What ordinary men can do: The bombing of Hiroshima

[Bozo Erectus]

but I don't think anybody who hasn't actually seen the Japanese fight can have any idea of what it would have cost"

Well, we found a way to avoid paying the cost ourselves. We unleashed a nuclear holocaust on civilians.

 

[YotoKiller]

Well, we found a way to avoid paying the cost ourselves. We unleashed a nuclear holocaust on civilians.

Yeah and the Japanese wouldn't have died by the tens of thousands in such an invasion?

100,000 died on Okinawa alone.

 

[Bozo Erectus]

Well, isn't that a valid goal? The untrustworthy Stalinist armies started the war in the west (by dividing Poland with Hitler-Germany) and occupied every single square inch they had 'liberated' during the war, for 40 more years.

And even so, it would have costed Russian and Japanese lifes. Probably more than 140.000......

Bozo, the question remains: Is killing 140.000 innocent civilians an option if you think it saves more lifes?

Like I said above: valid goal or not, we achieved that goal by incinerating women and children.

I dont know how many lives we saved, nobody does.

 

[Stapel]

Well, we found a way to avoid paying the cost ourselves. We unleashed a nuclear holocaust on civilians.

Civilians that would have been ordered to fight&die, would the mainland have been invaded.

I prefer the nuclear holocaust for 140.000, above the fight&die holocaust of an invasion, that might cost a million Japanese lifes.

But maybe that's just me being immoral .

 

[Bozo Erectus]

Yeah and the Japanese wouldn't have died by the tens of thousands in such an invasion?

100,000 died on Okinawa alone.

Yoto, I dont know where youre from. The next time your country is at war, and clearly losing, and the victors use nuclear weapons against your people, I want you to come back here and tell us all what a great thing it was.

 

[YotoKiller]

Yoto, I dont know where youre from. The next time your country is at war, and clearly losing, and the victors use nuclear weapons against your people, I want you to come back here and tell us all what a great thing it was.

Hmmm, lets assume the victors invaded with tanks and troops and killed just as many people, if not more. Then I'll tell you how glorious an invasion it was.

But then again if my country did what the Japanese did then I'd assume we asked for it.

 

[Bozo Erectus]

Yeah ok, Yoto, sure

 

[Bugfatty300]

So would you have prefered a land invasion, bozo?

 

[Bozo Erectus]

I would have preffered exhausting all other options first to achieve a Japanese surrender, instead of rushing to use our new toys, in order to thwart the Soviets.

 

[Stapel]

Like I said above: valid goal or not, we achieved that goal by incinerating women and children.

I dont know how many lives we saved, nobody does.

No, nobosy knows.
But a educated guess sais it's more than a million Japanese lifes.
We can never ever be certain about it. But is that a reason not to have done it?

The other way around:
Imagine the bombs not being dropped, and the war having ended in 1947 after a millions civilians slaughter party.
We would be discussing the (im)morality of not having ended the war in august 1945 by killing 'just' 200.000.

 

[Japanrocks12]

Why didn't you guys unleash the psychological aspect of warfare? However foolhardy the Japanese government may have been, they would have eventually realized that it was hopeless, everyone does.

 

[Bugfatty300]

Why didn't you guys unleash the psychological aspect of warfare? However foolhardy the Japanese government may have been, they would have eventually realized that it was hopeless, everyone does.

And how long would that have taken?

If your point is that it would have saved lives, then know that hundreds of thousands of Japanese were already dying by the month by mid 1945.

From bombing raids and simple famine.

 

[Japanrocks12]

And how long would that have taken?

If your point is that it would have saved lives, then know that hundreds of thousands of Japanese were already dying by the month by mid 1945.

From bombing raids and simple famine.

Not very long, considering that you have wrecked Tokyo through your air raids, and other major cities would have succumbed to the same fate. Okinawa and Iwo Jima alone were blood baths, we did not need two more. The Japanese were in retreat, you should have resorted to air raids.

 

[Speedo]

Civilians that would have been ordered to fight&die, would the mainland have been invaded.

Our local newspaper has had some articles about various aspects of the bombing in the last week or so.

Today there was a letter to the editor from a woman who was a survivor of Hiroshima. She was 13 at the time, and was forced to train every day with a sharpened bamboo stick to be prepared to fight the Americans....

She maintains that the atomic bomb saved her life.

Historians will second-guess Truman for eternity. They have that luxury, and, to some extent, that's their job. Doing my best to look at it from the information available to them at that time, I believe he made the right choice.

 

[puglover]

I'm not going to read this whole thread but I will say this.

Remember that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved many, many innocent lives that would have been lost if America had invaded the Japanese mainland.

 

[Bugfatty300]

Okinawa and Iwo Jima alone were blood baths, we did not need two more. The Japanese were in retreat, you should have resorted to air raids.

In just ONE single conventional American B-29 raid on Tokyo, 100,000 Japanese died.

Does bombing every Japanese city to ground over a matter of months seem any better than the two atomic bombs?

 

[Riesstiu IV]

I'm not going to read this whole thread but I will say this.

Remember that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved many, many innocent lives that would have been lost if America had invaded the Japanese mainland.

This has been repeated about 1000 times in this thread. Each new poster who joins the thread repeats the same arguments. I gave up on page 5. I don't think anyone will change or rethink their own views anyways.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Our local newspaper has had some articles about various aspects of the bombing in the last week or so.

Today there was a letter to the editor from a woman who was a survivor of Hiroshima. She was 13 at the time, and was forced to train every day with a sharpened bamboo stick to be prepared to fight the Americans....

She maintains that the atomic bomb saved her life.

Your story sounds a lot like a story of the soviet pravda : "All my family has died during the nuclear bombing but I'm glad about it because the good guys were the Americans".

I personally don't know if it was a good thing or not to nuke two Japanese cities as it's been done. No one will ever know if things would have been better otherwise. The only thing I see is that it's very sad humans had to do such a thing. There's no reason to be proud about this.

Could we at least agree on this ?

 

[Marla_Singer]

In just ONE single conventional American B-29 raid on Tokyo, 100,000 Japanese died.

Does bombing every Japanese city to ground over a matter of months seem any better than the two atomic bombs?

I don't believe we can compare conventional bombings with nuclear bombings for the simple reason that conventional bombings, no matter how atrocious they are, don't provoke the radiations a nuclear bombing does.

 

[Bugfatty300]

Your story sounds a lot like a story of the soviet pravda : "All my family has died during the nuclear bombing but I'm glad about it because the good guys were the Americans".

No, its a pretty well known fact that every Japanese civilian was conscripted into a huge force to atack the American ground forces. they didn't have enough rifles so they got knives and spears and such. I've heard plenty of interviews of Japanese who describe the same thing when they were small. And I did hear an interview with same woman Speedo is speaking of. As well others with opposite opinions.

There is even old film of little kids doing bayonet drills with bambu spears.

There is so many sources out there I won't even bother posting a link.

I personally don't know if it was a good thing or not to nuke two Japanese cities as it's been done. No one will ever know if things would have been better otherwise. The only thing I see is that it's very sad humans had to do such a thing. There's no reason to be proud about this.

I couldn't agree more.

I don't believe we can compare conventional bombings with nuclear bombings for the simple reason that conventional bombings, no matter how atrocious they are, don't provoke the radiations a nuclear bombing does.

Even the highest estimates put the two A-bomb death toll at 400,000. Including radiation effects.

600,000 Germans died from allied bombings.

And Just ONE American napalm raid on Tokyo killed nearly 100,000 Japanese.

Imagine if the mass napalm bombings of major Japanese populations went on for months or even years.

Radiation is a nasty thing. But so is napalm. The UN didn't ban its use for nothing.