64 years ago today

Texanne

Texanne

5,000+ Posts
We dropped the Big One. Hiroshima.

And changed the course of mankind forever. But it had to be done.
 
No doubt it had to be done. And I side with the view that the legacy of the bomb prevented world war over the next few decades.

Still, a horrible thing. Little kids, school girls in white dresses...

Not as horrible as the Dresden firebombing. We were pretty good at laying it to the women and children in those days. In military strategy terms, breaking the will of the enemy.

Again, those had to be done, too. Still horrible. We are, sometimes.
 
I would agree that we should never view war or warfare as anything other than a tremendous evil. However, I also have no qualms about stating that horrible acts of violence, when they are done to prevent unspeakable outcomes (e.g. Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany occupying Eurasia), are tantamount to necessary.

I would go so far as to say that if we aren't willing to firebomb an enemy's capital and major cities, we probably don't have cause to be at war in the first place.
 
MIA, It didn't matter if the target was worth hitting. Hell, set the damn thing off in the middle of Tokyo Bay. The simple demonstration of the power of the nuclear weapon would be enough. What did matter was the moral taint this act cast on our country. It was an act of terrorism - nothing less.

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GW, I don't dispute that a bit. I'm just saying, once the decision was made to drop the bomb, there were going to be civilian casualties. Arguing for a military target belies the point that it was not a military act, but a political one. In any event, if you drop it in the water, then you have the currents carrying the fallout around the globe. You drop it in the mountains, you taint the water supply for the cities below. Japan is a small place, there is no where to drop a bomb of this type where you aren't going to kill civilians. Once you've committed the horror you are about to unleash, I think there is a pretty compelling argument for making sure that no one will miss the point.

Again, I'm not supporting the decision to use the weapon (I'm not condemning it either, necessarily), just saying that there is no "safe" target in Japan or Western Europe to avoid a significant loss of life.
 
I fully agree that the "it had to be done" is a salve for regrets. Another meaning of that, is that there was no way it was not going to be done given the times and the players.

But it was horrible.

Lots of contributors to this. I've long found this history of the making and using of the bomb to be fascinating. I've used a quote by Oppenheimer a couple of times when leading technology planning workshops:

“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do with it after you have had your technical success. This is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

Nowadays, of course, this the textbook example of how not to go about it.
 
The more I read about how hard it would have been to invade the Japanese mainland, and how many Americans would have died attempting the invasion, the more justifiable this terrible act becomes. The civilian population was training to fight the invasion with every means necessary, including children with sharpened bamboo sticks.
The proposed invasion force, while huge, was not guaranteed success, especially after noting the difficulty of taking smaller islands like Okinawa. The Japanese did not surrender, it was dishonorable. Almost all fought to the death on the other Pacific islands.
It's not an anniversary to celebrate, but I would have to think were I in Truman's shoes I would have had to make the same terrible decision to drop the bomb on Japan.
Read the numbers of lives lost taking each Pacific island in WWII, then tell us if you were president if you would have authorized an invasion of Japan over dropping the atomic bomb. That's the bottom line.
 
First, I'm not sure we can distinguish with any clarity the difference between military and political acts in time of war.

Second, while it's true that the dropping of the bomb was a terrible thing, it has to be said that war, especially in the modern era, is necessarily terrible. The question is whether dropping the bomb was ultimately more terrible than the alternatives.

As it was, we barely got the Japanese to surrender after two bombs. Japanese military leaders, in fact, were doing everything in their power to prevent the emperor from announcing the surrender. It was by the narrowest of margins that the surrender happened at all. It's very unlikely that they would have surrendered had we dropped one of the bombs, as GT suggested, in Tokyo Bay. (And let's not forget that we weren't totally certain the devices would work properly, or for that matter that they would detonate at all. Nor did we, at the time, have an unlimited amount of material from which to make additional bombs.)

The alternative, which would have meant an invasion of the Japanese home islands, not only would have resulted in the deaths of many thousands of American servicemen, but it would have resulted in far greater devastation for the Japanese people themselves. There can be no doubt (if we assume that the casualty rates from the island-hopping campaign would have continued, in proportion) that Japanese citizens themselves were the chief beneficiary of the atomic bomb. Millions of Japanese civilians would have died in such an invasion.

As if that's not enough, Northern Japan would have, in all likelihood, been consigned to the fate of Eastern Europe and forced to endure Soviet repression for the next 50 years.

I can understand the need for collective self-criticism; that's a healthy thing for any group of people. But I wonder sometimes if we're just looking for reasons to hate ourselves.
 
Killing people with one bomb and killing people with one thousand bombs is still killing people. I don't see how it's any more of a reprehensible act than many other acts of war.
And wasn't Hiroshima being used heavily by the military? I thought the Japanese were using the civilians in this and other cities of the day as human shields??
 
People that believe the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wrong should have a conversation with someone who actually faught the Japanese in WWII. I have had several conversations with my grandfather who was stationed in the Phillipines at the time the bombs were dropped. His orders had already been recieved for his squadron to leave for Okinawa to prepare for the invasion of Japanese mainland. His squandron was due to arrive in Okinawa in Sept of 1945. He told me the talk was not to expect to return to the U.S. alive.

The Doolittle raids over Tokyo had taught the Americans that it was going to be a very hard task to invade Japan successfully. My grandfather says the decision to drop the 2 bombs were possibly the most difficult and most important wartime decisions made in history. Yes there were 150-200K casualties from the 2 A-bombs but a raid on Japan was estimated to have caused upto a million casualties. As per my grandfather the ******** deserved it for the cowardly sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Fifty some odd years later he has no mercy for the Japanese he had to fight.

Again if you know someone that fought in WWII talk to them, ask questions about their experiences after all they have been called the greatest generation. Be prepared the ones I know are not very politcally correct when talking about this war. All of my grandfathers siblings fought in WWII, all of his brothers in law fought in WWII. All came home alive, some were scarred and wounded but they made it back to their families. Now there are only a few left, my gpa turns 91 next month and is the last in the family alive that fought in WWII.
 
I'm kicking myself for not remembering the history professor at UT in the late 80's early 90's who was a killer presenter and knew a whole hell of a lot about WWII and especially the controversy of the nuclear bombings.

It was one of those intimate classes of 500 or so. From my recollection, he was pretty even handed in discussing the pros and cons of the dilemma facing the leaders of our country and military.
 
Japan's military was broken.

Its will was not.

We would be mistaken to look at the situation through a Western lens alone. We were in a situation unlike our usual concept of warfare -- once your army is destroyed, you surrender.

It didn't work that way in Imperial Japan. Defeating their military was NOT enough to insure victory. You had to destroy their spirit -- their will -- their belief in a divine right to victory (via the divine Emperor). And one must understand that JAPAN WROTE THAT RULE, not the U.S.

They essentially had the rule of "We will not be defeated until you destroy us completely, body, mind, and spirit."

The only answer to that is "Well, okay. Have it your way."

Taking life is taking life. It is all horrific. Arguing about numbers is pointless. If we had killed that many people over the course of weeks, with conventional bombs, bullets, etc., it would be no less or greater a horror.

What made Hiroshima particularly horrific was not the killing of thousands -- that had been done before. Instead, it was the FEAR created by the means of killing. That's why the atomic bomb made its unique mark on history. And it's why it still does.

Questioning the decision is folly. There is not a nation in the world that wouldn't have used the A-bomb to its advantage in WW-II. The times, the ethos, and the stakes, were quite different. It's arrogant of us to judge in hindsight from the comfort of our armchair . . . . a comfort guaranteed, in some part, by the use of the bomb itself.
 
I disagree with the fact that their will wasn't broken. If they had really wanted to break the will of the Japanese, they would have nuked Kyoto (which I'm told has high cultural significance to the Japanese with temples and such). We firebombed cities that killed more than either of the A-bombs, we had a Tokyo Millienia (1000 planes flying over tokyo at once, about 850 of which were B-29's). If we didn't use the A-bombs, we could have and would have set the entire country ablaze until there wasn't a structure left. Then, our entire Navy would be parked offshore delivering round the clock shelling of coastal cities and air sorties. A few months of that coupled with a demonstration of the nuclear weapon in Tokyo Bay would have brought the country to its knees.

Now, I kinda thing that dropping the nukes on Japan was merely a show to Russia that we had these big bad *** weapons and if they didn't play ball we could use them against them if need be. Of course, the Ruskies already knew that we had the bomb care of Klaus Fuchs.
 
We tried round the clock shelling of the various islands like Okinawa, Corregidor, and various others. The enemy created elaborate networks of tunnels, and almost all survived the shelling without a scratch. They waited patiently for all our troops, supplies, vehicles and armaments to land, kept waiting while troops went inland, then attacked with great fury.
I disagree that we would have been able to force unconditional surrender on the Japanese mainland without dropping the atomic bomb, without many more deaths on both sides than the bombs caused.
I certainly believe it is good to question leaders' decisions, but I agree with Truman's in this case.
My uncle Tyrus was training for the invasion of Japan, and it is highly unlikely he would have returned alive. His children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren support Truman's decision.
Killing someone with a mortar, a 12" shell, a torpedo, a rifle, a knife, a kamikaze dive, a B-29 firebomb, hand to hand-it's all wrong in one way, but necessary in another-if you agree the war is absolutely necessary. WWII was nesessary on our part, don't see how you can get around that evaluation.
The Japanese citizens supported their emperor, their army, their culture, and were preparing to die in defense of their homeland when it was invaded.
It is inescapable that more would have died in that invasion than the bomb killed, plus at the minimum hundreds of thousands of Americans.
 
GT, I think you should deal with the argument that's being made for the decision to drop the bombs, rather than falsely extending the opposing argument beyond what was said or intended or even hinted at.
 
even at the end, some Japanese commanders thought that with enough Kamakaze, victory could be achieved.

American invasion forces would have been absolutely swarmed with kamakaze before they ever made it to the Japanese mainland.

Sure, our fighters would have taken out 90% of them, but still, our troop transports would have surely been severly crippled and many men lost.
 
The major difference between shelling of islands in the Pacific and the shelling of Japan was that there we no civilians on the islands. What I think may have been a good idea, was to hold off on the invasion of Okinawa and drop the bombs there. The Japanese had 100k+ stationed on the island (along with another 100k civilians since it was a home island). You drop the nukes and they'd take care of any tunnels and underground shelter the army may have built, you'd kill largely soldiers depending on where it hit, and you'd demonstrate the power of the weapons.

The Trinity test was in mid-July, Okinawa started a few months earlier. Those involved knew the bombs were close to operational at that point.
 
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