-by-foot. Think not? Look at all the whiners kvetching about Israel (and Egypt) blockading the 'poor' Gazans. I mean, Slo Jo (and his handlers) have even committed war crimes by dropping packages on people and are going to put a floating pier in place (which the Israelis will shell out of existence the minute all the US servicemen are off of it.)
You can look at the end of the war from all perspectives and no matter how you look at it, nuking the bastards is still the most morally unambiguous method to bring those rat bastards to the table. Before the one-two punch they were still pushing for all their lands back (the Pacific Mandate) and all that they still held (Korea, parts of Mongolia and China.) After the bombs came the capitulation and rebuilding under Shogun McCarthur.