The "Bomb"

I'm with President Harry Truman on this one, if it saved one GI's life it was the correct thing to do. By many military experts, they say it saved lives on both sides, because of the amount of time the war would have gone on without it. Keep in mind their military wasn't know to be caring for civilian population. What did Sherman say about war?

 

Salty, you are the military guy, I just spend one enlistment in the service. Most military will do what they think they can do. I know what they did in the Philippines, China and other places.
But to answer your question, at that point of the war, I don't think they could. The bomb cut anywhere from 6 months to 2 years of ground fighting off of the war, depending on who you read. I was taught that it cut about a year and a half off of the war when I was a teenager. How many civilians would have been killed in 6 months or 2 years? How many of our GI's and their military would have been killed?
I still believe that it saved lives over all.

 

They are actually taught in school that the Pearl Harbor attack was justified since the US had an embargo that kept them from needed resources. And the attack was not a "sneak attack" to them, it's just that their embassy failed to get the declaration of war to the US government in a timely manner.

 

John, I met a lady from Japan who was married to an American a few years ago and she said the same thing. Most of us try and turn things in our favor, that is nothing new.

 

I think the bomb saved lives on both sides. And it has deterred WW3 for the last 70 years.

 

That's true. In addition, the Japanese are very nationalistic.

 

Probably not---by the time the Enola Gay dropped that bad mamma jamma----the Jap airforce was not considered a threat any longer---and most of the Imperial Naval vessels were doing survey work on the bottom of the Pacific!!

IOW----Japan did not have an air/naval force capable of bombing raids on the US at that point in the war

 

Actually the Japanese tried to bomb the continental US during WW2.

Here's a link to the story:

http://www.historynet.com/japanese-bomb-the-continental-u-s-west-coast.htm

 

This is a good post putting this difficult issue into prespective. There are other indicents in American history that we should not be proud of more than that. In my mind, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the way the Indians were treated, slavery and their treatment decades after treatment, and the treatment of American Japanese citizens in intern camps were all three nothing to be proud of. I am sure in their day, there was justification for each.

 

I am not a pacifist either, and served in the military. I believe in full second amendment rights. I will put it this way since it is a public board, no one would want to break into my house.

The historical incident that bothers me the most is Manifest Destiny. What kind of thinking said we had the God given right to take all of the land to the Pacific, without regard to anything between us at the time and the ocean.

I have thought for years about some of the points Roger made, and the issue of the A bomb on Japan is a tough one. Japan bombed us first. They killed innocent American lives. Did that give us the right to act like barbarians like them? There is no winner in this story. I can see where honorable people would come down on different sides.

Two things I will say in our favor. We dropped leaflets and sent out radio warnings from Saipan before dropping each of the two bombs. Also, we did not start the war. We treated our prisoners much better than they did ours. It is a good thing Japan surrendered after the second bomb, because we would have gone right down the list. Another honorable thing we did was not start with Tokyo.

None of this justifies the loss of innocent human life. It is a tough call, but I fall on the side that the decision was justified. I admire President Truman for his overall term in office. He had a sense of how to lead, and did not take polls to guide his decisions.

This is one of the hardest decisions ever made by a President. He was thrust into office by the death of Roosevelt, and had not been informed about the developement of the A bomb. I have no idea why Roosevelt did that, but it does not seem really bright.

Imagine any of our last four Presidents being put in that situation.

 

Japan launched some incendiary balloons from a sub and a couple landed in Oregon, starting forest fires.

 

Baloney. Japanese history and culture says otherwise.

 

This is a hard one. I know that yours is the standard answer, but C4K's position has merit too. I don't think anyone knows for sure whether or not the Japanese civilian populace would have fought, including the Japanese.

On your side is the fact that the Japanese actually trained civilians for a fight to the death against a possible Allied invasion by drilling them with sticks for rifles (the Japanese army would not have had enough guns to put into civilian hands), and even spears to use against rifles (an insane idea--the civilians were not stupid enough to actually try this). To this day the Japanese are strong on marching (I've seen little kids being taught to march at a grade school) and other military seeming activities. However, the average Japanese civilian in 1945 was not a samurai and did not have the samurai spirit. Rather than boldly face invaders they would have been scared out of their wits, like the average Japanse soldier was in the war.

On C4K's side is the fact that when Okinawa was invaded the civilians did not fight the invaders, but fled and hid or even committed mass suicide. Someone might answer that Okinawa had a separate language and culture. But by 1945 the Okinawans were fairly well integrated into Japanese culture, the Ryukyu Kingdom having been a Japanese prefecture since 1879.

My view? If we had invaded the Honshu mainland in 1945, the police and a few civilians would have fought the invaders, but the vast majority of the population would have been cowed before the invaders and not fought, but meekly obeyed.

 

A reasonable response, but we will have to agree to disagree.

You act as if the suicides on Okinawa and Saipan don't count as civilian deaths. I believe they would.

 

I thought the issue was not civilian deaths per se (unavoidable) but the number of deaths depending on the response of the Japanese civilian population to an Allied invasion--to fight or not to fight. That is usually how this problem is drawn in the history books. Shocking as the Okinawan suicides were, they represented only a tiny percentage of the population. Having known and talked to many Japanese who were civilians at the end of WW2, I'm convinced that the civilian population would not have resisted an Allied invasion, nor would they have committed mass suicide.

The Japanese military would have resisted, that's true. Would this resistance have been successful? I think not for long. Note that (1) the Japanese had no such fortifications on their beaches as the Germans did in Normandy and elsewhere, or as the Japanese themselves did on Iwo Jima, etc. (2) Allied air control would have been complete. The Japanese air force no longer existed as a coherent defense other than a few kamikaze units. (3) The Japanese navy was also virtually destroyed at this point, as witness the failed launch of the battleship Yamato. With complete air and naval superiority on the Allied side, what could the Japanese military have done?

Edited in: Having said all of that, it is true that there was no way the Allied leadership in 1945 could have had the analysis I just made. They made their decisions based on imperfect knowledge.