j_harvey wrote:

Minotaur029 wrote:We may not have had to drop the bomb though...it's up for debate.

The wheels were obviously in motion for the bomb well before Truman took office. Dude didn't even know about the thing for the brief time he was VP. That doesn't mean he didn't have a choice, but I wonder if Henry Wallace would have dropped the bomb had he stayed on as FDR's VP. Probably. All the military dudes were telling Truman that the bomb would save the lives of countless American troops.

My dad was a Navy Pacific theatre vet-and while thankful for the bombs, he readily admited it was pure fucking horror. When my father happened across a friend of mine wearing this shirt, he nearly cried:

Rick Reuben wrote:

ubercat wrote:Not crap. My personal favorite. I like Nixon, but Truman, that's a president.

Awful.

Hiroshima

Nagasaki

Great controversy has always surrounded the bombings. One thing Truman insisted on from the start: The decision to use the bombs, and the responsibility it entailed, was his. Over the years, he gave different, and contradictory, grounds for his decision. Sometimes he implied that he had acted simply out of revenge. To a clergyman who criticized him, Truman responded, testily:

"Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them."

Such reasoning will not impress anyone who fails to see how the brutality of the Japanese military could justify deadly retaliation against innocent men, women, and children. Truman doubtless was aware of this, so from time to time he advanced other pretexts. On August 9, 1945, he stated: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."

This, however, is absurd. Pearl Harbor was a military base. Hiroshima was a city, inhabited by some three hundred thousand people, which contained military elements. In any case, since the harbor was mined and the U.S. Navy and Air Force were in control of the waters around Japan, whatever troops were stationed in Hiroshima had been effectively neutralized.

On other occasions, Truman claimed that Hiroshima was bombed because it was an industrial center. But, as noted in the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, "all major factories in Hiroshima were on the periphery of the city – and escaped serious damage." The target was the center of the city. That Truman realized the kind of victims the bombs consumed is evident from his comment to his cabinet on August 10, explaining his reluctance to drop a third bomb: "The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible," he said; he didn’t like the idea of killing "all those kids." Wiping out another one hundred thousand people . . . all those kids.

Moreover, the notion that Hiroshima was a major military or industrial center is implausible on the face of it. The city had remained untouched through years of devastating air attacks on the Japanese home islands, and never figured in Bomber Command’s list of the 33 primary targets.92

Thus, the rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency: that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that was needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost. The ridiculously inflated figure of a half-million for the potential death toll – nearly twice the total of U.S. dead in all theaters in the Second World War – is now routinely repeated in high-school and college textbooks and bandied about by ignorant commentators. Unsurprisingly, the prize for sheer fatuousness on this score goes to President George H.W. Bush, who claimed in 1991 that dropping the bomb "spared millions of American lives."

Don't worry, Uber. A Bush is on your side.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes

Sorry, but what goes around comes around

It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers — and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4 % chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30 %

and somehow in a lot of people's twisted up heads the US were the bad guys

If you watch The War by Ken Burns in its entirety, you'll probably agree that dropping the bomb made sense. If you talk to your grandparents (if you're about my age), dropping the bomb made sense.

If you venture deep into the catacombs of history, however...the potential for a Japanese surrender to the Soviets (instead of America)...the potential of a Japanese surrender to the United States as a result of dropping the bomb on an uninhabited Japanese island in a show of military might (fuck fallout, nobody likely really knew what was up with that anyway)...then you start to wonder if it was the right thing to do...


That being said, Truman was clueless about the bomb until right after FDR died (that's a hell of a decision to make in practically an instant, no?)...and the average American soldier fully expected to be engaged in the Pacific War until at least '46 or '47.

Conservative analysts (in terms of numbers of war dead) expected 500,000 dead Americans with an invasion of the Japanese mainland. All accounts of the Japanese during that period (that I know of) document the Japanese as being intense as hell in terms of their balls/willingness to kick American ass. If I'll recall, Herbert Hoover (an extremely intelligent [if historically unfortunate] man) expected at least 1,000,000 American war deaths from invading Japan.


Yeah, a complicated issue. The Japanese "war council" elite was still only something like...5-4 in favor of surrender even after the two atomic bombs were dropped. 5-4 might not be quite right...but it was a one man difference, I know that...I think that's the most telling statistic of the lot of 'em...



(Additionally, the Japanese had no way of knowing that we did not have any more atomic bombs beyond the two that wiped out two of their largest industrial cities).

ubercat wrote:

Dr. Venkman wrote:

ubercat wrote:I like Nixon...

a paranoid anti-semite forced to resign from the country's highest office in disgrace. Nice heroes.

I said favorite president, asshat. I didn't use the word 'hero', nor did I come close, asshat.

Thanks anyway, asshat.

Three "asshat"s in one post. That's like a record, right? Dickface.

Put some Big Six representatives and Pacific theater dudes on a neutral boat - Chilean, Peruvian, whatever. Take them out to Bikini. Detonate an a-bomb. Tell the representatives that all hostilities stop now and they've got two weeks to unconditionally surrender. Potsdam wasn't cutting it.

Minotaur029 wrote:...the potential of a Japanese surrender to the United States as a result of dropping the bomb on an uninhabited Japanese island in a show of military might (fuck fallout, nobody likely really knew what was up with that anyway)...then you start to wonder if it was the right thing to do...

Problem with this is they didn't even surrender after they wiped out Hiroshima. It took two cities gone for that.

This is one of those moral quagmires I can't personally decide on.
The firebombing of Dresden killed as many as Hiroshima and - I imagine - was just as unpleasant.

Don't know loads about Truman but I'd have to say Crap from the little I do know.

I like Harry Truman. I don't agree with the a-bombs... but sort of see where someone could have, at the time, been convinced that it was a good idea-- that the Japanese would not surrender unless the most extreme scenario (more than the Tokyo bombings--although they were nearly as brutal-- but short of a complete genocide) was introduced. Truman's daughter, when questioned about his decision many years after the fact, insisted that Hirohito himself insisted that the Japanese would not have stopped had it not been Hiroshima and Nagasaki. OK whatever.

Anyway, has anyone read "Dear Bess"? It's the letters from Harry Truman to his wife between like 1910 and 1950-something. It's a pretty interesting read, especially when he talks about getting together with Uncle Joe. One fun tidbit is where he and Stalin keep trying to one up each other (although Truman doesn't entirely trust him) with their parties. Truman has a string quartet... Stalin gets an orchestra.

Minotaur029 wrote:Conservative analysts (in terms of numbers of war dead) expected 500,000 dead Americans with an invasion of the Japanese mainland. All accounts of the Japanese during that period (that I know of) document the Japanese as being intense as hell in terms of their balls/willingness to kick American ass. If I'll recall, Herbert Hoover (an extremely intelligent [if historically unfortunate] man) expected at least 1,000,000 American war deaths from invading Japan.

My grandfather, a Marine Sergeant who fought at Iwo Jima, stills speaks with a hushed awe whenever someone brings up the ferocity of Japanese soldiers.

A historian on Bill Moyers's show a few weeks ago referred to the dropping of the bombs as acts of racism. He said that Americans would never have nuked the Germans. Yet, from what I recall, he didn't mention anything about Dresden.

WWII! A series of global atrocities that I'm happy to have missed out on!

vockins wrote:Put some Big Six representatives and Pacific theater dudes on a neutral boat - Chilean, Peruvian, whatever. Take them out to Bikini. Detonate an a-bomb. Tell the representatives that all hostilities stop now and they've got two weeks to unconditionally surrender. Potsdam wasn't cutting it.

Alternatively, they could have tried Lytle S. Adam's Bat Bombs.

Dr. Adams maintained that the bat bombs would have been effective without the devastating effects of the Atomic bomb. He is quoted as having said:
“ Think of thousands of fires breaking out simultaneously over a circle of forty miles in diameter for every bomb dropped.

Japan could have been devastated, yet with small loss of life.[1]

That's a fascinating wikipedia page right there.

If there were a hell, I think they would burn people like him in it.