It was a real shame that our military did not stop USSR from getting all our bomb making data for free.
You can all thank the liberal left for that.
It was a real shame that our military did not stop USSR from getting all our bomb making data for free.
You can all thank the liberal left for that.
The Soviets had spies within the Manhattan Project. They also had German scientists who had been involved in the German nuclear program during the war.
The USA may have been the first to build and detonate a nuclear weapon, but we didnt "invent" it; the the science behind a nuclear explosion had been understood for some time and to get from the theory to an actual functioning weapon was simply a matter of refining and producing the plutonuim and perfecting the process.
Even if we had never dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it would not have stoped the Russians from building their own.
As bizarre at this might sound, using the A-bombs on Japan ultimately saved lives by forcing them to surrender and end the war without the need for an invasion of the Japanese home islands which would have resulted in millions of casualties.
As it was, the population of Japan had been driven to the brink of starvation by our naval blockade. Another fact to remember is that almost 40% of the Allied POW's taken by Japan died of starvation or mistreatment during the war, and conditions for them were growing ever worse by the day. The A-bombs...cruel as they were...were better than the alternative of an invasion where our troops would have encountered millions of starving women and children armed with bamboo spears who had been ordered to fight to the death.
As bizarre at this might sound, using the A-bombs on Japan ultimately saved lives by forcing them to surrender and end the war without the need for an invasion of the Japanese home islands which would have resulted in millions of casualties.
As it was, the population of Japan had been driven to the brink of starvation by our naval blockade. Another fact to remember is that almost 40% of the Allied POW's taken by Japan died of starvation or mistreatment during the war, and conditions for them were growing ever worse by the day. The A-bombs...cruel as they were...were better than the alternative of an invasion where our troops would have encountered millions of starving women and children armed with bamboo spears who had been ordered to fight to the death.
according to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, “the eventual decision to surrender would have been made, certainly by the end of 1945 and probably before November, the month set for the initial invasion of the home islands, without the additional persuasion of the atom bomb, Russia’s entry into the war, or amphibious invasion” (Wesley friend. Craven and James L. Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II [Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1953], vol. 5, p. 741).
Good article on Hiroshima. I have the same feelings that I wish we could have found another way.
I fully understand the reasons for our using this bomb. I however still have the feeling that using it has left a permanent scar on our sense of humanity.
Perhaps a corruption of innocence or another level of that corruption that goes above the many horrors that already took place during WWII.
I understand that among us out here in the land of the great unwashed, this is the very common belief. But in truth of fact, is it just a convient thought to allow us to live with ourselves? If one flips off American idol or other mind numbing program on the living room cyclops and goes to the bookshelf under "books not often read" and begins looking and asking, at the very least, questions should arise from the honest person. For example:
Quote:
according to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, “the eventual decision to surrender would have been made, certainly by the end of 1945 and probably before November, the month set for the initial invasion of the home islands, without the additional persuasion of the atom bomb, Russia’s entry into the war, or amphibious invasion” (Wesley friend. Craven and James L. Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II [Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1953], vol. 5, p. 741).
source
Here is an interesting series of documents leading up to the bombings and some of what took place leading to August 6th and August 9th 1945'.
Tie,
Excellent post, very well said. Regardless of everything else, I think I speak for both of us when I say I hope that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only tragic victims of mankind that will ever be subjected to the ultimate weapon....
A. Make an arrangement with Britian for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquistion of supplies in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia)
C. Give all poosible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek
D. Send a division of long-range heavy crusiers to the orient, Philippines or Singapore
E. Send 2 divisions of submarines to the orient
friend. Keep the main strenght of the US Fleet, now in the Pacific, in the vincinity of the Hawaiian Islands
G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil
H. Completely embargo all trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire
Postwar revisionist history has held that Roosevelt knew about the planned attack on Pearl Harbor but did nothing to prevent it so that the U.S. could be brought into the war. There is no evidence to support this theory. Conspiracy theorists cite a document known as the McCollum memo, written by a Naval Intelligence officer in 1940 and declassified in 1994. It has never been proven that either Roosevelt or his Cabinet saw this document or were aware of its arguments.
In 1999' former WW2 sailor Robert Stinnett wrote a powerful and equally provocative book entitled "Day of Deceit, The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor" which among other things based on gov't documents that the US via policy manipulated if you will the Japanese into some kind of attack that would allow FDR a pretext to enter the European theater of war when the larger public was against such efforts....
We didnt "manipulate" the Japanese into attacking us................ The idea that Roosevelt hatched a scheme to allow the bulk of our surface fleet to be blown out of the water while basically surrendering the entire Far East to Japan...in order to "motivate" the US to enter the war against Germany... is ridiculous.
Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I 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. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude...
The White House Years: Mandate for Change: 1953–1956: A Personal Account (1963), pp. 312-313
I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.
On his stated opposition to the use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese
Newsweek, 1963-11-11
Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, "MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor." Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children." - Admiral William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441. Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman
In 1950 Nitze would recommend a massive military buildup, and in the 1980s he was an arms control negotiator in the Reagan administration. In July of 1945 he was assigned the task of writing a strategy for the air attack on Japan. Nitze later wrote:
"The plan I devised was essentially this: Japan was already isolated from the standpoint of ocean shipping. The only remaining means of transportation were the rail network and intercoastal shipping, though our submarines and mines were rapidly eliminating the latter as well. A concentrated air attack on the essential lines of transportation, including railroads and (through the use of the earliest accurately targetable glide bombs, then emerging from development) the Kammon tunnels which connected Honshu with Kyushu, would isolate the Japanese home islands from one another and fragment the enemy's base of operations. I believed that interdiction of the lines of transportation would be sufficiently effective so that additional bombing of urban industrial areas would not be necessary.
"While I was working on the new plan of air attack... concluded that even without the atomic bomb, Japan was likely to surrender in a matter of months. My own view was that Japan would capitulate by November 1945." Paul Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, pg. 36-37 Vice Chairman, U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey
"Even without the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seemed highly unlikely, given what we found to have been the mood of the Japanese government, that a U.S. invasion of the islands [scheduled for November 1, 1945] would have been necessary."
Paul Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, pg. 44-45.
Brig. General Carter Clarke, military intelligence officer in charge of preparing intercepted Japanese cables - the MAGIC summaries - for Truman and his advisors
"...when we didn't need to do it, and we knew we didn't need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs." Quoted in Gar Alperovitz, The Decision To Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 359.
From what we read in the general media, it seems like almost everyone felt the atomic bombings of Japan were necessary. Aren't the people who disagree with those actions just trying to find fault with America?
Ask a typical American how the United States got into World War II, and he will almost certainly tell you that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the Americans fought back. Ask him why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and he will probably need some time to gather his thoughts. He might say that the Japanese were aggressive militarists who wanted to take over the world, or at least the Asia-Pacific part of it. Ask him what the United States did to provoke the Japanese, and he will probably say that the Americans did nothing: we were just minding our own business when the crazy Japanese, completely without justification, mounted a sneak attack on us, catching us totally by surprise in Hawaii on December 7, 1941.
You can’t blame him much. For more than 60 years such beliefs have constituted the generally accepted view among Americans, the one taught in schools and depicted in movies—what “every schoolboy knows.” Unfortunately, this orthodox view is a tissue of misconceptions. Don’t bother to ask the typical American what U.S. economic warfare had to do with provoking the Japanese to mount their attack, because he won’t know. Indeed, he will have no idea what you are talking about.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, the U.S. government fell under the control of a man who disliked the Japanese and harbored a romantic affection for the Chinese because, some writers have speculated, Roosevelt’s ancestors had made money in the China trade. Roosevelt also disliked the Germans (and of course Adolf Hitler), and he tended to favor the British in his personal relations and in world affairs. He did not pay much attention to foreign policy, however, until his New Deal began to peter out in 1937. Afterward, he relied heavily on foreign policy to fulfill his political ambitions, including his desire for reelection to an unprecedented third term.
When Germany began to rearm and to seek Lebensraum aggressively in the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration cooperated closely with the British and the French in measures to oppose German expansion. After World War II commenced in 1939, this U.S. assistance grew ever greater and included such measures as the so-called destroyer deal and the deceptively named Lend-Lease program. In anticipation of U.S. entry into the war, British and U.S. military staffs secretly formulated plans for joint operations. U.S. forces sought to create a war-justifying incident by cooperating with the British navy in attacks on German U-boats in the north Atlantic, but Hitler refused to take the bait, thus denying Roosevelt the pretext he craved for making the United States a full-fledged, declared belligerent—an end that the great majority of Americans opposed.
In June 1940, Henry L. Stimson, who had been secretary of war under Taft and secretary of state under Hoover, became secretary of war again. Stimson was a lion of the Anglophile, northeastern upper crust and no friend of the Japanese. In support of the so-called Open Door Policy for China, Stimson favored the use of economic sanctions to obstruct Japan’s advance in Asia. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes vigorously endorsed this policy. Roosevelt hoped that such sanctions would goad the Japanese into making a rash mistake by launching a war against the United States, which would bring in Germany because Japan and Germany were allied.
Accordingly, the Roosevelt administration, while curtly dismissing Japanese diplomatic overtures to harmonize relations, imposed a series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions on Japan. In 1939 the United States terminated the 1911 commercial treaty with Japan. “On July 2, 1940, Roosevelt signed the Export Control Act, authorizing the President to license or prohibit the export of essential defense materials.” Under this authority, “[o]n July 31, exports of aviation motor fuels and lubricants and No. 1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap were restricted.” Next, in a move aimed at Japan, Roosevelt slapped an embargo, effective October 16, “on all exports of scrap iron and steel to destinations other than Britain and the nations of the Western Hemisphere.” Finally, on July 26, 1941, Roosevelt “froze Japanese assets in the United States, thus bringing commercial relations between the nations to an effective end. One week later Roosevelt embargoed the export of such grades of oil as still were in commercial flow to Japan.” The British and the Dutch followed suit, embargoing exports to Japan from their colonies in southeast Asia.
Roosevelt and his subordinates knew they were putting Japan in an untenable position and that the Japanese government might well try to escape the stranglehold by going to war. Having broken the Japanese diplomatic code, the Americans knew, among many other things, what Foreign Minister Teijiro Toyoda had communicated to Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura on July 31: “Commercial and economic relations between Japan and third countries, led by England and the United States, are gradually becoming so horribly strained that we cannot endure it much longer. Consequently, our Empire, to save its very life, must take measures to secure the raw materials of the South Seas.”
wkmac. Hmm. good posting. Ofcourse we wer'nt alive back then. But, I never did think a second bomb of that nature was neccesary! One was bad enough, to drop another one 3days later.. without warning... that was madness. They should have given the japs a few more days to evaluate the situation. Or atleast ask them, surrender, or you want another bomb ?
Btw, many more then 500.000 died.. thats not counting the birthdefects, the shortend lives, and people dying decades later of radiation.
It hurts, when I think about all those innocent children, babies, grannies, mothers, etc.
But, it's history, and added on to the bad reputation Americans get.