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A good article on Truman wrongly using nuclear weapons

Had this thread and the article actually been about Truman we could all continue the dialogue yet it is a critique of a documentary. Blah.
 
swing_voter said:
Confirm what.

Even if 3 generals said, after the war was over, the bombing wasn't necessary, so what. They didn't know. They weren't in on any of the briefings.

It's like saying, "America should've been ready for Pearl Harbor." Really?
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Are you kidding? Eisenhower, leahy, Nimitz, lemay, Stinson, arnold, MacArthur ....etc did not know if the war was over? Lol

Ok. You got nothing
 
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swing_voter said:
Without the bomb, there would be an invasion.

The invasions of Okinawa and Iwo Jima were previews of the invasion of the mainland. American casualties would be extremely high, as would Japanese casualties.

The bomb saved lives.
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Oh, the last battle (Okinawa) is the one that led several to revise their earlier casualty estimates of a mainland invasion. One of which placed the Allied losses at around 1 million casualties. And Japanese losses at well over 6 million dead. And yes, I am being very specific here, as was the report. Allies at around 1 million casualties (dead and wounded), and Japan with over 6 million dead.

And even more telling than the 2 you mentioned are 2 earlier battles.

At the Battle of Tarawa, where 35,000 Marines landed on an island occupied by 2,600 Japanese. Now this is the first major battle between the two forces, so remember that the extreme hatred towards the Japanese soldiers had yet to develop which led to "no surrender" orders because of their tendency to attempt to give false surrenders just so they could try to kill more before dying.

Of those over 2,600 Japanese soldiers, only 17 were captures alive. And almost all of those were badly wounded when captured so could not resist.

And now we will fast-forward to the Battle of Saipan. This was the only island we had to invade with a significant Japanese civilian presence (Okinawa is a Japanese prefecture, but culturally they are very different). This is the island where over 7,000 civilians killed themselves, many on film. There is plentiful footage of crying American translators trying to talk entire families into surrendering as they climbed the cliffs, only to see the parents throw their children off of it, then jump themselves.

Of the over 25,000 civilian population on the island prior to the invasion, only around 1,000 survived the battle. Suicides were rampant, along with civilians attacking with knives, spears, and hand grenades. And this was a true "Japanese Civilian population", Japan had only had control of the island since 1919 when it was turned over to them from Germany after WWI. And for almost 2 decades they made colonizing it with Japanese citizens from the mainland a major part of their overseas strategy.

This is what by the middle of 1945 those who knew and understood Japan were trying to get the US government to understand. Not even Mac really understood this. Yes, he was undoubtedly an "Asian Expert", but that experience was based on his understanding of Chinese and Pilipino cultures, not Japanese. And anybody that does not understand that there are vast differences in them is either a fool, a liar, or both.

And this lasted for long after the war. On Okinawa, most of the civilian casualties were actually inflicted purposefully by the Japanese soldiers. They knew that the Okinawans were "culturally different", even to this day their "popular media" presentation of them is generally of a simple, backwards people who are not very bright, have no real warrior spirit, and love only Watermelon and Turtles. A simple, carefree people who love to wear little to no clothes and do not have a care in the world. Where a depiction of a "Mecha" in Japan is always a fighting robot like Voltron, if such is in Okinawa it is always a mechanical turtle.

Turtlese1.jpg


LHAdvancedMutsumi.jpg


The depiction of an Okinawan is generally like that of an "American Redneck". Akin to wearing a tank top, mullet, leaning on a broken down truck. Rustic, simple peasants and in general looked down on.

A large difference between that, and the warrior mentality of the mainland, especially in the early Showa era.

This is why so many were slaughtered by their own country, the soldiers knew that if given a chance they would surrender, so they killed them so they would not dishonor themselves. When I lived on Okinawa, we had to be very careful when talking to those old enough to survive the war. Never to ever refer to them as "Japanese", they were "Okinawans". Most of the survivors of that battle had a lifelong hatred of the "Japanese". And in fact, while we could go anywhere we wanted on the island, the Japanese military who were stationed there were confined to their bases. Still not allowed to leave them, even 45 years after the end of the war.

This is the difference between somebody that only knows of Japan and the war from reading revisionist history, and somebody that has actually lived there, and knows and understands enough of the culture to recognize things like this.
 
I agree.

If the Japanese were going to surrender before we dropped the bombs, they sure weren't acting like a people who were about to surrender. They were acting like a people who were about ready to fight to the death over every inch of Japanese soil.


The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II | National Security Archive

Here's an article about Eisenhower on the bomb, that it was made up. Many people believe Eisenhower never would've said it to a civilian as he's claimed to have done.
 
swing_voter said:
I agree.

If the Japanese were going to surrender before we dropped the bombs, they sure weren't acting like a people who were about to surrender. They were acting like a people who were about ready to fight to the death over every inch of Japanese soil.


The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II | National Security Archive

Here's an article about Eisenhower on the bomb, that it was made up. Many people believe Eisenhower never would've said it to a civilian as he's claimed to have done.
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Who are these many people?
 
“You know the most terrible decision a man ever had to make was made by me at Potsdam. It had nothing to do with Russia or Britain or Germany. It was a decision to loose the most terrible of all destructive forces for the wholesale slaughter of human beings. The Secretary of War, Mr. Stimson, and I weighed that decision most prayerfully. But the President had to decide. It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think that they were and are. But I couldn’t help but think of the necessity of blotting out women and children and non-combatants. We gave them fair warning and asked them to quit. We picked a couple of cities where war work was the principle industry, and dropped bombs. Russia hurried in and the war ended.”


The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II | National Security Archive
 
The Japanese only wanted one thing to surrender....and we gave that to them anyway
 
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower*said*in 1963, “*the Japanese were ready to surrender*and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
 
The Japanese did not want to surrender, but even if they did that's not really the point of this discussion.

The major point is if Truman did not drop the bomb(s) and the war went on 1 more week, 1 more month, 3 more months, whatever, before the Japanese surrendered, and more Americans needlessly died, and it came out we had a weapon that would have ended the war sooner and those Americans didn't need to die...

Truman would have been impeached, tried and probably jailed.

That's the reality..

Since the Japanese were so quiet and secretive about whether they wanted to surrender, or not, Truman had no choice..
 
vegas giants said:
‘The Japanese Were Already Defeated and Were Seeking Peace’ | FAIR
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That's a bowl of mush, Vegas. I'm looking for firm facts. It seems to me that there was no bigger advocate for peace in high Japanese circles than Prince Konoe, the former Prime Minister... and yet when he proposed it to the Emperor in 1945, he was firmly rejected. Can you name anyone capable of speaking on behalf of the Government who was actively making peace overtures?

When the Third Reich was coming apart, you had Goering and Himmler making their own separate peace overtures to the Western Allies... but I haven't seen any evidence for anything similar coming from the Japanese. Have you?
 
SenorXm/Sirius said:
The Japanese did not want to surrender, but even if they did that's not really the point of this discussion.

The major point is if Truman did not drop the bomb(s) and the war went on 1 more week, 1 more month, 3 more months, whatever, before the Japanese surrendered, and more Americans needlessly died, and it came out we had a weapon that would have ended the war sooner and those Americans didn't need to die...

Truman would have been impeached, tried and probably jailed.

That's the reality..

Since the Japanese were so quiet and secretive about whether they wanted to surrender, or not, Truman had no choice..
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The fleet could have sat in Tokyo bay and waited. Lemay said the war would have been over in two weeks
 
Cordelier said:
That's a bowl of mush, Vegas. I'm looking for firm facts. It seems to me that there was no bigger advocate for peace in high Japanese circles than Prince Konoe, the former Prime Minister... and yet when he proposed it to the Emperor in 1945, he was firmly rejected. Can you name anyone capable of speaking on behalf of the Government who was actively making peace overtures?

When the Third Reich was coming apart, you had Goering and Himmler making their own separate peace overtures to the Western Allies... but I haven't seen any evidence for anything similar coming from the Japanese. Have you?
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So do you claim the generals who said the war was over were lying?
 
vegas giants said:
So do you claim the generals who said the war was over were lying?
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Were any of them Japanese? If not, then how could they know?

The way I figure it, no war is over until one side - or both sides - stop fighting it.

So who was stopping as of Aug 1st, 1945?
 
vegas giants said:
The fleet could have sat in Tokyo bay and waited. Lemay said the war would have been over in two weeks
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Lemay said this, MacArthur said that, Eisenhower said this, this one said that.. Fact is the Japanese didn't say a damn thing, one way or the other., and they were the only ones who counted then. The attempted coup obviously shows the Japanese were split on whether they were going to surrender, or not. Which is probably why they were so quiet about their intentions.

And that made it all the more confusing and harder for Truman.

If he didn't use the bomb and another 1,000 Americans or whatever the number was died, he would have been out of a job by 1946.
 
Cordelier said:
Were any of them Japanese? If not, then how could they know?

The way I figure it, no war is over until one side - or both sides - stop fighting it.

So who was stopping as of Aug 1st, 1945?
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Well all they had to do is wait. There was no real significant danger from Japan.


As I said Lemay gave it two weeks and later said it probably would have been less
 
SenorXm/Sirius said:
Lemay said this, MacArthur said that, Eisenhower said this, this one said that.. Fact is the Japanese didn't say a damn thing, one way or the other., and they were the only ones who counted then. The attempted coup obviously shows the Japanese were split on whether they were going to surrender, or not. Which is probably why they were so quiet about their intentions.

And that made it all the more confusing and harder for Truman.

If he didn't use the bomb and another 1,000 Americans or whatever the number was died, he would have been out of a job by 1946.
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Who dies by sitting on your ship and waiting? Japan was no real threat
 
vegas giants said:
Well all they had to do is wait. There was no real significant danger from Japan.


As I said Lemay gave it two weeks and later said it probably would have been less
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Sure... just wait. I'm sure the Japanese wouldn't use the interval to bolster their defenses in the slightest. Just like I'm sure there wouldn't have been any political pressure put on the President to act at all.
 
vegas giants said:
Well all they had to do is wait. There was no real significant danger from Japan.


As I said Lemay gave it two weeks and later said it probably would have been less
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Hmmm... Lemay. Isn't that the same guy who told LBJ that bombing North Vietnam would bring Hanoi to the peace table in two weeks?
 
Cordelier said:
Sure... just wait. I'm sure the Japanese wouldn't use the interval to bolster their defenses in the slightest. Just like I'm sure there wouldn't have been any political pressure put on the President to act at all.
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Bolster what defenses? Are you kidding? They were putting up little resistance at that point. The war was over. Give them what they wanted....no war crimes for the imperial family....and they would have signed the peace treaty. We gave them that anyway.


Those bombs were a message to russia.
 
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