The WWII Atomic Bomb Attacks Hiroshima and Nagasaki

You can go ahead and rep that post now.

 

This will be a day long remembered.

 

I've waited patiently for a decade.

 

I'll say. Hard to believe that just 10 years ago so many of us believed that WW2 actually happened. (@KingCheetah)

 

I've remained consistent.

 

I managed not to post in this thread 11 years ago, which must have taken a great deal of restraint on my part. Good lord. There were some wildly inaccurate posts scattered throughout. My father served in the Pacific in early 1945, when we had just begun taking back the Philippines, and I asked him what he thought about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He thought it was a tragedy after the war, but that during it (FYI, he enlisted in the Navy in Spring, 1942) everyone he knew in early 1945 dreaded the thought of invading Japan and had no doubt that, dreading it or not, it was inevitable. The atomic bombs stunned everyone.

The Bomb was unknown to everyone but a minuscule number of people in the government, in the military, and those scientists and engineers working on developing and building them. Same with the British, who were also heavily involved in it’s development. Dad visited Japan several times after the war, beginning in the late 1950’s, and loved the country. I’ve been there myself. Yet though we imposed our system of government on them, and still have about 50,000 service men and women stationed there, leaving the emperor in place was critical to having a peaceful occupation.

The military government of Japan, in the name of the emperor (and just what he knew about what was going on might be open to debate), committed incredible atrocities in Korea, China, Southeast Asia, the American colony of the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia today) and likely places I’ve forgotten. Their military murdered far more civilians in those countries than were killed in Japan by bombing, atomic or otherwise (and we probably killed and maimed more civilians in that country with conventional bombing), as well as tens of thousands of prisoners of war.

War is hell. World War Two, if World War One wasn’t enough proof, and it should have been, proved it beyond any shadow of a doubt. Two lessons not well learned, apparently. In my opinion.

 

I am not interested in questioning the decisions of a government that was sneak attacked at Pearl Harbor.

Maybe they could have dropped the bomb away from cities....as a show of force....but it was 1945.....and they did what they think was right.

DD

 

The rest of this old thread is pretty worthless, but I'm reminded that I miss:

@rhadamanthus

@weslinder

They are gone, into the ether, we will never see their likes again.

 

I just visited the Pacific War Museum in Fredricksburg this past weekend. Amazing museum...I highly recommend it.

 

Interesting topic. I found the allied air campaigns over Germany and Japan problematic. That's not just some revisionist sentiment either, contemporaries had reservations about them too. I've generally been fairly anti-dropping of the atomic bombs but learning more and more recently about the sheer barbarism of the Japanese makes me question it. It's remarkable just how barbaric the Japanese were. Absolutely incredible.

 

Does the museum still have its July 4th fat man nuclear reenactment?

 

So you have been honing your craft for awhile.

 

I'm in the same boat. I'm not in love with any aspect of war. It all sucks. I try to imagine myself having to make these decisions and wondering what I would do...I'm glad that's above my pay grade, honestly, because I don't know how I could live with myself.

The nature of the Japanese treatment of civilians everywhere they went...the way the civilians fought in Okinawa...the god like status of the Emperor...the horror of the fire bombings we were already doing on Japanese cities...and the thought of what Allied troops would have encountered in a ground war in Japan...all of those things make me less likely to judge harshly those who made the decision to drop the bombs. I have zero doubt that the death toll would have been far higher with a mainland invasion.

At the same time, I hate it. I wish none of it was necessary and I don't relish in it at all. It was all completely awful. It is, however, one of the few wars in history where there seem to clearly be "good guys" and "bad guys" (and I realize that language is pretty limiting and simplistic)...but you're literally pitting democracy vs. fascism in this war, and two nations that had gone so far beyond the pale in the name of conquest. They really did have to be stopped.

One misconception I hear a lot is, "oh, the Japanese were trying to surrender." Umm, no. They sought a surrender where they could keep the imperial structure and the emperor...where they would judge for themselves whether they committed any war crimes...and they wanted it brokered by the Soviet Union, whose only real interest at that point was ending up with Korea. That was not the kind of surrender the Allies were looking for, and it would not have definitively ended things.

Also...to anyone interested, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast is just crazy great. The one called Destroyer of Worlds and then the longer series called Supernova in the East both cover these topics.

 

stopped due to Covid

 

I thought they just stole a fat dude's nachos and let him freak out.

 

Have been waiting for Supernova in the East to be done before listening, but can't really tell if the series is done without just seeing a new topic start. 3 years+ for a series is a long time.

 

In hindsight it is also extremely interesting to see the antithesis of how each nation is dealing and self contemplating with the mistakes of the past.

While Germany and in this case the US have looked within and are making sure to educate their people about WW2 and the atrocities of nuclear war..Japan has decided to admit NO fault of their own for their hineous war crimes on civilians.

Japan makes sure that their children learn and hear nothing about WW2 because that would be..too shameful?
Instead japanese popular culture uses nazi symbols widely in everyday communication like swastikas as a form of greeting.

So with their determination even now as the losers to admit nothing is it so farfetched to say that it actually would take two nuclear bombs for them to surrender?

 

It really is a remarkable museum. I took our children there when they were young and helped chaperone more than one elementary school class on a tour there. They have a B-25 bomber and a PT boat, for example, which brings Colonel Doolittle and John Kennedy to mind. An opportunity for a story or two. Our children should know about such an important part of our history and the museum helps bring it to life.

The topper is that Fredericksburg is a really great town to visit. We go there a couple of times a year (except for this past year, of course) and sometimes rent a cottage in town or a cabin a few miles away in the country for a couple of nights. It’s an easy trip from Austin.

 

This has been a big problem with Japan's relationships to it's neighbors especially the Koreas and the PRC. It's one of the big reasons why there is always concern in Asia when Japan talks about redeveloping a military that can project power.

It's a also a frequent feature of PRC rhetoric regarding why the PRC needs to build up its military.

 

The dropping of the atomic bombs are one of those things that I really have a hard time saying whether it was right or wrong. It's very important to consider just how bloody WWII was including the indiscriminate killing of civilians by forces on all sides and in that sense the death toll of the atomic bombs were in line with many other bloody events of the war.

While we can easily say that the motivations for war were clearer (Democracy versus Fascism) than many wars the methods it was fought even by the Allies were far from morally clear.