No, We Didn't Need to Nuke Japan

Atrocities happened on both sides, Hollywood movies notwithstanding.

 

Personal interviews of the survivors of the Bataan Death March, the Jap prison ships, slave labor camps, concentration camps, Pearl Harbor ----aren't Hollywood movies

 

Happens in every war. Had the Confederacy won the Civil War, that war criminal William T. Sherman would have soon been shot for his crimes.

 

hmmm... IF you totally ignore RECORDED real history then you MIGHT be correct... where are you... perhaps... China?

see this a lot... trying to change history and bring about a lack of a will for national self defense...

guilt trip aimed at the uneducated but indoctrinated among us!

very much like when the germans attacked pearl harbor kind of thing IMHO...

 

would've, could've, should've.
What is done is done.
Just like slavery, yep, it happened. Was it moral? Was it legal? Can't change the fact that it happened.
Is this just a troll post?
Let's talk about the mayoral race in NYC. It's a little more current than the millions that died 80 years ago.

 

IMHO it's design is to guilt trip those that know so little about what happened...

the idea may be to cause anti-war, anti-American, and more anti gov protest...

kinda a trap for people that SEEM to think things back then are the same as as they are now...

it does NOT take into account the differences in the world cultures over time... in fact it SEEMS to deliberately avoid historic cultures...

for a very long time "manifest destiny" was a world wide belief... that cause a lot of death and harm...

a thinking that IMHO parallels with if God meant man to fly he would have given him wings...

 

By attempting to have an intelligent discussion about an historic subject and present information that may conflict with your established views and opinions, I am an anti-American troll agitator, guilt-tripper and Chinese spy.
Again, how does being antiwar equate with being "anti-American" or "anti-government?"

Well done, guys.

 

General Eisenhower said that the atomic bombing of Japan was military unnecessary, so did Generals LeMay and MacArthur,
so did Admirals Nimitz and Halsey and Leahy.
https://www.nytimes.com/1963/10/25/...oral-issue-in-opposing-abombing-of-japan.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1945/10/06/...es-in-congress-and-at-monument-a-hero-is.html
Congressional Record, Volume 158 Issue 127 (Wednesday, September 19, 2012)
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/us-hiroshima-nuclear-bomb-anniversary/
Hiroshima: Military Voices of Dissent | Origins

The bombing was likely for testing the device on a population, and for impressing the Soviets,
see Leo Szilard, Manhattan Project:
Hiroshima: Quotes

"Gen. Dwight Eisenhower stated in his memoirs that when notified by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the decision to use atomic weapons, he “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.” He later publicly declared, “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

"Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, stated in a public address at the Washington Monument two months after the bombings that “the atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.”

"Adm. William “Bull” Halsey Jr., the commander of the US Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946 that “the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment…. It was a mistake to ever drop it…. [The scientists] had this toy, and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.”

More quotes against dropping the bombs from General Eisenhower, General MacArthur, Admiral Leahy,
other government officials and Herbert Hoover:
Hiroshima: Quotes

Much of the civilian criticism of using nuclear weapons was also conservative.
American Conservatives Are the Forgotten Critics of the Atomic Bombing of Japan: News Article - Independent Institute

The Decision to the Use the Atom Bomb
"in an exhaustive, thoroughly documented study of the events of that time, Gar Alperovitz makes plain why the United States did not need to deploy the bomb, how Truman was advised of alternatives to it by nearly every civilian and military adviser, and how his final decision was later justified by what amounted to a deception - the claim that the action saved half a million to a million American soldiers who might otherwise have died in an invasion. Alperovitz demonstrates that Japan was close to surrender, that it was profoundly threatened by the prospect of Soviet entry into the war, and that American leaders knew the end was near. Military commanders like Eisenhower, Arnold, and Leahy saw no need to use the bomb; most of Truman's key Cabinet members urged a clarification of the position of Japan's Emperor to speed surrender. But the inexperienced president listened most intently to his incoming secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, and Byrnes was convinced the bomb would be an important diplomatic instrument in dealing with the Soviets"

Bonus work of "historical revisionism" deflating the FDR/WW2 myth, strictly verboten:
https://dn720001.ca.archive.org/0/items/freedom-betrayed-herbert-hoovers-secret-history-of-the-second-world-war-and-its-/George H. Nash - Freedom Betrayed_ Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath.pdf

 

Those generals and admirals weren't going to among the maimed and slain. It was the American soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen that were going to pay the butcher's bill, and their families would suffer too. Also, the allied POWs would have died. As President Truman said, I'm the President of the United States, not Japan!

 

Yep…..they earned every little piece of both those nukes. The display set the rules for every day since. F#ck-em.

 

"To Pacific war veterans, who had dreaded an invasion of Japan, the atomic bomb meant even more. It was a godsend, an unexpected reprieve, a stay of execution. Paul Fussell, a 21-year-old Army Lieutenant, recalled of his unit: “We cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.” To Robert Edson Lee, a sailor in the Pacific, the bomb meant simply “that we could go home, and that ended our moral concern.”
Generals rarely lead the charge into the hell of battle, it's easy to say in hindsight we should not have dropped the bomb when you life is not on the line

 

Yesterday's war isn't going to look like Tomorrow's war except for the dead bodies.
as every decade passes, we improve the efficiency of killing and the enemy improves their defenses.

What was that saying, the generals are preparing for yesterday's war?

FA, Being Anti-war is fine but if you wanted to have a discussion usually starting it off with an argumentative title isn't the best way to go. Instead of "No, We Didn't Need to Nuke Japan!" ya could have gone with "Did we need to Nuke Japan?". One is an argument; One is a dialog.

Unless of course you lived down range of NNSS during the testing years .. then one could see your bias a bit better.

as always, the truth about war, the reasons for going to war and the cost of war can never be determine before or during the war only decades after the war can it be teased out.
Our current crop of chucklefucks in power across the globe ... give zero shits about history, just about their legacy. Hopefully we can keep it as skirmishes here and there and never have another world war. But I'd not take bet against the Vegas House Oddsmakers.

 

There have been 5 mass extinctions due to natural causes. Man is just a speck in the earths history and we will become extinct by our own hand-just a matter of time.

 

I've been a student of history my entire life, mostly the Civil War, and while I enjoy alternative history fiction occasionally, History is History and there is nothing we can or should do to change it because that would just create a whole new set of problems. Pray that no one invents a time machine, because everyone will want to change their history. Imagine a world where the Confederacy won, Great Britain won the American Revolution, Rome never fell, the Axis Powers won WW2, the USA and USSR fought WW3, or someone travels to 1 million years BC Africa and kills Lucy. Don't get all upset about it because being history fewer and fewer people will remember or care about it and eventually it will be all but forgotten.

 

I think that's a point a lot of people missed - it wasn't just Allied lives that were saved by the bombs it was also the lives of the Japanese people as well.

 

....................We awoke to the usual ships bell of 'morn watch, the ship was abuzz more than most mornings, something had happened, or was about to happen, today felt a little different then past days. We set about our morning much as we always did, cleaning, painting, preparing, while the ships radars scanned and the fleets planes buzzed overhead looking for the dreaded Japs. Having recently taken a Kamikaze hit and suffered unspeakable losses of men, men I knew well, we were on edge! Steaming just to the north west of Okinawa as part of a Radar Picket and blocking force, we were expecting the Japs to sorti at any time, we knew they wanted revenge, and knew they would expend every sailor, every ship, every plane they could muster and fight us to the very end! Just before the for-noon watch, the ships loud speaker announced that we had just struck the Jap home lands and that we had dropped some sort of new weapon and that it was hoped it would force the Japs to surrender. We had no idea of such a weapon, wild ideas began to spread, what sort of weapon could bring the Japs to their knees and force them to give up? None the less, we were now on alert and ready for the order to Man Battle Stations, and as such the fleet were zig zaging northward at speed to do god only knows what. We got word of another weapon being used and that we should be ready for anything that Japs might throw at us! Imagine spending days on end on a constant state of readiness, the ship absolutely buzzed with activities as we kept her steam up and her guns at the ready. Weeks later, we received orders to stand down and to form up close with escorts and sail up the coast of Japan. We were ordered to be ready, but that a fight was not likely! Sept One, 1945, we were ordered into loose formation and sailed under close escort into Tokyo Bay as part of what we were later told would be occupation forces, Japan had surrendered! We didn't know it until we were there to see it the next day, but the Japs sent their delegation out to the Missouri, one of the newer battle ships in the fleet, and they signed the official surrender aboard ship! It was over, you could hear cheers all over the harbor, the war had ended! We stayed in Tokyo for three days, then received orders to set sail for home! God, we were finally going home, the greatest news one could ever hear, and this mighty ship had carried us through till the very end! Later, we learned of the Atomic bombs they dropped on Japan and that it was hoped that they would force the japs to see reason and surrender, otherwise, the war was going to continue on and untold numbers would be lost, we were glad they dropped those bombs, it meant we had the chance to see our loved ones again, to hug our moms and Kids, and could take a good job and live our lives, not stuck on a ship not knowing if or when your end was coming and having to continue to endure countless alerts, not knowing if it was planes, subs, other battleships, or what, we were going home, and that sure felt good to us! 17 October, we arrived in Boston and were given leave, and told to pack everything, as we would not likely be returning to the ship! God how I loved that Ol' Girl, but it was time to say my goodbyes to her and to wish her well!

Excerpts from Chief Water Tender J.W. Green, U.S.S. New Mexico, BB-40 and his recollections of his time aboard ship!

 

Semantics. It was the title of the video in my original post. If you want to interpret that as my trying to start an argument vs. a discussion, that's your prerogative.

 

The way you wrote the thread title was an Absolute, not a question! Your stating your position that you are absolutely apposed to using the bombs against Japan!

 

No guilt here. Japan touched the boats hard, fucked to a new level and went hard at it, then discovered a whole new level of find out.
We had to drop the sun on them twice because, back story time... Japanese physicists were so convinced that a nuclear weapon couldn't be built that they sent all their nuclear materials to the Nazis.
The Japanese were also convinced that:
Nuclear weapons were impossible.
Enough nuclear fuel to make a weapon couldn't be mined out of the earth.
Which giving the approach they were using made sense.
Problems with the Japanese nuclear weapons program were:
I think they were trying to use natural uranium to make the weapon out of.
I don't think they had made it far enough along to realize they needed breed uranium/plutonium or enrich uranium.
They had some heavy water, but I don't think they knew what to do with it.
So when we dropped one on them they didn't believe it. They thought it was some kind of trick. Then we dropped an even more powerful one on them and we told them we were going to drop one on them every few weeks till they surrendered.
The next one was several months out, the US would have started the invasion of mainland Japan before the 4th one could be finished and be the 3rd one to be dropped on Japan.