# Thoughts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Was it the Right Call?



## BAYLOR (Dec 24, 2014)

Did the bombings of both cities really end war or would Japan have surrendered without them? The alternative not using the bombs was an invasion of the Japanese home islands, whcih would have been very costly in lives on both sides. The battle of Okinawa was sample of what US troops would have faced had we been forced to invade.


Thoughts?


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 24, 2014)

The question as to whether Japan was ready to surrender before either bomb was dropped I can't answer; there seems to be valid arguments either way. The Japanese were a formidable foe who would fight for every inch of ground. How dificult is it to fight an enemy that is prepared to sacrifice itself en masse to stop you from advancing? It's quite conceivable that potentially thousands of US lives were saved from an enemy who would not surrender.
You have to ask yourself why such an attack would not be carried out against a military target? Probably because the devastation caused would not have looked as bad. Many Japanese cities had been fire-bombed killing countless civillians, but the physcological impact of one single bomb being dropped on Hiroshima and wiping the city and it's citizens from the face of the earth must have been enormous. 

The question I have to ask is was the bomb dropped on Nagasaki really necessary? Or would the threat of doing it have been enough to get Japan to surrender? 

The other question is whether the lives of hundreds of thousands of civillians is an acceptable cost for saving the lives of thousands of soldiers?

The first question my heart and mind says that they would have surrendered without the need to drop a second bomb. The second question , I just don't know. 

It's far easier to look at things with hindsight, I guess being in a war-time situation some really tough decisions have to be made. And I'm sure that Pearl Harbour and the way that Allied prisoners were treated may have had some bearing on it.

One thing I'm fairly certain of is that it probably stopped World War III (or at least has put it off for the time being).


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## Ray McCarthy (Dec 24, 2014)

Or the Russians might have beaten Japan. They killed more Japanese Soldiers than USA. They didn't even really start either, till the War in Europe was over (Then shipped loads from West to East via Trans Siberian etc). Despite the impression of Films and Media, the Russians were beating the Germans ...

Perhaps the only positive aspect of the USA A-Bombs on Japan was an unwillingness by Russia and USA to subsequently use them.

Dresden was similar devastation and probably a War Crime. Churchill's deliberate decision and Bomber Harris's campaign against German Civilians was simply immoral. With that example and then the US involvement to support it, then the A Bombs in Japan  were inevitable.


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## Ray McCarthy (Dec 24, 2014)

paranoid marvin said:


> One thing I'm fairly certain of is that it probably stopped World War III (or at least has put it off for the time being).


I agree.
Then the US and Russians scared themselves with the really big H-Bomb tests and started talking about Atmospheric test ban and SALT.


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 24, 2014)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Or the Russians might have beaten Japan. They killed more Japanese Soldiers than USA. They didn't even really start either, till the War in Europe was over (Then shipped loads from West to East via Trans Siberian etc). Despite the impression of Films and Media, the Russians were beating the Germans ...
> 
> Perhaps the only positive aspect of the USA A-Bombs on Japan was an unwillingness by Russia and USA to subsequently use them.
> 
> Dresden was similar devastation and probably a War Crime. Churchill's deliberate decision and Bomber Harris's campaign against German Civilians was simply immoral. With that example and then the US involvement to support it, then the A Bombs in Japan  were inevitable.



Yep , I agree. Dresden wasn't necessary, but it did help to bring the war to an earlier conclusion. I think the Allies were looking to enforce a regime change - they knew that with Hitler in charge surrender was out of the question.

Again though the question of civilians dying at the cost of soldier's lives; is it acceptable to kill civillians to win a war? At least with Dresden it was more of a military target, but for sure Harris would have been tried as a war-criminal by the Germans if they had won.


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## Ray McCarthy (Dec 24, 2014)

The Western Allies killing German Civilians was simply killing Civilians. It wasn't hastening the war end or regime change. 
Dresden was pure revenge. Or to deprive Russians of materials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II


> In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed over 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) of the city centre. An estimated 22,700 to 25,000 people were killed. *Three more USAAF air raids followed, two occurring on 2 March and 17 April aimed at the city's railroad marshaling yard and one small raid on 17 April aimed at industrial areas.*


The fact that in 1950s UK and USA were STILL justifying this totally pointless killing of 22,000 to 25,000 people as the Russians advanced shows that certainly at the time they thought A-Bombs on Japan was totally justified and many will still claim the Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan was justified. They have to, or else admit they perpetrated war crimes.
Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden etc yes there were military targets. But the motivation was to kill as many German Civilians as possible.

I don't think it's acceptable to to kill civilians to win a war. But can you find an example where it actually can be proved beyond doubt that killing civilians helped to win a war?

The V1 & V2 "terror" weapons killed maybe 2,000. The effect was to HARDEN allied resolve and "pay them back"! About 20,000 people died making them, mostly slave labour!

The Western Allied bombing (primarily was of civilians) simply hardened German resolve.

Vietnam and Agent Orange?


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## AnyaKimlin (Dec 24, 2014)

One of my earliest memories is of a man speaking at remembrance day at church.  A gentleman who had mints in his pocket.   He had been in a boat and watching Hiroshima happen.  From that moment on he became a pacifist and nothing would convince him that was right.  I've also known men involved in bombing campaigns including Dresden and had a great-aunt who was in Dresden and had a lucky escape.  When you are shown these events from  an individual deeply personal perspective it is very hard to say any act of war is worth it.  The toll on the men who did the bombings is often awful..  Our bombing of the Mohne Dam was an act that it is now enshrined in law that we don't do again.

If you're the one suffering because of it then it is never worth it.


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## willwallace (Dec 24, 2014)

If I recall correctly, the US only had the 2 bombs.  They thought about blowing one up on an island, with Japanese observers, but if they weren't sufficiently impressed, they would have had only one left.
The second bomb was used after Japan failed to respond to the first one.  Using two in quick succession gave the impression we had lots of them, and could just drop one every few days.
Using the atomic weapons saved Allied and Japanese lives, undoubtedly.  Besides the fact that the soldiers would have fought ferociously defending the homeland, it also would have prevented civilian casualties.  I've seen documentaries with footage of Japanese women and children throwing themselves off cliffs rather than be captured by Americans, in the Pacific.  Who knows how many would do the same thing while their men were being killed in battle? Nuclear weapons are horrible, terrible devices that we should pray are never used in anger again.  But in this case, I don't think it was the wrong way to go, unfortunately.


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## Ray McCarthy (Dec 24, 2014)

willwallace said:


> Using the atomic weapons saved Allied and Japanese lives


*Maybe* _some_ Allied Lives. We can't tell for sure.
It certainly didn't save Japanese Lives. Killed mostly civilians. Lots.
*At least 129,000 people died, mostly civilians.*

The Russians and Chinese where also fighting Japan, Russia was doing well.

All the Angst about Communism. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_red_than_dead


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 24, 2014)

Hiroshima hadn't been bombed prior to that. It's almost as if they were saving it so that the 'demonstration' would have maximum effect.

I think the message was just as much for Stalin as it was for Japanese high command.


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 24, 2014)

I think I speak for everyone in saying that none of this detracts from the brave men and women who fought during this conflict; it's just a question of the tactics that were used by those in High Command.

It could be that with the imminent arrival of nuclear weapons, and with the potential for Axis forces to acquire these, that Allied forces wanted to land a knockout blow as soon as was possible - regardless of cost to civilians. It could also have been done to make sure that the war ended before Stalin's forces exntended too far.


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## Ray McCarthy (Dec 24, 2014)

All the Angst about Communism ...


paranoid marvin said:


> It could also have been done to make sure that the war ended before Stalin's forces exntended too far


Yes, absolutely. Stalin *might* have occupied all of Germany. But it's immoral to kill 129,000 Japanese to send a message to Stalin. Especially as before the Bombs dropped the West already had their dirty secret agreements about repatriation, Austria, Berlin, Germany, Korea. (Yalta etc).

If the US hadn't entered WWII in Europe, the war there might have lasted to 1948 with the Dutch and French speaking Russian today. Also USA would not have been keen to see Russia occupying more of Japan (I think some island contested till recently Russia and Japan).
Inept Occupation of Korea by the Russians and USA after they agreed a Partition allowed the Chinese "wiggle room" and resulted in Korean War in 1956. Neither side actually got round to putting any significant amount of troops after Japanese Occupation forces left. The Koreans in far North had been helping the Communist Chinese fight Japanese and then Nationalists in China, so when the Northerners decided they didn't like the USA-USSR partition, they attacked and  the Chinese then helped.

In UN, the Nationalists, now occupying Taiwan were still recognised, so PRC stayed away in a huff and the resolution to use UN force in Korea was agreed, rather than just the USA.

A war caused by Russian & USA ineptitude after defeat of Japan!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War

If the USA had been prepared to listen to China almost all Korea would be unified with south and DMZ to give China security.

Most wars are pointless or can be avoided. I see no evidence that in the last 120 years of war that there was ANY justification for the attacks on Civilians. (Boer War, UK invented Concentration camps)


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## willwallace (Dec 24, 2014)

Ray McCarthy said:


> *Maybe* _some_ Allied Lives. We can't tell for sure.
> It certainly didn't save Japanese Lives. Killed mostly civilians. Lots.
> *At least 129,000 people died, mostly civilians.*
> 
> ...


Estimated casualties for the allies were 500,000 to 1.5 million. The Japanese were expected to incur casualties of around 25‰ of the population, which in 1945 was about 72 million. So that's around 18 million casualties. These numbers are based on the Okinawa campaign,  when the Japanese were fighting on their own territory.

So in comparison, 129,000 casualties versus nearly 20 million is significant.


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## Ursa major (Dec 24, 2014)

paranoid marvin said:


> The other question is whether the lives of hundreds of thousands of civillians is an acceptable cost for saving the lives of thousands of soldiers?


This sounds quite black and white until one realises that most of the US soldiers (and the majority of the Japanese defending forces) would have been civilians before Pearl Harbour and were again civilians reasonably soon after the end of WWII.

The US could not have defeated the Japanese by using only its pre-1942 standing army.


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## Mirannan (Dec 24, 2014)

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ghastly examples of what can happen if there are WMDs in existence and you make mistakes that are bad enough. An example that wouldn't have been available if the two bombs hadn't been used.

Given that nuclear power and nuclear weapons were inevitable sooner or later, it's quite possible that those two bombs saved humanity. I don't know whether it's been done, but I can imagine an alt-hist story in which Truman decided to do a demonstration instead of live use - and twenty years later there was a full-scale thermonuclear spasm war, for lack of the horrible example. We almost had one of those in the real world, on at least two occasions, with the example in front of us!

As somewhat of an aside, I've seen in a few places an idea for promoting peace and preventing that particular apocalypse; that of, every ten or twenty years, using some uninhabited rock in the middle of the ocean (or maybe a surplus-to-requirements ship) as a firing point for a high-yield thermonuclear blast - and having all the world's leaders and media watching it from a safe distance. Just to make sure that everyone knows what can happen if they screw up badly enough.

On Christmas Eve, it's worth reflecting on the fact that people are far from perfect. Maybe we never will be.


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## BAYLOR (Dec 25, 2014)

paranoid marvin said:


> Hiroshima hadn't been bombed prior to that. It's almost as if they were saving it so that the 'demonstration' would have maximum effect.
> 
> I think the message was just as much for Stalin as it was for Japanese high command.



Didn't the fire bombing of Tokyo kill more people then Hiroshima ?


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## willwallace (Dec 25, 2014)

Over 100,000, I believe.


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## Foxbat (Dec 25, 2014)

Projected casualties for Operation Downfall (2 part invasion of Japan codenamed Olympic and Coronet) ran to 1.7 million allied casualties (with around 800 000 fatalities) and between 4 and 10 million Japanese casualties (dependent on the willingness of the civilian population to take up arms). Given the rates of mass suicides to avoid capture by Japanese civilians in previous invasions and the prospect of fantaticism fuelling fighting on home soil, the bombs look like the lesser of two evils. 70 years on, I'm not sure what the alternative might have played out.


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## River Boy (Dec 26, 2014)

paranoid marvin said:


> Yep , I agree. Dresden wasn't necessary, but it did help to bring the war to an earlier conclusion. I think the Allies were looking to enforce a regime change - they knew that with Hitler in charge surrender was out of the question.



There has to be an argument that bringing war with a country that was carrying out genocide to an end quicker was worth it. Doesn't take away the sadness of having to make such a decision when it would obviously have been preferable to target those in charge rather than ordinary people.

Regarding Japan, I agree that the question of the second Bomb is definitely a source of debate. In diplomatic terms though I don't know how much Japan was told or threatened; whether they remained stubborn or whether they had an opportunity they didn't take.


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## AnyaKimlin (Dec 26, 2014)

BAYLOR said:


> Didn't the fire bombing of Tokyo kill more people then Hiroshima ?



It wasn't just the deaths - a generation of women were tainted by Hiroshima.  Nobody would marry them or have children with them.  It's only been in my lifetime fish in the waters nearby have been edible etc  There were the cancers and other issues afterwards.


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 26, 2014)

willwallace said:


> Over 100,000, I believe.




I don't think it was the number of people that were killed, more the way it was done. Cities had been bombed or firebombed on many occasions; there was nothing new here. There was plenty of warning and it could be survived with the right protection and some luck. The atom bomb was an entirely different proposition; with virtually no warning a whole city and it's people could be reduced to ashes. In war you need to have some hope of survival, but what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki removed all hope; there was no 'blitz-spirit' to be found here. Even an hounourable death fighting your enemy was denied to the Japanese.

Anyakimlin, I didn't realise that. I knew there were many health problems for many years after, but not that the citizens of those places were so tainted; how terribly sad.


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## AnyaKimlin (Dec 26, 2014)

paranoid marvin said:


> Anyakimlin, I didn't realise that. I knew there were many health problems for many years after, but not that the citizens of those places were so tainted; how terribly sad.



It was believed a woman from Hiroshima and Nagasaki would produce a deformed child because of the bombs.  To us in 2014 it is just sad but this was the 1940s/50s when a woman's best chance of getting on in life was still marriage and children.


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## BAYLOR (Dec 27, 2014)

AnyaKimlin said:


> It was believed a woman from Hiroshima and Nagasaki would produce a deformed child because of the bombs.  To us in 2014 it is just sad but this was the 1940s/50s when a woman's best chance of getting on in life was still marriage and children.



It's unfortunate that all of that happened , but none of it would have happened had Japan never started a war  in the first place.


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## Foxbat (Dec 27, 2014)

The answer to question 7 in this  http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~dinov/courses_students.dir/data.dir/AtomicBombSurvivorsData.htm  is interesting.
*
Question 7.* What health effects have been seen among the children born to atomic-bomb survivors?

This was one of the earliest concerns in the aftermath of the bombings. Efforts to detect genetic effects were begun in the late 1940s and continue to this day. Thus far, no evidence of genetic effects has been found. Recent advances in molecular biology may make it possible to detect genetic changes at the gene (DNA) level at some time in the future. RERF scientists are working to preserve blood samples that can be used for such studies as suitably powerful techniques are developed (see *Repository of biological materials*). Monitoring of deaths and cancer incidence in the children of survivors also is continuing.

But remember, these were not _in utero _exposures to radiation but births after the fact.


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## Boneman (Dec 27, 2014)

Aren't the details of the discussions as to why 2 bombs were dropped and why mainly civilian targets were used, available under the Freedom of Information Act? (Or the American equivalent). If not, why not?

If you have  a weapon that will save the lives of your own forces, and cause the enemy to surrender, you use it. The debate about why Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and who made those decisions) should be answered if the information about the decisions is available to the public.


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## Foxbat (Dec 27, 2014)

Boneman said:


> Aren't the details of the discussions as to why 2 bombs were dropped and why mainly civilian targets were used, available under the Freedom of Information Act? (Or the American equivalent). If not, why not?
> 
> If you have  a weapon that will save the lives of your own forces, and cause the enemy to surrender, you use it. The debate about why Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and who made those decisions) should be answered if the information about the decisions is available to the public.




As far as I'm aware, the reason for those two particular cities was because they were relatively untouched by allied bombing raids up to that point. Wiping out a whole city with one bomb was a statement of the terrible future that would await Japan if it continued to wage war.

There was no logic in bombing Tokyo because there would probably be nobody left in authority to offer a surrender (also killing the Emperor may well have strengthened the resolve of the Japanese people to resist).


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## Venusian Broon (Dec 27, 2014)

Foxbat said:


> As far as I'm aware, the reason for those two particular cities was because they were relatively untouched by allied bombing raids up to that point. Wiping out a whole city with one bomb was a statement of the terrible future that would await Japan if it continued to wage war.
> 
> There was no logic in bombing Tokyo because there would probably be nobody left in authority to offer a surrender (also killing the Emperor may well have strengthened the resolve of the Japanese people to resist).



And as the allies were now fully working on a 'total' war mindset to combat both Japan and Germany they no doubt had a long list of every target city in the country - each one with the legitimate* military and industrial targets that were necessary for the Japanese war effort. No doubt a list of these important operations could be found for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Apparently (I didn't know this) but the next atomic bomb was scheduled for delivery on August 19th (that's 10 days after the actual surrender) and there is evidence that they would have used it on Tokyo. At least there is a cited bit of evidence on Wikipedia for that assertion...

Couple of other points: 

- Japan had to unconditionally surrender or the allies would have to occupy the Japanese islands. The 'well the Red army had defeated the Japanese army in Manchuria, therefore they were beaten and would have surrendered' is a bit of a red herring IMO. By the spring of 1945 most of the Japanese merchant fleet was sitting at the bottom of the pacific ocean and there was very little that Japan could do to help its own troops in its overseas operations. Thus those in Manchuria were understrength, lacking supplies and very few heavy weapons (artillery, tanks and a complete lack of an effective airforce.) The huge numbers of Russians (I think they outnumbered the Japanese defenders 2:1), were extremely well armed and supplied and therefore easily cut through the exhausted Japanese. 

But that still left the main islands to take - and as Okinawa showed, and as others have pointed out in this thread - the butchery that may have occurred, whether it was US or Russian forces, was being predicted on a scale out of parallel in human history. And although these projections are pretty high end, there is no doubt that the Japanese civilian population would have taken the brunt of the causalities, in the many millions at least. 

The Japanese military had a tight control on society, after the Soviets had declared war, the military instantly declared martial law. Some piecemeal dropping of leaflets by the US telling the Japanese that they were on the verge of losing therefore surrender was the best option seemed to backfire totally. I've seen interviews with Japanese civilians at the time who saw the notes but just took them to be Allied propaganda therefore it only strengthened their resolve to continue fighting, if that had been repeated all over the country it might have tipped the military into a position of remaining at war till the end. Remember even after two atomic bombs being dropped, it took the utterly unprecedented step of intervention by the Emperor to accept unconditional surrender when the cabinet was split. 

- Why two bombs? Well it took the Japanese quite a long while to accept that an atomic bomb had in fact been dropped in the first place, unfortunately. It took another quick second atomic attack to 1) give them more evidence and 2) try and convince them that the US had in fact a huge number stockpiled and they were about to strike everywhere else. 


An unforeseen consequence of these attacks is that the utter devastation that these weapons could cause was plain to see for all - as others in the thread have said, I do think that they may have helped stop a third world war amongst the big powers in the years to follow. (Instead we got a cold war and a lot of fighting by proxies: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan... No matter what way we choose, it seems we cannot help but inflict suffering on each other, one way or another.)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Of course in total war, as strategic bomber commands around the world discovered the virtual impossibility precision bombing (and anyway production rates continued to rise in Germany as they reorganised their industry in the face of both day and night time mass bombing raids - it only started to slow down, I believe, when raw materials could not be found and moved in in sufficient quantities to supply the industrial base, which occurred surprisingly late in the war) the civilian population who worked the industries and supported the military were deemed a target.


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## svalbard (Dec 27, 2014)

It was the wrong call and a war crime. The Americans knew that Japan was looking for a peaceful resolution to the war, using the Soviet Union as an intemediatory. This they knew through intercepting messages between Japan and their embassy in Moscow. A bit more imagination from the Americans and 200,000 civilians would not have lodt their lives.


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## Foxbat (Dec 27, 2014)

The Russians declared war on Japan on august the 8th with invasion commencing on the 9th. Stalin wanted his share of territory in the far east. Not exactly the act of somebody trying to end the war.


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## svalbard (Dec 27, 2014)

The Allies had broken the Japanese codes earlier in the war. Regardless of the fact that Russia declared war, the Japanese had sent coded messages to sound out peace deals, which the Americans knew about. Taking this small, but critical piece of information into account it makes the dropping of those 2 bombs one of the most heinous acts in history.


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 27, 2014)

from 1944 - possibly earlier, the Soviets were as much of a threat as the Japanese and Germans   possibly more so. If Stalin had invaded Germany in 1938, it's quite conceivable that the rest of Europe would have been allied with Hitler against them. 

I do wonder how much Stalin was tempted to push on past Berlin and attack the uk/us forces, especially now that the Soviet war machine was in full swing.


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 27, 2014)

Armed forces are meant to protect civilians of any nationality. It's too easy in war time to consider them as enemy combatants just because they are forced to work in munitions factories etc. As soon as you start to target civilians in order to win a war,especially when you aim to take the moral high ground, you lose sight of the reason you're fighting in the first place


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## AnyaKimlin (Dec 27, 2014)

BAYLOR said:


> It's unfortunate that all of that happened , but none of it would have happened had Japan never started a war  in the first place.



If I was one of those women I doubt those would be my thoughts.   For those women it was not unfortunate - it was devastating and destroyed them in a more comprehensive and horrendous way than any fire bombing could do.  Would you be so flippant about it if it was you?

The war leader who had my most respect was John Major when he visited the troops in Iraq and gave the speech where he acknowledged those fighting were the same age as his son.   He saw the human side of the conflict right the  way through the war.  More like him and we might not have so many decisions taken without the human cost taken into account.


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## Venusian Broon (Dec 27, 2014)

paranoid marvin said:


> from 1944 - possibly earlier, the Soviets were as much of a threat as the Japanese and Germans   possibly more so. If Stalin had invaded Germany in 1938, it's quite conceivable that the rest of Europe would have been allied with Hitler against them.
> 
> I do wonder how much Stalin was tempted to push on past Berlin and attack the uk/us forces, especially now that the Soviet war machine was in full swing.



Well Churchill at some point in 1945 certainly wanted to look into doing the opposite - sweeping past Berlin and attacking the Soviet forces with the UK/US and a re-equipped Wehrmacht. Look up Operation Unthinkable. I'm sure the Stalin may have pondered it too (but he had known about the US atomic bomb project for a lot longer than the US thought he did, so that might have stopped him.) 



paranoid marvin said:


> Armed forces are meant to protect civilians of any nationality. It's too easy in war time to consider them as enemy combatants just because they are forced to work in munitions factories etc. As soon as you start to target civilians in order to win a war,especially when you aim to take the moral high ground, you lose sight of the reason you're fighting in the first place



Then every single major nationality in WW2 failed this. In such a total war such 'rules' may be followed at the start, but then get quickly ignored when you find out you are fighting for your survival against a very aggressive enemy. (In fact if you go back in history, I'd argue that all wars quickly degenerate and perhaps there's never been a war where civilians have really been protected at all. Give me a campaign and I'll show you a ruined and pillaged city with its murdered inhabitants. To believe civilians should be protected is an admirable sentiment but in reality it has never ever been true.)

As for the moral high ground - of course all sides would claim it at the beginning - but there was a lot of self-interest from everyone (as well as just surviving against aggressors). I agree that one should careful not to ignore atrocities on one side because they were 'not as bad' as the ones the other side perpetrated, but the Nazi regime systematically murdered millions of people in gas chambers, while deciding that 30 million Russians in territory that they occupied were 'surplus to requirements' and deliberately planned their starvation. If Hitler had won, this would only have continued and expanded no doubt - deaths further increasing in such a world. The Japanese treated occupied territories and their civilian populations very badly as well (200,000 deaths in six weeks in the rape of Nanking in 1937 for example.) 

The allies in 1941 I'm sure didn't know this was coming, so the moral argument (that it was a good war) can only be applied in hindsight. I do agree that we must have our own moral qualms that we took on some of the nature of the enemies 'evil' actions to defeat them.


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## Ray McCarthy (Dec 27, 2014)

Stalin DID pass Berlin.  Check were East German Border was vs Berlin. The Russians let the Allies occupy parts of Berlin. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Germany
See also Vienna
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Advisory_Commission

That's why the Air Bridge had to be run!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Blockade

The whole issue of WWII War crimes and A-Bombs by Western Allies, The Soviet, Japanese and German crimes, Collaboration is a contentious issue in Public, that has mostly been agreed long ago by proper Historians. Discussion on a random Internet Forum with a lot of dubious sources and poorly informed opinions is nearly pointless. A friend who is an Expert on Politics and History of the period refuses to discuss it on line.

The deaths, injuries and suffering were real. The projected casualties and events presented as a result of NOT dropping the two Bombs vary between plausible and outright fantasy. We can't change the past or know what "might have been".  

Why did MacArthur not stop and agree a DMZ with Chinese during Korean War?

Why Grenada, Bay of Pigs, Falklands War (Caused by UK FO sending wrong "signals" to Argentinians), the two Gulf Wars, Vietnam, Russians then Americans and allies in Afghanistan, Egypt & Saudi fighting proxy via Yemen, All the other pointless Middle East Wars.  Somalia, Sudan etc. US Interference in South America.

The important thing is to vote for sensible Politicians and agitate for "correct" decisions in the future.


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## Venusian Broon (Dec 27, 2014)

Ray McCarthy said:


> that has mostly been agreed long ago by proper Historians.



Who last time I looked seemed to be constantly disagreeing with each other or pushing forward new interpretations all the time.

Easiest thing to do if you think it's pointless to discuss an issue is probably not to contribute to such issues on random internet forums, as I have found that tends to work


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## AnyaKimlin (Dec 27, 2014)

Historians are as subject to bias as any other group of researchers and affected by their sponsors and those who pay.  Also telling an historical bigwig his prevailing wind stinks is going to get your squashed by friends of bigwig (speaking from experience after a certain essay at university)/


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 27, 2014)

And of course we are not just discussing if it was tactically the right thing to do, but also morally; something historians (quite rightly) do not discuss. 

Yes I agree that civilians will always , and have always, been caught up in conflicts. In the heat of the moment towns and cities have been pillaged and inhabitants killed or defiled. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki , along with their populations, were destroyed as an example to both the Japanese and Russian governments - and quite possibly to see just how great a devastation could be wreaked on a 'live' target.

As a general of an army, knowing that using such a weapon would mean more of my men would make it back home , would I use it? I'm glad I never had to make that decision.


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## The Ace (Dec 27, 2014)

BAYLOR said:


> It's unfortunate that all of that happened , but none of it would have happened had Japan never started a war  in the first place.




That's a rather iffy  stance.

While the ins and outs are a bit more complex, the practical upshot of US (along with British and Dutch) foreign policy from the late '30s onwards, meant that Japan either had to start a war or starve.  I have no intention of portraying the Japanese as helpless victims (their conduct in China was nothing short of monstrous), but there were faults on both sides.

Morally the atomic bombs were indefensible, pragmatically they were a solution, but it's interesting that there's strong support in Scotland for at least one of the aims of independence - the removal of the descendants of these obscenities from our territorial waters (and 20 miles from our largest city with a population of 600, 000).

I firmly believe that a negotiated peace was possible, without the projected land invasion, but I wasn't on the spot at the time.   Maybe it was the only way to bring the war to a swift conclusion, but we'll probably never know.


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## Venusian Broon (Dec 27, 2014)

paranoid marvin said:


> As a general of an army, knowing that using such a weapon would mean more of my men would make it back home , would I use it? I'm glad I never had to make that decision.



There's an interview with a man who was a British Army officer in the _The World at War_. He was commanding a unit in the front-line as part of the advance into Germany. He was asked if there were any enemy concentrations or centres of communication that needed 'taken out' - i.e. hit by a massive force of strategic bombers overnight. In his sector there was the town of Cleves, which he said was a beautiful medieval town that he knew well. He said he would preferred to have left it alone, but it was the most direct route for German reinforcements and units to come up and oppose them and his unit - so to help save the lives of his men he said that Cleves should be taken out. In the raid that followed something like 90% of the towns buildings were severely damaged (and I believe 500 civilians died). He stated he believed he made the correct decision and today would not have changed his mind on the matter...but for years afterwards he had nightmares about Cleves and what he personally allowed happen to it.

Unfortunately these extremely difficult decisions had to be made, possibly hundreds of times, every day in a conflict like that. Our lives today, for better or worse, are built on the actions and burdens of that generation. 



@The Ace - I disagree with the starve part - their choice was to start a war to grab the raw materials they needed to continue aggressive military behaviour or stop their imperial ambitions to occupy China and kowtow to the US anti-imperialist demands. 

To be fair to the US of the 30's and 40's, they were pretty anti-Imperialist to everyone - including the Brits - and actually if the US were not so opposed to Japan I'm sure Britain in 1941 would have recognised the Japanese gains in China, possibly even given them supplies not to have a war as we were focused on Germany. 

Whether the new world order the US built after WW2 is something akin to a Empire in all but name is probably another debate...


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## BAYLOR (Dec 30, 2014)

AnyaKimlin said:


> If I was one of those women I doubt those would be my thoughts.   For those women it was not unfortunate - it was devastating and destroyed them in a more comprehensive and horrendous way than any fire bombing could do.  Would you be so flippant about it if it was you?
> 
> The war leader who had my most respect was John Major when he visited the troops in Iraq and gave the speech where he acknowledged those fighting were the same age as his son.   He saw the human side of the conflict right the  way through the war.  More like him and we might not have so many decisions taken without the human cost taken into account.



Japan had it's own bomb program, had they gotten the the atom bomb first , they wouldn't have hesitated to use it against military or civilian targets.   They had no regard for non japanese. Consider what they they did in China.  The bombing on Nanking  and other places there . It's estimated that they may have killed as many as 5 million . They were doing German Warfare  experiments on chinese citizens which to this day is still having repercussions.

What if The Uk  had had access to atom bombs during the battle of Britain? Do you think they would have refrained from using them against Germany to stave off defeat?


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## AnyaKimlin (Dec 30, 2014)

BAYLOR said:


> What if The Uk  had had access to atom bombs during the battle of Britain? Do you think they would have refrained from using them against Germany to stave off defeat?



Probably not but I still don''t think they should have.  Dresden, the Mohne Dam etc were horrific enough.


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 30, 2014)

If it took nuclear weapons to defeat the nazis then that would have been the right call. The thing is that it wouldn't have taken, or at least it was unlikely to take, the destruction of 2 cities to defeat the Japanese.


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## mosaix (Dec 30, 2014)

paranoid marvin said:


> Hiroshima hadn't been bombed prior to that. It's almost as if they were saving it so that the 'demonstration' would have maximum effect.



The Hiroshima museum is quite clear on this. The Americans specifically chose Hiroshima as an A-bomb target because it had not previously been bombed. Therefore subsequent analysis could attribute the damage directly to the A-bomb and the A-bomb alone.

One thing that has only recently come to light is that up to 30,000 (I think that's right) of the casualties in Hiroshima were Korean slave labourers. The Japanese have only recently acknowledged their presence in the Hiroshima peace garden because they regarded them (and still do to a certain extent) as sub-human.  There were also a number of American prisoners of war.


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## BAYLOR (Dec 30, 2014)

AnyaKimlin said:


> Probably not but I still don''t think they should have.  Dresden, the Mohne Dam etc were horrific enough.



If it was question of survival The UK would have likely used them.




paranoid marvin said:


> If it took nuclear weapons to defeat the nazis then that would have been the right call. The thing is that it wouldn't have taken, or at least it was unlikely to take, the destruction of 2 cities to defeat the Japanese.



Weren't there plans to use the weapon on Nazi germany if they had still been in the war ?


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 30, 2014)

I don't think nuclear weapons would have been used in Europe in 1945 for several reasons. One is that it would likely have led to Germany using chemical weapons, and probably would have resulted in the deaths of many allies. By 1945 even before the final defeat of Germany , the allies were deciding what would go to whom. You can fairly easily rebuild a bombed city , but no one would want to have to deal with a radioactive wasteland.


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## BAYLOR (Dec 31, 2014)

Germany's own A Bomb program  never really went anywhere . They didn't really have the means to build a reactor to produce bomb material.


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## willwallace (Dec 31, 2014)

paranoid marvin said:


> I don't think nuclear weapons would have been used in Europe in 1945 for several reasons. One is that it would likely have led to Germany using chemical weapons, and probably would have resulted in the deaths of many allies. By 1945 even before the final defeat of Germany , the allies were deciding what would go to whom. You can fairly easily rebuild a bombed city , but no one would want to have to deal with a radioactive wasteland.


I'm fairly certain that the effects of radiation from atomic bombs weren't really known until after they had been used, so it probably didn't figure into the decision to not use them in Europe. Also they didn't have many anyway.


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 31, 2014)

In all honesty , I'm not sure that they knew what to expect. Another reason for using the weapons on undamaged cities, far from any friendly troops and territory.


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## Venusian Broon (Dec 31, 2014)

BAYLOR said:


> Weren't there plans to use the weapon on Nazi germany if they had still been in the war ?



Yes, I believe when the program was started, the assumption was it was to be used against the 'tougher nut to crack', the Nazis. By the time the weapons were coming on line, Germany was clearly collapsing and on the verge of being overrun. (which was still to cost Stalin and the Soviet Union about 350,000 casualties to attain in the final battle of Berlin, so still a massive cost in human lives and suffering for the allies to finish the job)

And I agree with @willwallace, despite actually setting some off in the desert, there was a huge amount of naivety about the after-effects of this weapon, both physically and biologically (and to be frank 'atomics' in general - who can forget the advert showing off the 'atomic car' in the early 1950's, a Buick-like thing with an nuclear reactor as an engine!)  There was also a misplaced 'can-do' attitude that if there were problems, they'd be solved very easily at the time - sometimes such optimism is great for progress, other times it is merely hubris opening up a rats nest of problems.


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## Ray McCarthy (Dec 31, 2014)

Venusian Broon said:


> which was still to cost Stalin and the Soviet Union about 350,000 casualties to attain in the final battle of Berlin


Total USSR losses about 20 million (Civilian, Military, Europe & Asia).
They call it the "Great patriotic war". I forget how many of his own people Stalin killed / murdered / executed.

We do have Atomic powered ships and subs. Apart from USA Military, there is a Russia Icebreaker and there was an Ore carrier. Also a combo Cruise/Cargo ship.

There was advanced plans (practical) for an Atomic powered train. The car was never a real project. There was examination of idea of Atomic powered aircraft, but ICBM development and practicalities made that be dropped.

USA 1950s radios by law had C D marks on AM scale, a pair of triangles. Because any Nuclear attack was deemed to be via bombers and thus all stations would close with Civil Defence only broadcasting telling people what to do. This was also why in 1950s for a while an FM only tuner was illegal to sell. Any radio had to have MW (AM or BC = Broadcast Band to Americans, but LW and SW are also AM and Broadcast, USA only ever had aeronautical & beacons on LW).
The ICBMs made all Civil Defence schemes and the Radio plan obsolete.

It was only Hydrogen Bomb that resulted in opening talks on banning Atmospheric tests  and start of SALT. Both the Minuteman program and Regan "Starwars" destabilised the situation based on "MAD" doctrine:
1) If a defence is only 90% effective (none were ever going to be as good as that), the enemy only has to build x10 more ICBMs
2) If a defence is *going to be* 100% effective it might trigger Nuclear Armageddon, as the other side may be convinced that who ever gets 100% protection might launch a 1st strike knowing they are safe from retaliation.

Actually a 100% defence solution isn't possible. Cynics suggest that both USA anti-ballistic missile schemes and the recent laser on aircraft (abandoned) scheme only existed to try and bankrupt the "enemy" into wasteful ICBM production. The collapse of USSR though was a bit more complex than that.


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## Ursa major (Dec 31, 2014)

Venusian Broon said:


> a huge amount of naivety about the after-effects of this weapon, both physically and biologically


Aren't there suggestions that the incidence of cancer amongst the cast and crew of _The Conqueror_ was far higher than one would expect, and that the reason was they filmed it downwind of a 1950s nuclear testing site? (The increased rates of cancer were not confined only to the cast and crew: they also affected the townspeople there.)


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## Venusian Broon (Dec 31, 2014)

Ray McCarthy said:


> I forget how many of his own people Stalin killed / murdered / executed.



Aside from paranoia and colossal mistrust that saw him purge his party, his army and political dissidents, I believe the utter devastation he inflicted on his own people was the 'five year plan' and '_progress_'. 

He didn't say "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic" but he certainly seemed to believe it.


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## Venusian Broon (Dec 31, 2014)

Ursa major said:


> Aren't there suggestions that the incidence of cancer amongst the cast and crew of _The Conqueror_ was far higher than one would expect, and that the reason was they filmed it downwind of a 1950s nuclear testing site? (The increased rates of cancer were not confined only to the cast and crew: they also affected the townspeople there.)



I heard that too - and that John Wayne's cancer could be somehow blamed on this. (Although apparently he had a six pack a day cigarette habit, which seems to me to be a more direct cause of his lung cancer.)

It is amazing to look back at when they discovered radioactive substances and what they actually did with these discoveries (with our knowledge now.) At the time, it was the new miracle substance and was invested with wondrous properties. As late as the early 1930's I believe there was a radium-therapy craze in the US, where people actually ingested radium, pasting it on themselves or drinking it dissolved in water. All for better health or curing diseases! 

mmmm, all those lovely energetic alpha particles trapped inside your body ripping through your cells...

It was only a decade or so before the bomb, but that cheery and optimistic, 'radioactivity is progress and inherently "good"' still seemed to be very evident in the late 40s and 50s.


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## Ursa major (Dec 31, 2014)

I came across all this the other day, when reading that Dick Powell** (director/producer) was one of the (potential) victims, although he was a chain smoker (according to his wife). That's why I also mentioned the townsfolk (on the basis that one would hope they weren't all chain smokers, give or take the kids...).


** - That's one of the joys/issues with encyclopaedias (and, in this case, Wikipedia): you start looking one thing up and before you know it, you're reading entirely different stuff.


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## Ray McCarthy (Dec 31, 2014)

> During the 1920s and 1930s, the harmful effects of this paint became increasingly clear. A notorious case involved the "Radium Girls", a group of women who painted watchfaces and later suffered adverse health effects from ingestion. It is now recognised that radium paint requires great care in application, maintenance and disposal to avoid creation of a hazardous condition.
> Radium paint used silver-doped zinc sulfide phosphor, usually doped with copper (for green light), silver (blue-green), and more rarely copper-magnesium (for yellow-orange light). The phosphor degrades relatively fast and the dials lose luminosity in several years to a few decades, despite the long half-life of the Ra-226 isotope (1600 years); clocks and other devices available from antique shops and other sources therefore are not luminous anymore, though they are still radioactive and can be identified with a Geiger counter. The dials can be renovated by application of a very thin layer of fresh phosphor, without the radium content (with the original material still acting as the energy source); the phosphor layer has to be thin due to the light self-absorption in the material.



They were clear on this by end of 1920s, with awareness starting to get publicity in 1924. Known perhaps even before 1920s and ignored!
The girls using radium impregnated paint for dials were licking the brush to get a good point on it.
Frightening stuff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_jaw
The death of Eben Byres (probably due to Radium Therapy) was in 1932.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_dials

Best solution if you think WWII radio or old clock has radium based paint is to varnish over it. It can even have new phosphor applied. This stops it flaking (it's only the dust/flakes etc that are a risk).

Quackery still exists today (all kinds of gadgets from harmless magnets and copper to dangerous herbs, fake snake oil) but frightening that Radioactive Quackery was still active in the 1950s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery


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## Venusian Broon (Dec 31, 2014)

Ursa major said:


> ** - That's one of the joys/issues with encyclopaedias (and, in this case, Wikipedia): you start looking one thing up and before you know it, you're reading entirely different stuff.



Exactly - and what on earth did we do before this inter-webby thing came along?

I presume that we all did during our University days (if we went to such an establishment) have massive resources available in the form of their libraries, but I remember it being a whole day-trip length activity (or at least an afternoon!) to research a particular point or area, so you had to really build up the stamina and plan a day out for it. Now info comes to us in seconds, and like you say quickly generates all sorts of related (and unrelated) threads of thoughts. 

It's also stopping me getting through the second draft of my chapter 7, part 4. So I really should return to that.


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## AnyaKimlin (Dec 31, 2014)

BAYLOR said:


> If it was question of survival The UK would have likely used them.
> 
> ?



The UK does a lot I don't automatically think is right.


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## willwallace (Dec 31, 2014)

A little divergence from the main topic....

Having spent some years in the 1980's in the US Navy onboard a nuclear sub, I saw firsthand how careful the USN is when it comes to nuclear-powered ships.  Redundancies on top of redundancies, backup systems for the backup systems, constant training, and constant monitoring of exposure every day you're aboard ship.  All of this caution came about because the US learned a lot about radiation effects from the bombing of Japan, and applied that in the building of the first nuclear sub, Nautilus, which came into service in the early 50's.  The reactor compartment is by far the strongest part of the ship, the last thing you want is a leak.  The Russian designs, by comparison, are notoriously poor when it comes to reactor safety-Chernobyl is a good example, as well as several of their subs which have experienced reactor problems. 

It's too bad that the worst reactor accident in the US, Three Mile Island, was so overblown in it's effect on building new nuclear plants in the US.  The actual effect on the population was not measurable-not that it couldn't be measured by any means available, it actually had no statistical effect on the number of cancer-related deaths in the exposed population(contrary to all the doom-sayers). 

A worker in a nuclear power plant will, typically, get less exposure in a year at work, than you would from a standard set of dental xrays.  Flying in an airplane at 35,000 feet, living somewhere that has a lot of granite deposits or in a high altitude city, will give you much greater radiation exposure than working at a nuke plant.

Of course, none of this has much to do with nuclear weapons being used on civilian populations, but I thought I would throw this out there as general information regarding exposure to radiation.


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 31, 2014)

Exposure to lead, exposure to radiation, exposure to asbestos; unfortunately we only find out too late what is harmful. Who knows what it will be next?


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 31, 2014)

AnyaKimlin said:


> The UK does a lot I don't automatically think is right.



The UK could have used chemical weapons but didn't. It's far easier to use weapons of mass destruction when you do not have to worry about your enemy retaliating in kind.


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## Venusian Broon (Dec 31, 2014)

paranoid marvin said:


> Exposure to lead, exposure to radiation, exposure to asbestos; unfortunately we only find out too late what is harmful. Who knows what it will be next?



I think tis the nature of mankind to *not* look before he/she leaps. 

I remember reading in some account of the campaigns of Alexander the great* that they discovered this strange material seeping up through the ground when they passing through on the way to, or were in the vicinity of Persepolis. They'd never come across it before and it burned with a flame a colour they had never seen (although I can't believe they'd never come across bitumen and tar before, they had been at sea only a few years before, surely they would have noted the smell...) So a few young boy members of Alexander's entourage volunteered to be coated in the stuff and then burnt, to see if this flame was different from normal flame. 

It of course was just the same as normal flame and you can imagine what happened to these proto-scientists/guinea pigs when coated in petroleum and set alight.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

* I'm aware that these accounts were all written quite a long time after the events, but there's a good chance that many of the anecdotes were handed down intact by word of mouth, I suppose.


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## AnyaKimlin (Dec 31, 2014)

paranoid marvin said:


> The UK could have used chemical weapons but didn't. It's far easier to use weapons of mass destruction when you do not have to worry about your enemy retaliating in kind.



And when you don't know men who have been destroyed by gas.  Far harder to take the decision when you witness, on a regular basis, the devastation caused by chemical warfare in WWI.

It's like with the attack on the dams - afterwards, when the destruction was witnessed, it was made illegal to attack water sources.  

I can't help but wonder if the nuclear attack had been in Europe if similar rules would have been made.  "The Yellow Peril" are miles away and easy targets.


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## paranoid marvin (Dec 31, 2014)

Possibly the reason why Hitler, a Ww1 veteran, for all his other atrocities didn't use gas.


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## Mirannan (Dec 31, 2014)

Venusian Broon said:


> I think tis the nature of mankind to *not* look before he/she leaps.
> 
> I remember reading in some account of the campaigns of Alexander the great* that they discovered this strange material seeping up through the ground when they passing through on the way to, or were in the vicinity of Persepolis. They'd never come across it before and it burned with a flame a colour they had never seen (although I can't believe they'd never come across bitumen and tar before, they had been at sea only a few years before, surely they would have noted the smell...) So a few young boy members of Alexander's entourage volunteered to be coated in the stuff and then burnt, to see if this flame was different from normal flame.
> 
> ...



A fun fact is that the pitch used on ships of the time was a different substance altogether, derived from pine resin I believe. Incidentally, it has a much lower melting point than does asphalt, which is why tarring and feathering isn't a death sentence.

So they wouldn't have been familiar with bitumen, most likely. Pine pitch smells completely different.


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## willwallace (Dec 31, 2014)

paranoid marvin said:


> Exposure to lead, exposure to radiation, exposure to asbestos; unfortunately we only find out too late what is harmful. Who knows what it will be next?



Just like one week your hear of a study that drinking coffee is bad for you, the next week another study says the opposite.  Drives people crazy(at least coffee drinkers like me!).


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## AnyaKimlin (Dec 31, 2014)

paranoid marvin said:


> Possibly the reason why Hitler, a Ww1 veteran, for all his other atrocities didn't use gas.



I think gas was the one that even those who didn't go to war go to see the horrors of and never got used to.  Men came home "coughing up a lung" it seemed to horrify that generation more than the missing limbs somehow.

It was also the horror that dominated Dulce Et Decorum Est:
_As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. 
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, 
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace 
Behind the wagon that we flung him in, 
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, 
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; 
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood 
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,_

I wonder if there was a Japanese poem about the atomic bomb that we recited in the UK and  was as popular as Dulce Et Deocorum Est would we hold different views on it?  I know my views on it were formed as a child by a naval officer who had witnessed Hiroshima.   The only thing I can think of is the OMD song Enola Gay.

I found this one which does bring out the humanity
http://www.thehypertexts.com/Hiroshima Poetry Prose and Art.htm
_*Let Us Be Midwives!*_
by Hiroshima survivor Kurihara Sadako
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

_Midnight . . .
the basement of a shattered building . . .
atomic bomb survivors sniveling in the darkness . . .
not a single candle between them . . .
the odor of blood . . .
the stench of death . . .
the sickly-sweet smell of decaying humanity . . .
the groans . . .
the moans . . .
Out of all that, suddenly, miraculously, a voice:
"The baby's coming!"
In the hellish basement, unexpectedly,
a young mother had gone into labor.
In the dark, lacking a single match, what to do?
Scrambling to her side,
forgetting their own . . ._


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## Ray McCarthy (Dec 31, 2014)

paranoid marvin said:


> Possibly the reason why Hitler, a Ww1 veteran, for all his other atrocities didn't use gas.


It's not actually very efficient outdoors. *He used it indoors*. Lots.
The real reason that Chemical Weapons not used generally after WWI is that bullets, bombs, missiles, shells and high Explosives, tanks and aircraft were more effective for outlay.

The next big usage was USA using Agent Orange etc in Vietnam , the fact that it affected people was "collateral damage", the real target was the trees.


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## AnyaKimlin (Dec 31, 2014)

Ray McCarthy said:


> The next big usage was USA using Agent Orange etc in Vietnam , the fact that it affected people was "collateral damage", the real target was the trees.



And it took until 2003 to kill my father-in-law.


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## Ray McCarthy (Dec 31, 2014)

Sorry to hear that. It's nasty stuff. Certainly it was a war crime using it. I think I read recently that USA is even now (or only now?) helping clear up the contaminations they caused in Vietnam?


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## Venusian Broon (Dec 31, 2014)

Mirannan said:


> A fun fact is that the pitch used on ships of the time was a different substance altogether, derived from pine resin I believe. Incidentally, it has a much lower melting point than does asphalt, which is why tarring and feathering isn't a death sentence.
> 
> So they wouldn't have been familiar with bitumen, most likely. Pine pitch smells completely different.



Interesting Mirannan, thanks. I know bitumen had been traded in antiquity in the Eastern Mediterranean - there are sources next to the Dead sea for example - and they were used by Egyptians for boats - and I presumed that other peoples in the vicinity may have used it (obviously the Egyptians have a complete lack of pine trees, although I suppose they possibly could have got pine resin from Lebanon.) What the Greeks used to seal their boats on the Northern side of the Mediterranean I didn't really know.


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## AnyaKimlin (Dec 31, 2014)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Sorry to hear that. It's nasty stuff. Certainly it was a war crime using it. I think I read recently that USA is even now (or only now?) helping clear up the contaminations they caused in Vietnam?



He was in the air force - as a serviceman and civilian think he was with them for over 40 years.  They are from what I gathered during his funeral and various services doing far more clearing it up in Vietnam than the effects in the US.  A lot of the men entitled to compensation never fill in the forms because it is more hassle than it is worth.  It's strange because as a British person born in the 1970s the Vietnam war and even Korea (less so because of MASH) is the stuff of movies and parental stories far more so than WWI or WWII was.  But with my father-in-law I came face to face with the effects of Korea and Vietnam on a person.

My family was very lucky in that nobody died in either of the World Wars - my gran said it was strange she'd waved my grandfather off at a railway station full of people when they came back only six men go off the train and five of them belonged to our family.  Other people were waiting in hope but their loved ones didn't get off the train.  But I think because they came back on mass having all had varying experiences it was very real.  I found it interesting that the least affected was my Uncle Ken who had been a conscientious objector.  That was despite him seeing more action in the ambulance corps than some of the others.  He was also the one who found it easiest to talk about his experiences which were horrific.


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## Mirannan (Jan 1, 2015)

Venusian Broon said:


> Interesting Mirannan, thanks. I know bitumen had been traded in antiquity in the Eastern Mediterranean - there are sources next to the Dead sea for example - and they were used by Egyptians for boats - and I presumed that other peoples in the vicinity may have used it (obviously the Egyptians have a complete lack of pine trees, although I suppose they possibly could have got pine resin from Lebanon.) What the Greeks used to seal their boats on the Northern side of the Mediterranean I didn't really know.



Hmmm... Of course, it's quite possible that both were used. Bitumen when building them when available, pine pitch for running repairs.

A somewhat relevant Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarring_and_feathering


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## Gramm838 (Jan 1, 2015)

This is one of those questions that we can't answer this far after the fact - most veteran GI's would tell you it was absolutely the right thing to do.

Once again this is trying to put a 2015 viewpoint against the 1945 mindset. It happened. End of story.

Maybe a bigger question that we should ask is "why weren't nuclear weapons used to end the Korean War?" - after all it was only 8 years later.


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## BAYLOR (Jan 1, 2015)

Gramm838 said:


> This is one of those questions that we can't answer this far after the fact - most veteran GI's would tell you it was absolutely the right thing to do.
> 
> Once again this is trying to put a 2015 viewpoint against the 1945 mindset. It happened. End of story.
> 
> Maybe a bigger question that we should ask is "why weren't nuclear weapons used to end the Korean War?" - after all it was only 8 years later.



In the case of the Korean war It might have set very bad cold war precedent like  legitimized usage of such weapons in regional conflicts.


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## AnyaKimlin (Jan 1, 2015)

Gramm838 said:


> This is one of those questions that we can't answer this far after the fact - most veteran GI's would tell you it was absolutely the right thing to do.
> r.



Actually my mindset was created by people who were there.  And I don't know many who were actually involved in the more horrific events who came out in support of them growing up.


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## Ray McCarthy (Jan 2, 2015)

Gramm838 said:


> Maybe a bigger question that we should ask is "why weren't nuclear weapons used to end the Korean War?" - after all it was only 8 years later.


Because that would have been even MORE stupid than what was already done. Do read up on the Korean War!
1) The Russians & USA could have easily prevented it.
2) The UN/USA/South WON! All they had to do was stop and agree a DMZ with Chinese. They arrogantly refused and continued to the Chinese border. So the Chinese resupplied N.K and counter attacked.  The final border was more or less the one the Russians & USA had agreed before the Korean War Started.

I'm sure the South Koreans would not have wanted North Korea Atomic Bombed. Or do you mean the USA should have used them on China? 
Also the USSR did back the NK. The Soviets had detonated their first nuclear bomb in September 1949, the year before. If the USA had had adequate troops in SK the Russians would have never supported the invasion of the South, which very nearly succeeded.

Also the Korean war was strangely a UN, not a USA  war. The UN wouldn't have agreed to use of nuclear weapons.


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## Gramm838 (Jan 2, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Because that would have been even MORE stupid than what was already done. Do read up on the Korean War!
> 1) The Russians & USA could have easily prevented it.
> 2) The UN/USA/South WON! All they had to do was stop and agree a DMZ with Chinese. They arrogantly refused and continued to the Chinese border. So the Chinese resupplied N.K and counter attacked.  The final border was more or less the one the Russians & USA had agreed before the Korean War Started.
> 
> ...



I believe MacArthur did request the use of nukes on both the Korean Peninsula and mainland China -which is why he was removed from command.

My point was that at the point that the UN forces had been pushed all the way south, given that only 6 years previously nukes were shown to be war winning weapons, they could have been used again to end the war there and then.


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## BAYLOR (Jan 2, 2015)

Gramm838 said:


> I believe MacArthur did request the use of nukes on both the Korean Peninsula and mainland China -which is why he was removed from command.
> 
> My point was that at the point that the UN forces had been pushed all the way south, given that only 6 years previously nukes were shown to be war winning weapons, they could have been used again to end the war there and then.




And that would have set nightmarish foreign policy precedent. Imagine using them to solve regional conflict.


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## Ray McCarthy (Jan 2, 2015)

Gramm838 said:


> My point was that at the point that the UN forces had been pushed all the way south, given that only 6 years previously nukes were shown to be war winning weapons,


If the USA  had sat and done nothing on Okinawa, the Russians might have defeated the Japanese in 1946.
There is no proof at all that two bombs needed to win the war. Ended it earlier, is true.

If they'd been used after 1949 it would have been the start of Armageddon.  The Russians had the "Bomb" before the Koran War started.

See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Japanese_War_(1945)

Whatever the logic or need for the First Atomic Bomb drop, the second one was not needed.


----------



## paranoid marvin (Jan 3, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> If the USA  had sat and done nothing on Okinawa, the Russians might have defeated the Japanese in 1946.
> There is no proof at all that two bombs needed to win the war. Ended it earlier, is true.
> 
> If they'd been used after 1949 it would have been the start of Armageddon.  The Russians had the "Bomb" before the Koran War started.
> ...



It could be argued that the use of the second bomb was to demonstrate that they ha more than one. Quite why anyone would think they only had one , or at least couldn't make a second, I do not know.

It could also be argued that they wanted to see what the differing effects were between a urnainum and a plutonium based weapon; sadly I think that this is probably the more likely reason. 

As for Korea - these weapons are only effective when being used against opponents who cannot counter with similar devices. If the US had used them in Korea, either the Chinese or the Russains would have also used them, or at the very least declared a conventional war against the US ; Korea wasn't important enough to risk reducing America's ciities to radioactive piles of rubble over.

Any state that has nuclear weapons becomes virtually invulnerable; until they use them.


----------



## BAYLOR (Jan 3, 2015)

paranoid marvin said:


> It could be argued that the use of the second bomb was to demonstrate that they ha more than one. Quite why anyone would think they only had one , or at least couldn't make a second, I do not know.
> 
> It could also be argued that they wanted to see what the differing effects were between a urnainum and a plutonium based weapon; sadly I think that this is probably the more likely reason.
> 
> ...




They're the ultimate double edged sword.


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## paranoid marvin (Jan 3, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> They're the ultimate double edged sword.




That's right, but a double edged sword is preferrable to using your bare hands.

If it wasn't for the US and UK having atomic weapons, Stalin would almost certainly have invaded non-Soviet Europe; the only wonder is that he didn't risk nuclear war and invade anyway.


----------



## BAYLOR (Jan 3, 2015)

paranoid marvin said:


> That's right, but a double edged sword is preferrable to using your bare hands.
> 
> If it wasn't for the US and UK having atomic weapons, Stalin would almost certainly have invaded non-Soviet Europe; the only wonder is that he didn't risk nuclear war and invade anyway.



 At the time Stalin didn't know  how many bombs we actually had. He saw the films and newsreels showing the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and believed that if he moved on Europe ,  the US would devastate Russia. Having no ability to retaliate from such a potential attack , Stalin wasn't going take a risk, at least not until he had atomic weapons of his own.


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## paranoid marvin (Jan 3, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> What kept Stalin from invading europe was that at the time ,he couldn't be sure just how many bombs we actually had. He probably saw the films and newsreels showing the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and figured that if he moved on Europe the US would devastate Russia. Having no ability to retaliate from such a attack , Stalin wasn't going to take that risk, at least not until he had atomic weapons of his own.



Which takes us back to the reason why they were used in the first place. What happened at Nagasaki and Hiroshima probably saved the rest of the world from a similar fate; it still doesn't make it right though.


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## BAYLOR (Jan 3, 2015)

paranoid marvin said:


> Which takes us back to the reason why they were used in the first place. What happened at Nagasaki and Hiroshima probably saved the rest of the world from a similar fate; it still doesn't make it right though.




The unfortunate and probably unavoidable consequences , the cold war , the arms race and the numerous proxy wars and regional conflicts that came about.


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## paranoid marvin (Jan 3, 2015)

If you cant fight yourself, you get (non-nuclear) nations to fight for you, and if you cant beat him on the battlefield you make more bombs,bigger bombs - the fact that you can destroy the world 10 times over is irrelevant, gou have to have the most and the best killing devices there are. 

Its all rather pathetic and childish really.


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## BAYLOR (Jan 3, 2015)

paranoid marvin said:


> If you cant fight yourself, you get (non-nuclear) nations to fight for you, and if you cant beat him on the battlefield you make more bombs,bigger bombs - the fact that you can destroy the world 10 times over is irrelevant, gou have to have the most and the best killing devices there are.
> 
> Its all rather pathetic and childish really.



All the lives lost all the money and resources wasted on destruction. There are so many moments and choices  and missed opportunities in history that might have prevented all of that.


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## Foxbat (Jan 3, 2015)

Gramm838 said:


> I believe MacArthur did request the use of nukes on both the Korean Peninsula and mainland China -which is why he was removed from command.



MacArthur always denied such a request and, in 1960, Truman issued a retraction stating that no such request was made and that it was only his (Truman's) personal opinion that MacArthur wanted to use Nuclear weapons. 

It seems like this was a bit of spin-doctoring to make removing him a little easier.


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## Allegra (Jan 6, 2015)

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: totally necessary. Whereas Dresden was totally not.


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## Prescott Fry (Jan 8, 2015)

My grandfather, LT. Colonel Donald B. Mcbride is a firsthand witness to the dropping of the bombs. He was the guy behind the scenes, working with the Pentagon and top White House officials to decide wether to drop the bombs or begin a massive sea, land, air invasion of the Japanese Mainland. 

During the last battle of the war, Okinawa, my grandfather dug around at Suri Castle and found original manuscripts which detailed Japanese invasion plans. If Americans would have invaded, it would of dwarfed Normady as every woman, child, and man was prepared to fight to the last breath to protect their sacred soil. 

Yeah it was the right thing. Yes, it had some benefits toward the overly ambitious Russians, diplomatically speaking. But overall, it was the right thing in the scheme of things


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## Prescott Fry (Jan 8, 2015)

He estimated four million Japanese deaths and two million american casualties.


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## Prescott Fry (Jan 8, 2015)

He gave these figures to Roosevelt before he dropped the bombs. My grandfather has personal letters proving this.


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## Dinosaur (Jan 9, 2015)

The Germans used chemical weapons quite a bit on the Eastern front to clear Soviet bunkers (such as Sebastapol), plus the "accidental" usage when front line supplies of chemcial shells were mixed in with the regular supplies.


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## Prescott Fry (Jan 10, 2015)

Thank got the Germans didn't get the thoughts of Einstein, e=mc^2, in the sense of enriched uranium. Shoo. He'd of gone trigger crazy and fried the ozone


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## portman (Feb 20, 2015)

I think it's very easy to debate with the benefit of hindsight the decisions of others, that had lived through 6 years of war (if you assume the war started in 1939 and not with the earlier Japanese invasion of China). 

Rightly or wrongly they did what they thought was right at the time - that's all any of us can hope to do.


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## Gramm838 (Feb 22, 2015)

Allegra said:


> Hiroshima and Nagasaki: totally necessary. Whereas Dresden was totally not.



Dresden was the same thing but without nuclear weapons - it was a demonstration to the Russians of the combined airforces of the western allies could do if they were used against the Russians, because at that time the Russian airforce did not have the capability or experience to stop a huge bomber raid - it was not something they had ever needed to do when fighting the Luftwaffe


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## Ray McCarthy (Mar 7, 2015)

Gramm838 said:


> it was a demonstration to the Russians of the combined airforces of the western allies could do if they were used against the Russians, because at that time the Russian airforce did not have the capability or experience to stop a huge bomber raid


Or it was just bloody minded revenge.


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## BAYLOR (Mar 7, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Or it was just bloody minded revenge.



Very likely revenge factored into the decision.


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## BigBadBob141 (Mar 12, 2015)

I entirely agree with Prescott Fry, the dropping of the A-Bombs was justified.
A few hundred thousand civilians died, but weight that against the millions who would certainly have died without the bombs.
Don't forget that the Japanese were more then willing to use there own civilian population as a weapon.
Imagine wave after wave of suicide bombers charging the American lines, and these waves would very probable be made up of women and children.
This is just one of the possible nightmares which were stopped with the dropping of the bombs!


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## Ray McCarthy (Mar 12, 2015)

BigBadBob141 said:


> but weight that against the millions who would certainly have died without the bombs.


No proof. The actual deaths were real.

Also is it right to kill 10 children to save the life of 100 soldiers?


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## BigBadBob141 (Mar 14, 2015)

War is war is war is war.
It's nasty and it's horrible and it stinks to high heaven!
It's easy to judge with the 20/20 vision of history.
There probable were other factors such as an element of revenge or keeping the Russians out of Japan.
I can understand if not condone the revenge factor when you consider how appallingly the Japanese behaved before and during WW2.
Just look at the rape of Nanking, Nazi observers were horrified by what went on there.
But for me the main reason is the saving of lives, both Japanese as well as American and maybe British and Russian too.
I dare say they could have dropped the first bomb on a less populated target, but the shock value of Hiroshima should have made them surrender straight away.
Nagasaki need not have happened if they weren't so tardy.
I wonder what would be the reaction if Germany had managed to hold out and the first one was dropped on Berlin.
Would people be asking then if it was justified or not?


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## Ray McCarthy (Mar 14, 2015)

Dresden was similar destruction and death and pointless too. So you got your wish.  Most of the German cities  were destroyed purely as vengeance, there was little military value. Military targets and rail lines to death camps could have been bombed instead.


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## Ursa major (Mar 14, 2015)

The accuracy of bombing was very poor in those days. (People, rightly, dispute the accuracy of our current weapons, because even precision weapons can go astray or be aimed at the wrong target.) Give or take the technology used in the "dam buster" raids, there were no even vaguely precision bombs and no way to aim them other than releasing them based on the plane's altitude, airspeed and distance from the target: all a bit wing-and-a-prayer, particularly at night.

Unless all the targets were literally miles from any centres of population, there would always have been many civilian casualties. Besides, there's little point in bombing military installations (mostly containing conscripts, i.e. people who would be civilians in other circumstances) if you leave the industrial base intact. Which is not to say that some of the bombing raids weren't wrong; they were. But I don't think that is true of the nuclear attacks on Japan, which is the topic of this thread.

The idea that there's a nice way to fight wars is simply ridiculous and given that ridiculousness, second guessing what people in those wars did (except in the case of provable war crimes) seems rather pointless. And saying that only the real deaths matter and dismissing the very likely much higher death tolls that would have resulted by other military strategies is even more ridiculous. Does anyone really think that the Japanese, when faced with a full-scale invasion, would have thought, "You know, we might as well surrender now." That's simply ludicrous. The Japanese defended worthless pieces of rock around the Pacific at great cost to themselves (and the Allies). Can anyone really believe that they'd have put any less effort, blood and lives into defending their homeland and their semi-divine emperor?


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## Grimward (Mar 14, 2015)

willwallace said:


> Estimated casualties for the allies were 500,000 to 1.5 million. The Japanese were expected to incur casualties of around 25‰ of the population, which in 1945 was about 72 million. So that's around 18 million casualties. These numbers are based on the Okinawa campaign,  when the Japanese were fighting on their own territory.
> 
> So in comparison, 129,000 casualties versus nearly 20 million is significant.



To elaborate on this point, I agree with BigBadBob (and anyone else here who alluded to this, apologies for not noting you specifically if I missed your contribution, or am repeating your quoted materials!); the Japanese were TRAINING school children (certainly secondary school level boys, although I've seen old newsreels where YOUNG [12 years old?] Japanese school girls were ALSO receiving the same training) to charge American soldiers on sight, no questions asked, with sharpened sticks, spear-like, with the intent to "bleed the Americans as much as possible").  The argument about killing 10 children to save 100 soldiers here is simply not applicable; as part of the Ketsugo program, the Japanese were prepared to sacrifice ALL of their children along with the adults in "fulfilling" their "responsibilities to the emperor".  Foreign Minister Togo and Prime Minister Suzuki were not able to persuade, cajol, or convince the military to surrender, even AFTER both bombings, and had to go thru the Cabinet to effect the surrender.  In other words, the question is NOT would this wholesale slaughter on both sides have happened, but for how long before some alternative influence led to surrender, and would this have happened soon enough to render Hiroshima unnecessary?  And from where was that alternative influence to come?  Japan was already fighting the 2-front war as Ray and others have noted, so there was no additional Russian influence to be had.

In contemplating what might have been, the numbers are staggering.  Did we need the second bomb? Probably not.  There is no question in my mind, however, that the abhorrent first bomb exchanged hundreds of thousands of deaths for what would have been millions.  Having said that, could I look a survivor of Hiroshima or Nagasaki in the face and say it was justified?  Would I be recognizable as human if I did?  There's no real justification for this type of atrocity (nor should anyone infer that I consider this a moral choice; killing anyone is immoral), just a choice between a horrible outcome and another exponentially worse.  Maintaining the status quo (ie, not making this decision) was automatically a choice for the invasion.  I'm eternally thankful that I've never had to make such a decision.


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## Dinosaur (Mar 14, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Dresden was similar destruction and death and pointless too. So you got your wish.  Most of the German cities  were destroyed purely as vengeance, there was little military value. Military targets and rail lines to death camps could have been bombed instead.


A) the death camp survivors agreed that bombing cities was better than relieving the camp suffering.

B) Bombing rail lines was hard, you need to hit the marshalling yards, in the cities. Which kind off defeats the point.

C) there were no convenient industrial parks on the suburbs to hit, industry tended to be in the population centres.

D) people focus on the German civilians dying but don't care about Japanese civilians dying in city busting raids. Hmm...


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## BigBadBob141 (Mar 15, 2015)

I'm sure I read a story somewhere, I think it was called "Back To The Stone Age", can't remember the author.
In this the Allies have no A bombs.
But instead of invading the four islands of Japan they spend the next 20 or 30 years systemically carpet bombing everything in sight.
The only other story I can remember about ending the war is "Lucky Strike" by Kim Stanley Robinson.
In this the Enola Gaye crashes before the raid and the LS takes it's place.
The bombardier deliberately drops the bomb in the harbour instead of the city.
He is court marshalled and shot, but his sacrifice leads to a world wide peace movement.
While I like both stories I don't think they would work in real life.


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## Grimward (Mar 15, 2015)

The invasion link in my post above details what was planned for Operation Downfall, and if you look at some of the plans for Kyushu and Honshu, the plan basically did call for what to me equates to Dresden-like carpet bombing, so while it certainly wouldn't have gone on for 20 or 30 years, maybe not so far-fetched after all?


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## AnyaKimlin (Mar 15, 2015)

BigBadBob141 said:


> I wonder what would be the reaction if Germany had managed to hold out and the first one was dropped on Berlin.
> Would people be asking then if it was justified or not?



Bombing dams is, I believe, against the Geneva convention because of what we did at the Mohne Dam.

So yes there are things that happened in Germany I question and people questioned at the time.

Dresden was appalling.


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## BAYLOR (Mar 15, 2015)

AnyaKimlin said:


> Dresden was appalling.



Dresden was unfortunate but, it never would have happened if Germany hadn't launched a war In europe in the first place. Hiroshima and Nagasaki similarly would not have happen if Japan had never launched a war against The US.


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## AnyaKimlin (Mar 15, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> Dresden was unfortunate but, it never would have happened if Germany hadn't launched a war In europe in the first place. Hiroshima and Nagasaki similarly would not have happen if Japan had never launched a war against The US.



It wasn't unfortunate -- whether right or wrong  they were by any standards appalling.  Children cooked.   Don't dilute an atrocity just because you believe it had to happen.  Vesuvius was a similar atrocity -- there was no right or wrong but the results were awful.  Unfortunate is such a lily-livered word to describe what happened.


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## BAYLOR (Mar 15, 2015)

AnyaKimlin said:


> It wasn't unfortunate -- whether right or wrong  they were by any standards appalling.  Children cooked.   Don't dilute an atrocity just because you believe it had to happen.  Vesuvius was a similar atrocity -- there was no right or wrong but the results were awful.  Unfortunate is such a lily-livered word to describe what happened.



It's called War Anya.


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## AnyaKimlin (Mar 15, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> It's called war Anya.



And how does that make it less appalling?  Maybe if more people had to face the consequences of war we might see less of it.   The innocent always suffer more in war than anyone guilty of anything.


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## Ray McCarthy (Mar 15, 2015)

If you become "morally" the same as the original aggressor, what exactly are you defending?

War is bad, evil. Yet of course we can't allow unchecked aggression. Solutions are not simple as Balkans, Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine etc since WWII show.
East Germany 1948
Hungary 1956
Czechoslovakia 1968
Afghanistan: Russians and then West. It's not solved.
Second Iraq War:

The so called "Arab Spring" or "Social Media Revolutions" in Arab / Moslem world nothing of the sort. Libya is a mess. Egypt is worse than Mubarak era.  Palestinians go from self inflicted disaster to disaster.  1Million Syrian Refuges in Lebanon. I bet none in 10 years after the conflict ends, vs the deliberate policy of Arab world to keep the Palestinians as refugees.
No solution for Iran's Nuke program.
No solution for N. Korea's Nuke program.
No solution for IS / ISIS
Saudi Arabia and Gulf states.
All the Yemen wars pointless.
French and USA Indochina/Vietnam pointless.

It's easy for the winners of a war to say the other guys were really bad. All the bad stuff we did was so totally justified, because <insert unproven winners rationalisation>

Winners write history and decide who gets tried for war crimes.

*I don't have the answers, but sophist justifications of the winner's atrocities (especially when the war was justified!) gives politicians the confidence to fight new pointless ones and commit war crimes in wars that are needed.*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Soldier_(song)
*Donovan's version of Buffy Sainte-Marie's song:*

He's five foot two and he's six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears
He's all of thirty-one and he's only seventeen
Been a soldier for a thousand years

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew
And he knows he shouldn't kill and he knows he always will
Kill you for me my friend and me for you

And he's fighting for Canada
He's fighting for France, he's fighting for the U.S.A.
And he's fighting for the Russians
And he's fighting for Japan
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way

And he's fighting for Democracy, he's fighting for the Reds
He says "It's for the peace of all"
He's the one who must decide, who's to live and who's to die
And he never sees the writing on the wall

But without him
How would Hitler have condemned him at Labau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone
He's the one who gives his body as a weapon of the war
And without him all this killing can't go on

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from here and there and you and me
And brothers can't you see
This is not the way we put the end to war


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## BAYLOR (Mar 15, 2015)

AnyaKimlin said:


> And how does that make it less appalling?  Maybe if more people had to face the consequences of war we might see less of it.   The innocent always suffer more in war than anyone guilty of anything.



War is appalling that is fact and something to be avoided.   But doing what you propose won't happen and even if it did won't make war and it consequences any  any less likely.  In  1925 the Locarno Treaty tried to outlaw war and you can see how successful that was., The League of Nations failed to prevent the next War.   And after the World War II and Nuremberg, wars have still happened.


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## AnyaKimlin (Mar 15, 2015)

I said less not none.

Governments have in the past been able to white wash war so that people can call the cooking of children "unfortunate" rather than appalling.

However, Social Media now plays a part.  As a result I know far more about the mistakes my government has made in Syria than any previous conflict.  We the "innocent" bystanders or electorate are no longer as sheltered as we used to be.


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## Ray McCarthy (Mar 15, 2015)

Censorship and propaganda are as much a problem in "free" countries. 
There is no privacy on Internet.
Most Newspaper / TV media is dominated by rather narrow dishonest viewpoints.


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## BAYLOR (Mar 15, 2015)

AnyaKimlin said:


> I said less not none.
> 
> Governments have in the past been able to white wash war so that people can call the cooking of children "unfortunate" rather than appalling.
> 
> However, Social Media now plays a part.  As a result I know far more about the mistakes my government has made in Syria than any previous conflict.  We the "Innocent" bystanders or electorate are no longer as sheltered as they used to be.





Did you live in London during the Blitz?


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## BAYLOR (Mar 15, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Censorship and propaganda are as much a problem in "free" countries.
> There is no privacy on Internet.
> Most Newspaper / TV media is dominated by rather narrow dishonest viewpoints.



George Orwell would have a field  day with out media .


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## Ray McCarthy (Mar 15, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> Did you live in London during the Blitz?


Irrelevant.


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## AnyaKimlin (Mar 15, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> Did you live in London during the Blitz?



I'm 39.

My family were in London and Liverpool during the blitz.  Or they were in the war.


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## BAYLOR (Mar 15, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Irrelevant.



Not really 


The War Before my time , all I have is the history ive read.


What about you Ray?


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## AnyaKimlin (Mar 15, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> The War Before my time , all I have is the history ive read.



I grew up in Liverpool surrounded by men and women who were involved in the war.  Walked passed a variety of bomb sites on a regular basis and could name who died there - and exactly how.  (whether they drowned, burned, suffocated etc).  My life was filled with first hand accounts of World War II.  Including a German Great-Aunt.

My gran sat in a chair every air raid listening to the bombs fall.  My grandfather was a deeply scarred navigator.  My Great Uncle Ken was a conscientious objector so served in the ambulance corps.  Great Uncle Harold was in the Merchant navy.  And my Uncle got sent back from being evacuated for burning down a school.


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## BAYLOR (Mar 15, 2015)

My family were in London and Liverpool during the blitz.  Or they were in the war.[/QUOTE]


But you were not  there , you didn't experience the blitz.  They did, that generation might have a different perspective on Dresden then you ?


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## AnyaKimlin (Mar 15, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> But you we're there , you didn't experience the blitz.  They did, that generation might have a different perspective on Dresden then you ?



They formed my perspective.  It's very difficult to say bombing children is unfortunate when you've seen it before your eyes and had your heartbroken by it.   A good portion of the men I grew up with were disillusioned and damaged or pacifists.


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## BAYLOR (Mar 15, 2015)

AnyaKimlin said:


> They formed my perspective.




Long after the fact. Hindsight something that our generations have the luxury of .  Im not unaware of the dark deeds of the Allies , there are  alot of them. But what the Germany and Japan and Italy did was far worse and I shudder to think of the millions more that would have died had they won.


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## AnyaKimlin (Mar 15, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> Long after the fact. Hindsight, It's easy look at the past and draw the different conclusion then the people living the history.  .



You asked what their perspective was.  They had lived the same atrocities and no way would they call it unfortunate.  And there were a lot of men who came back who did not think any of the war was worth it.  And they were still living the pain in the 1980s.  It wasn't long after the fact -- I don't think you understand how long the consequences of World War Two lasted on the cities who had been bombed.


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## BAYLOR (Mar 15, 2015)

AnyaKimlin said:


> You asked what their perspective was.



They lived it our generations didn't.   They might be less inclined to agree with your point of view?


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## AnyaKimlin (Mar 15, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> They lived it our generations didn't.   They might be less inclined to agree with your point of view?



They agreed with me.  I sat listening to them talk every Thursday.  That's where my view came from.  Whether it was right or wrong they would never ever have white washed the war.


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## BAYLOR (Mar 15, 2015)

AnyaKimlin said:


> They agreed with me.  I sat listening to them talk every Thursday.  That's where my view came from.  Whether it was right or wrong they would never ever have white washed the war.




The war wasn't pretty Anya , not at all. 55 million people lost their lives .  There is one possible way it all could have all been prevented. Woodrow Wilson , David Lloyd George,  George Clemenceau and Vitorro Orlando could have crafted a better Treaty of Versailles. One that didn't bankrupt and embitter Germany.


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## AnyaKimlin (Mar 15, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> The war wasn't pretty Anya ,.



My objection is to the way you play down just how bad it was.  Not that war should or should not happen.

What I don't think you are coming even close to grasping is how long the consequences of being heavily bombed lasted in cities like Liverpool and Dresden.  In so many ways. Cleaning up, injured people, PTSD etc  And we didn't have to cope with the nuclear aftermath.  You say "you're not of that generation" and no I wasn't in the blitz but I was still witnessing the aftermath.  If my gran and auntie had been Hiroshima rather than Liverpool I almost certainly wouldn't be here.


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## BAYLOR (Mar 15, 2015)

AnyaKimlin said:


> My objection is to the way you play down just how bad it was.  Not that war should or should not happen.
> 
> What I don't think you are coming even close to grasping is how long the consequences of being heavily bombed lasted in cities like Liverpool and Dresden.  In so many ways. Cleaning up, injured people, PTSD etc  And we didn't have to cope with the nuclear aftermath.  You say "you're not of that generation" and no I wasn't in the blitz but I was still witnessing the aftermath.  If my gran and auntie had been Hiroshima rather than Liverpool I almost certainly wouldn't be here.



And my objection  to your point of view to is the whole we should be all be guilty and lament over the past forever, which is neither practical nor realistic. It won't change the past .

And yes Im well aware of how it many years took for Europe and Japan to rebuild after the war  and all the various other consequences of that war.


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## AnyaKimlin (Mar 15, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> And my objection  to your point of view to is the whole we should be all be guilty and lament over the past forever, which is neither practical nor realistic. It won't change anything.



Acknowledgement is not guilt.  I don't feel guilty about Dresden or Hiroshima.  Or even Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria -- I don't have to feel guilty to believe my country acted poorly. And I think more empathy for the "other" side is where we start to reduce war.  You can't legislate for that. 



> And yes Im well aware of how it many took for Europe and Japan to rebuild after the war.



Really? You've never mentioned the human cost, just the fatalities.  To quote from a lady just back from Syria "There are far worse things in war than death."


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## BAYLOR (Mar 15, 2015)

Yes  ive read about what happened to the survivors in Germany and the rest of Europe after the fighting had stopped. It wasn't pleasant and idealistic like the news reel portrayed. It was years of hell for them. Ive read all about.



Anya it easy to read about history and make lofty judgments. I do it myself.


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## BigBadBob141 (Mar 21, 2015)

While I was born a few years after WW2 I lost an aunt & a grandfather in the Coventry blitz of 1940.
I also lost a cousin of my mother in Italy who was hiding from the Germans to avoid forced labour.
As for Dresden and the rest it's easy to say that they brought this upon themselves but it's true.
Sherman had it right, WAR IS HELL ! ! !


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## Dinosaur (Mar 21, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> They lived it our generations didn't.   They might be less inclined to agree with your point of view?


So you have no right to comment on Dresden right?


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## BAYLOR (Mar 22, 2015)

Dinosaur said:


> So you have no right to comment on Dresden right?



_That  _i did not say. And while we're on the topic , What are your thoughts on Dresden?


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## BigBadBob141 (Mar 22, 2015)

Bomber Harris always gets the blame for Dresden, but it was Churchill and his cabinet who ordered him to do so, why I don't know?
Harris was reluctant to do so as there were much more important targets.


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## paranoid marvin (Mar 28, 2015)

It's easy to judge the actions of others with hindsight; far harder to make the right calls at the time. I do think the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were avoidable, and I do think that a military target would have been more appropriate. Of course a military target wouldn't have had the same impact as wiping out a whole city, but would still have sent the right message to Japanese high command.

In wiping out those civiliian populations, I think the US was telling the Japanese that they were prepared to do anything to end the war. I also think that they wanted to see the effectiveness of the weapons. For me , this is wrong, and if it had been done by the Germans or the Japanese would have been deemed a war crime. But then again so would Dresden, the Dambuster raids , and other similar Allied assaults that killed more civillians than military personnel. 

Like I said , it's tough to judge. The Allies (particularly with the war against Germany) wanted to make sure that they ended the war as quickly as possible. Hitler kept going on about his 'wonder weapons', and for all the Allies knew he might have stockpiles of biological or chemical - or possibly even nuclear -weapons to use as a last throw of the dice. Perhaps more importantly the had to make sure that the Soviet army didn't advance too far West. 

If the atomic weapons hadn't been used , perhaps the Japanese may have not surrendered completely , and there may have been Allied prisoners in Japanese camps for years whilst negotiations took place. Perhaps a less effective peace treaty would have given them time to re-group... who knows?
In all honesty I think that all that would have happened is every city in Japan being carpet bombed into oblivion before a ground invasion leading to the loss of many lives on both sides. 

But does the ends justify the means? I guess the answer can't be 'yes' or 'no', just 'that's war'. I know that it sounds more than a little trite, but that I think is the only answer.


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## Faisal Shamas (Apr 7, 2015)

I believe the disaster already existed, the people were already dead in some reality or the other, those who made the choice, made it to live through their guilt.


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## BigBadBob141 (Apr 7, 2015)

Given the mind set of the Japanese Military at the time I think a negotiated peace would have been highly unlikely.
Rather I think they would have preferred to go out in a blaze of so-called glory, taking everyone else with them.
Look at Okinawa, the Japanese army feed the civilian population with lies about how the Americans would treat them, then forced them to commit suicide.
I still think the bombs were justified.
As for the Dam-Buster raid, the civilian death toll was unfortunate but the dams were a legitimate target.
If fully successful the raid would have set back German Industry for some time.
However it did not take the Germans too long to repair them, and any follow up raid would have probable failed due to increased anti-aircraft guns.


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## Venusian Broon (Apr 7, 2015)

BigBadBob141 said:


> As for the Dam-Buster raid, the civilian death toll was unfortunate but the dams were a legitimate target.
> If fully successful the raid would have set back German Industry for some time.
> However it did not take the Germans too long to repair them, and any follow up raid would have probable failed due to increased anti-aircraft guns.



Yes it took them about 6 months, I believe, to rebuild the dams - but it took a lot of manpower and concrete - and therefore helped slow down the construction of the Atlantic wall, so in that manner helped D-Day succeed.


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## BAYLOR (Aug 5, 2015)

Hiroshima happened 70 years ago today.


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 5, 2015)

BBC said:
			
		

> The conventional wisdom in the United States is that the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war, and because of that it was justified - end of story.
> 
> Is that really the end of the story?
> 
> It's certainly a convenient one. But it is one that was constructed after the war, by America's leaders, to justify what they had done. And what they had done was, by any measure, horrendous.


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33754931


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## Ursa major (Aug 5, 2015)

> The conventional wisdom in the United States is that the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war, and because of that it was justified


So are they saying that:

It wasn't the atomic bombs that ended the war, but the firebombing that started months earlier?
None of the city-wide destruction (atomic or otherwise) was necessary, because the war would have ended without a further, enormous loss of life?
(Or are they simply saying that the war did not end for those who survived, but were injured in, the atomic-bomb raids, which would be truly pitiful, really, as no war comes to an end with all those still alive being no worse** off than they were before the war began.)
Given the statement I quoted, and the lack of any rational or logical explanation of why the conventional wisdom is not correct, I can only assume that the article wants to suggest that the dropping the atomic bombs was wrong, while accepting that it probably wasn't.


** - I often think, when we hear of another car bomb attack in Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere (or other acts of violence, or accidents, or natural disasters), that sometimes too much prominence is given to the death tolls, and not enough to the (perhaps lifelong) suffering of those who were not killed outright.


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## BigBadBob141 (Aug 5, 2015)

Of course dropping the bombs was a horrible act.
There's no such thing as a nice bomb.
But as I stated before it was the only way to quickly end the war.
If the Americans ect. had been forced to invade the following bloodbath on both sides would have been far, far worse.


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## Ursa major (Aug 5, 2015)

And, as I've pointed out before, almost all the dead would have been citizens (including the _conscripted/drafted_ soldiers/sailors/airmen) in the sort of conflict that would have been needed. Given the experiences on small and medium-sized islands, it's hard to imagine the US using anything other than overwhelming force (to the extent that they could organise this in a practical way) following a battle plan that would have put the lives of its own combatants above that of any of the inhabitants of Japan's four main islands.


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## Nick B (Aug 5, 2015)

If it had been nuclear weapons used _against _an allied nation instead of by one, the would have been many war crime trials carried out by now.

Tens of thousands of civillians killed - atrocity, no matter who committed it.


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## svalbard (Aug 5, 2015)

Quellist said:


> If it had been nuclear weapons used _against _an allied nation instead of by one, the would have been many war crime trials carried out by now.
> 
> Tens of thousands of civillians killed - atrocity, no matter who committed it.



Agree.


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## BAYLOR (Aug 5, 2015)

BigBadBob141 said:


> Of course dropping the bombs was a horrible act.
> There's no such thing as a nice bomb.
> But as I stated before it was the only way to quickly end the war.
> If the Americans ect. had been forced to invade the following bloodbath on both sides would have been far, far worse.



The battle of Okinawa gave the US military an idea of just how bad it would have been had we gone the invasion route.


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## Nick B (Aug 5, 2015)

I'm sure the other sides in the war also justified their own atrocities as 'for the greater good'.


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## Mirannan (Aug 5, 2015)

The fire-bombing of Tokyo (just for one example) caused more damage and killed more people than either atomic bomb did. The nukes were really just more of the same.


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## BAYLOR (Aug 5, 2015)

Mirannan said:


> The fire-bombing of Tokyo (just for one example) caused more damage and killed more people than either atomic bomb did. The nukes were really just more of the same.



Except that the Tokyo firebombing used multiple conventional incendiary bombs.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki only one bomb each . The Idea two bombs destroyed two cities likely  terrified the Japanese high command.


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## Nick B (Aug 5, 2015)

The list of acceptable atrocities commited 'for the greater good' is pretty long yes, but as long as its the 'good' guys doing it, it is fine.

History is written by the victorious, as we have seen.


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## BAYLOR (Aug 5, 2015)

Quellist said:


> If it had been nuclear weapons used _against _an allied nation instead of by one, the would have been many war crime trials carried out by now.
> 
> Tens of thousands of civillians killed - atrocity, no matter who committed it.



The Japanese started it,  they reaped the whirlwind.


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## BAYLOR (Aug 5, 2015)

Quellist said:


> The list of acceptable atrocities commited 'for the greater good' is pretty long yes, but as long as its the 'good' guys doing it, it is fine.
> 
> History is written by the victorious, as we have seen.



Then the bad guys who started the war should have refined from starting a war.


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## AnyaKimlin (Aug 5, 2015)

Mirannan said:


> The fire-bombing of Tokyo (just for one example) caused more damage and killed more people than either atomic bomb did. The nukes were really just more of the same.



Does that figure include those who died long after or those affected in the next generations?


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## Nick B (Aug 5, 2015)

There are no winners in war. But if you have to go to war, you attack their military machine. You take out the soldiers, the weapons, the command. You can't kill thousands of civillians and then try to claim the moral high ground, no matter what the enemy did to you.

The only way to be moraly superior to your enemy is to not sink to their level. Civillian casualties happen, we all know that, but knowingly drop a weapon of arbitrary death upon a civillian centre is unacceptable by any ethical outlook.


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## Nick B (Aug 5, 2015)

AnyaKimlin said:


> Does that figure include those who died long after or those affected in the next generations?



Not only that, but spent years studying the effects with no intention of helping the victims. The US used the aftermath as a clinical study long after the event, making no attempt to help the victims.


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## BAYLOR (Aug 5, 2015)

Quellist said:


> Not only that, but spent years studying the effects with no intention of helping the victims. The US used the aftermath as a clinical study long after the event, making no attempt to help the victims.



The japanese  were working on their own bomb, given their conduct actions in China and other places , what do suppose they would have done had they gotten there first? 55 million people perished because of Nazi Germany, Fascist  Italy and Imperial Japan and had they won million more would have died.


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## Nick B (Aug 5, 2015)

Thats ok then. As long as you can justify mass killing of innocent people it's fine. 
We killed tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children, but it's ok because they might have done the same. And it's less than the nazis killed so its okay.


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## AnyaKimlin (Aug 6, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> The japanese  were working on their own bomb, given their conduct actions in China and other places , what do suppose they would have done had they gotten there first? 55 million people perished because of Nazi Germany, Fascist  Italy and Imperial Japan and had they won million more would have died.



Would they?  People around the world were suffering long after World War II.  My grandfather died many years later but it was complications from the war that killed him.  Would the regimes have lasted as long as the impact of the war?  We don't know that.  And are the regimes we protected that much more virtuous?  They're not any less corrupt.

And because we had an atomic bomb couldn't Japan have justified their use based on the fact we had one and could use it against them?  Would we be so blase about a bomb that hit America?  I'm pretty sure Americans wouldn't really be bothered about devastation in Europe they've proved again and again they're not.  I don't think many British people would tell French, Germans or Spaniards they don't know anything about being attacked or terrorism.


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## BAYLOR (Aug 6, 2015)

Quellist said:


> Thats ok then. As long as you can justify mass killing of innocent people it's fine.
> We killed tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children, but it's ok because they might have done the same. And it's less than the nazis killed so its okay.



Your just looking for something to pointlessly argue about aren't you?




AnyaKimlin said:


> Would they?  People around the world were suffering long after World War II.  My grandfather died many years later but it was complications from the war that killed him.  Would the regimes have lasted as long as the impact of the war?  We don't know that.  And are the regimes we protected that much more virtuous?  They're not any less corrupt.



Anya forget it, Neither You nor Quellist are right about this . In that time frame the decisions and reasons to bomb both places  were the correct ones. It's very easy to do the revisionist line about "Oh how terrible we shouldn't have done it." The Axis powers started the the war with malevolent intent.


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## Nick B (Aug 6, 2015)

No, I am not pointlessly arguing. The thread is to discuss whether the nuclear bombing of two cities was the right call. My stand is that no, it is not justifiable nor was it the right call.

You asked the contraversal question, as you often do (and I am not a troll, this is a thing I feel strongly about), this is my view. I like your line of questioning. Difficult questions need to be asked. But be ready for uncomfortable answers.


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## DPWright (Aug 6, 2015)

If Hitler had surrendered like all generals secretly wanted him to when the allies landed in Normandy then that would have saved the lives of over 300,000 soldiers and civilIan and many 10s of thousands more from starvation/homeless ect. The war was loat for them, everyone knew it but Hitler. However they were fanatics and fought on extending the war by another year. The japenese were also fanatics and would have fought for every inch of soil. The Americans knew this. Now I'm no advocate for violence of any kind but whose to say 100,000 people dying by atomic bomb didn't save a further 200000 fron dying in a prolonged war? I'm not saying it's right but in war this decisions have to be made. The allis had learnt from Europe the consequences of a prolonged war.


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## DPWright (Aug 6, 2015)

Excuse my poor typing. Big fingers and my phone's small keypad are a bad combination...


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## BAYLOR (Aug 6, 2015)

Quellist said:


> No, I am not pointlessly arguing. The thread is to discuss whether the nuclear bombing of two cities was the right call. My stand is that no, it is not justifiable nor was it the right call.
> 
> You asked the contraversal question, as you often do (and I am not a troll, this is a thing I feel strongly about), this is my view. I like your line of questioning. Difficult questions need to be asked. But be ready for uncomfortable answers.




We have the advantage/disadvantage of historical hindsight . The problem is that we weren't there to see the situation as it occurred. In the context of the times and the circumstances.  They were the correct decisions.

Your quite correct there is nothing at all wrong with asking difficult questions.


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## Ursa major (Aug 6, 2015)

Quellist said:


> You take out the soldiers, the weapons, the command. You can't kill thousands of civillians


You must have missed my posts where I pointed out that the soldiers were mostly conscripts (i.e. civilians who were sent to fight) and their deaths are no less worthy of regret than those of un-conscripted civilians.

I think our attitudes to the deaths of soldiers are too much influenced by all those battles and wars fought by (often relatively small numbers of) volunteers and mercenaries, where those who risked their lives in conflict made a conscious decision to join up.


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## mosaix (Aug 6, 2015)

Regarding the general point of the thread. I'd be interested to know why the nuclear attack has been singled out for discussion when the non-nuclear fire-bombing of Tokyo killed more people (approximately 100,000). Does the delivery system really have any significance in comparison to the number of casualties?

Sorry if this has already been mentioned / discussed.


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 6, 2015)

Maybe the USA didn't want Russia to beat the Japanese.
Hiroshima: 70,000 initial Deaths and about 70,000 radiation deaths.
Fire-bombing of Tokyo was a war crime too.
Okinawa is always brought up as an excuse, but that is 100% misleading and doesn't take account of possible blockades and the increasing Russian shipments to the East once VE occurred and huge successes Russians were having attacking Japanese Military. They didn't really  start attacks till after War in Europe ended and they got stuff shipped east by rail.

The USA was simply impatient.

BUT ... Should leaders or countries be actually apologising for wrong actions of people 70 to 75 years ago? Or 100 years ago (WWI) or Boer War, Or 1905 Russian - Japanese war, or Ireland 1916 (both sides criminally wrong). Saying it was wrong isn't same as Apologising.  Are the nations that committed war crimes on both sides 1936 to 1945 worried about compensation claims? 

Everything in the last half dozen posts has been said before in the thread, I can't see either side changing view point. We can't ever say the ends always justifies the means. Possibly the question is why did they drop a second one so quickly?


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## mosaix (Aug 6, 2015)

Quellist said:


> Thats ok then. As long as you can justify mass killing of innocent people it's fine.
> We killed tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children, but it's ok because they might have done the same. And it's less than the nazis killed so its okay.



Hi Quellist. I think you need to define your term 'innocent'. Okay, without a doubt, there were children and Japanese adults who were against the war who were killed. There were also prisoners of war and Korean slave labourers. But a large part of the population, as in any nation at war, were part of the war effort - supporting the armed forces, manufacturing munitions etc.


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## Brian G Turner (Aug 6, 2015)

The BBC has an interesting piece on the moral issues:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-33754931

Interesting to read that the American government allegedly suppressed the showing of films made of the after-effects. 

We have the benefit of coldly evaluating the historical facts, but it also appears that "terror bombing" by the allies - the specific targeting of civilians - was hidden from the allied public during WWII.


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## Ursa major (Aug 6, 2015)

mosaix said:


> I'd be interested to know why the nuclear attack has been singled out for discussion when the non-nuclear fire-bombing of Tokyo killed more people (approximately 100,000). Does the delivery system really have any significance in comparison to the number of casualties?


I was thinking about this yesterday, but in the context of the whole war. It struck me, and still does, that there was more (strategic) point to the nuclear attack on Hiroshima (and, perhaps, that on Nagasaki) than there was to, for example, Dresden (although I understand that there are those who defend the Dresden attack based on its strategic position with respect to Germany's transport infrastructure).

What Dresden wasn't was any sort of warning shot, which Hiroshima surely was. (What it also was, in terms of the destruction, was one of _very_ many cities reduced to rubble**.)

So, speaking as a Brit, I see the Dresden attack as much more worthy of being described as a war crime than Hiroshima, as I don't think it either changed the overall course of the war in Europe, or was seriously intended to do so. (I suspect that it was just another ratcheting up of the bombing campaign, almost done because it _could_ be done, and because it fitted in with the mindset of the time, based on years of escalating attacks on large cities.)


** - As part of a holiday tour in the 1980s, I stayed a night I Hannover. Near the hotel was a museum, which contained a number of models depicting (the centre of) Hannover at various points in its history. The model of Hannover in 1945 showed not a single building with an intact roof. (In fact, I can't recall seeing _any_ roofs, intact or otherwise.) Hannover was, like Dresden, a transport hub. (According to Wiki, "only" 6000*** people were killed during the many allied bombing raids, which included those on residential areas****.)

*** - An estimated 42,600 civilians died (and 37,000 were injured) in eight continuous days (day and night) of raids on Hamburg.

**** - I have no idea if these were deliberately targeted:  precision bombing was a rarity in those days.


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## WaylanderToo (Aug 6, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> Anya forget it, Neither You nor Quellist are right about this . In that time frame the decisions and reasons to bomb both places  were the correct ones. It's very easy to do the revisionist line about "Oh how terrible we shouldn't have done it." The Axis powers started the the war with malevolent intent.



^^^ This!!! Dropping the bomb was at that point in time absolutely the right thing to do and from everything I have read did save lives.

As has been previously mentioned the fire bombing of various Japanese and German cities also caused mass casualties but somehow (with the exception of Dresden) these aren't mentioned with the same horror, strange old world.


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## Nick B (Aug 6, 2015)

I think this is one of those discussions where the debate quickly becomes circular. 
Luckily this community is polite and debates don't deteriorate into name calling.

We will agree to disagree. 

War does not dictate who is right, only who is left.


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## WaylanderToo (Aug 6, 2015)

Ursa major said:


> **** - I have no idea if these were deliberately targeted:  precision bombing was a rarity in those days.




I read somewhere that back then a bomb landed within 5 miles of target was considered to be on target (obviously attacks using Tallboy and Grandslam wouldn't be included in this) these days if it's just within 5 metres it's considered a poor show


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## Ursa major (Aug 6, 2015)

WaylanderToo said:


> I read somewhere that back then a bomb landed within 5 miles of target was considered to be on target


I've also heard that five miles figure.


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## Mirannan (Aug 6, 2015)

Quellist said:


> There are no winners in war. But if you have to go to war, you attack their military machine. You take out the soldiers, the weapons, the command. You can't kill thousands of civillians and then try to claim the moral high ground, no matter what the enemy did to you.
> 
> The only way to be moraly superior to your enemy is to not sink to their level. Civillian casualties happen, we all know that, but knowingly drop a weapon of arbitrary death upon a civillian centre is unacceptable by any ethical outlook.



Two points about that: First, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military centres. (Arguably, the whole of every Japanese city was; military production had become a cottage industry, literally.) Second, precision strikes such as you describe were impossible with WWII technology. The general run of bomber crews had a CEP of hundreds of yards by war end - at the beginning, it was miles! The existence of small numbers of highly-trained specialists is irrelevant to that point.


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## AnyaKimlin (Aug 6, 2015)

WaylanderToo said:


> ^^^ This!!! Dropping the bomb was at that point in time absolutely the right thing to do and from everything I have read did save lives.
> 
> As has been previously mentioned the fire bombing of various Japanese and German cities also caused mass casualties but somehow (with the exception of Dresden) these aren't mentioned with the same horror, strange old world.



Actually, I have said the same about Dresden (and carpet bombing in general), the Dambuster raid  (although I love the film), the use of Agent Orange and other chemical warfare over the years, going over the top during WWII when they were using soldiers as nothing more than cannon fodder etc  However, the difference between Dresden, and chemical or nuclear warfare or mines is that with carpet bombing the physical harm done to people ends when the war does.  It doesn't continue to physically harm the next generations although they do have to clean up the mess left and the mental scars go on for decades. Dresden was appalling.  People, innocents including children, cooked in bomb shelters like they did in Herculeum. It was very much a war crime.  With the Mohne Dam etc that was acknowledged as so appalling after the war that it was made a war crime for future wars. 

My views weren't formed by revisionists.  They were formed by people who were right in the middle of all this and who I grew up around.  Unusually, my family didn't lose a single person in either WW1 or WWII (except a very distant cousin in Australia) so they all came home.  I had a great-aunt who'd been in Dresden and a grandfather who was a navigator who I think might have been involved with several carpet bombing raids - whether Dresden was one I do not know.  My grandfather hated Churchill for the things he witnessed in war that were never reported. He said that's why he wasn't voted back in after the war - too many had seen too much.  I come from a family who lived in Liverpool and London during World War II.  My great-gran, gran and great-aunts refused to use air raid shelters, and my aunt was not evacuated with other children.  (My uncle by marriage was sent back because he burned down a school).  As a child I walked around and saw bomb sites.  The city I lived in was still recovering in the 1980s.  As my grandfather said what's the point of fighting and giving your life for something just as evil as that you're fighting against.

Hiroshima was one of the first acts of war I remember hearing about.  A man who watched it happen and was one of the first British naval officers in Japan after it happened.  The other was a great-uncle in the Merchant Navy who had also been in Japan shortly after.  The first gentleman came home, like my grandfather, a pacifist.  At the start of WWII my family had one conscientious objector.  By 1946 we had far more.  Remembrance Sunday 1983, the gentleman who had witnessed Hiroshima got up and spoke of his experience to an audience made up mostly of those who had been there and done that during the World Wars (in some cases both of them).    His speech was incredibly well received.  Even those that hated Germans were shocked by Dresden.

It's only in 2003 I got to watch someone die from Agent Orange.


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## AnyaKimlin (Aug 6, 2015)

Ursa major said:


> I've also heard that five miles figure.



First ever bombing raid during World War One.  (my figures are dodgy but the idea is there)  80 fighters turned back due to poor weather, one tried to bomb the British Fleet, another neutral bombed neutral Denmark, two made the designated target.   Even now with precision bombing there is room for error.  The fact we don't have a decent replacement for the Nimrod can't be helping with that.


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 6, 2015)

WaylanderToo said:


> fire bombing of various Japanese and German cities also caused mass casualties


Along with other bombings and war crimes already mentioned here.


AnyaKimlin said:


> First ever bombing raid during World War One


People did shelter in the London Underground for fear of Zeppelin raids in WW I. The UK aircraft and guns couldn't reach the height of Zeppelins for some while.

WWII, Germany inexplicably bombed Dublin. Possibly they were "lost". Despite  De Valera himself being sympathetic to Nazis, most Irish people supported the Allies. UK / US pilots quietly allowed to "escape" across the Border, German pilots etc interned.  Instead of separate frequencies and programs for Cork, Dublin and Athlone, the Irish Government secretly agreed to help UK and moved all three transmitters to Athlone frequency. They fed the program by cable to UK were it was transmitted from 5 or 6 transmitters in south of England. This was so that the Luftwaffe couldn't use the three Irish stations as Navigation beacons.


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## WaylanderToo (Aug 6, 2015)

AnyaKimlin said:


> Actually, I have said the same about Dresden (and carpet bombing in general), the Dambuster raid  (although I love the film), the use of Agent Orange and other chemical warfare over the years, going over the top during WWII when they were using soldiers as nothing more than cannon fodder etc  However, the difference between Dresden, and chemical or nuclear warfare or mines is that with carpet bombing the physical harm done to people ends when the war does.  It doesn't continue to physically harm the next generations although they do have to clean up the mess left and the mental scars go on for decades. Dresden was appalling.  People, innocents including children, cooked in bomb shelters like they did in Herculeum. It was very much a war crime.  With the Mohne Dam etc that was acknowledged as so appalling after the war that it was made a war crime for future wars.
> 
> My views weren't formed by revisionists.  They were formed by people who were right in the middle of all this and who I grew up around.  Unusually, my family didn't lose a single person in either WW1 or WWII (except a very distant cousin in Australia) so they all came home.  I had a great-aunt who'd been in Dresden and a grandfather who was a navigator who I think might have been involved with several carpet bombing raids - whether Dresden was one I do not know.  My grandfather hated Churchill for the things he witnessed in war that were never reported. He said that's why he wasn't voted back in after the war - too many had seen too much.  I come from a family who lived in Liverpool and London during World War II.  My great-gran, gran and great-aunts refused to use air raid shelters, and my aunt was not evacuated with other children.  (My uncle by marriage was sent back because he burned down a school).  As a child I walked around and saw bomb sites.  The city I lived in was still recovering in the 1980s.  As my grandfather said what's the point of fighting and giving your life for something just as evil as that you're fighting against.
> 
> ...




but that's just it - by mere dint of the fact that it's after the event they are revisionist views. 

I'd actually argue that Dresden and Tokyo were _worse_ than Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the use of agent orange since it was known that a firestorm would ensue... in fact that was the primary aim. I'd be surprised if anyone knew the full extent of the horrors of the atom bomb or AO


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## svalbard (Aug 6, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Along with other bombings and war crimes already mentioned here.
> 
> People did shelter in the London Underground for fear of Zeppelin raids in WW I. The UK aircraft and guns couldn't reach the height of Zeppelins for some while.
> 
> WWII, Germany inexplicably bombed Dublin. Possibly they were "lost". Despite  De Valera himself being sympathetic to Nazis, most Irish people supported the Allies. UK / US pilots quietly allowed to "escape" across the Border, German pilots etc interned.  Instead of separate frequencies and programs for Cork, Dublin and Athlone, the Irish Government secretly agreed to help UK and moved all three transmitters to Athlone frequency. They fed the program by cable to UK were it was transmitted from 5 or 6 transmitters in south of England. This was so that the Luftwaffe couldn't use the three Irish stations as Navigation beacons.



My Grandfather was stationed on Beara Pennisula during WWII or as the Irish Government called it 'The Emergency'. In between ferrying cattle across to Dursey Island he was part of a unit that came upon a Lufftwaffe pilot who crashed around Castletownbere. They buried him with full military honours.


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 6, 2015)

svalbard said:


> Lufftwaffe pilot who crashed around Castletownbere


Possibly ran out of fuel?  I've been there. He was obviously seriously lost, as that (for those who don't know) on the South West Atlantic coast.


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## Venusian Broon (Aug 6, 2015)

svalbard said:


> ...he was part of a unit that came upon a Lufftwaffe pilot who crashed around Castletownbere. They buried him with full military honours.



It's surprising to see it now but at the start of the WW2, during the phony war when both the UK and Germany sent small sorties of bombers over each other's military bases, Luftwaffe pilots and aircrew who had been shot down and killed were given burial with full military honours by the British authorities. (Its in _The World at War_ on film.)


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## WaylanderToo (Aug 6, 2015)

Venusian Broon said:


> It's surprising to see it now but at the start of the WW2, during the phony war when both the UK and Germany sent small sorties of bombers over each other's military bases, Luftwaffe pilots and aircrew who had been shot down and killed were given burial with full military honours by the British authorities. (Its in _The World at War_ on film.)




in a similar vein...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Lamason


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## AnyaKimlin (Aug 6, 2015)

WaylanderToo said:


> but that's just it - by mere dint of the fact that it's after the event they are revisionist views.
> 
> I'd actually argue that Dresden and Tokyo were _worse_ than Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the use of agent orange since it was known that a firestorm would ensue... in fact that was the primary aim. I'd be surprised if anyone knew the full extent of the horrors of the atom bomb or AO



Does it being less worse make it more right or less appalling or more justified?  I don't think so.   There were only 1600 killed as the result of the Dam Busters raids. I don't think those bombing Dresden or Tokyo understood the full horrors of that either.  Those making the decisions on either side were never in any real danger.  Long gone is the general who leads an army into battle.  Are you seriously suggesting that Hiroshima was not intended to be more horrific than anything that had gone before?  If they didn't think it would be catastrophic why bother doing it?

And the views I heard talk are not revisionist because they were not formed after the events.  They were formed _during_ the events and as a result of witnessing those events and/or being involved in them.  The man who I heard talk at church had done the same talk every year since he returned from the war and his views were formed whilst watching the bomb being dropped.  My grandfather's views on carpet bombing were formed as he navigated the planes that dropped those bombs.  My great-aunt's views on Dresden were formed whilst she sheltered from the bombs.   My views on chemical warfare were cemented watching a man die from the effects of agent orange just over a decade a go.


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## BigBadBob141 (Aug 7, 2015)

I'm getting a bit feed up defending the bomb.
20/20 hindsight in history is easy, it's alright to moan about the bomb ect. after the fact, was it a war crime ect.
If the Germans or Japanese had the bomb first and used it would we have tried them as war criminals?
The answer is no!
For the simple reason if they had the bomb and used it they would have won the war!
The only thing I have to add is, ask yourselves this, would you want to live in a world where Nazi Germany & Imperial Japan were victorious!!!


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## thaddeus6th (Aug 7, 2015)

Stayed out of this debate until now, because of the coverage on the news.

Lots about the people who died. Little on the context. As I understand it, more died in the bombing of Tokyo (conventional bombing). Nothing about the potential Japanese and Allied casualties if an invasion had occurred, which would have been horrendous.

Were the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a good thing? No. But were they the lesser of two evils? Yes.


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## svalbard (Aug 7, 2015)

thaddeus6th said:


> Stayed out of this debate until now, because of the coverage on the news.
> 
> Lots about the people who died. Little on the context. As I understand it, more died in the bombing of Tokyo (conventional bombing). Nothing about the potential Japanese and Allied casualties if an invasion had occurred, which would have been horrendous.
> 
> Were the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a good thing? No. But were they the lesser of two evils? Yes.



However invasion was not a foregone conclusion. Japan was tentatively seeking a peaceful resolition using Russia as intermediatory. Bad choice!

Also Japan's Navy and airforce was a spent force which meant invading mainland Japan was not am urgent need. 

There were other ways but a message, and a terrible one at that, was going to be delivered. Twice.


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 7, 2015)

No one other than me ever seems to mention the rapidly ramping up Russian offensive, how successful they were and what casualties they expected.

Instead I see the same tired misleading excuses I have read for 40+ years that ignore the facts!



svalbard said:


> Russia as intermediatory


Or alternatively they were NOT negotiating with the Russians because the Russians hitting them hard?  The reality is that NOT due to Atomic Bomb but BECAUSE of the end of Russian Intermediary negotiations, due to Russia declaring war and attacking is why the Japanese met and decided to Surrender to USA!

Some alternates to a purely USA Atomic centric view of Between VE and VJ in 1945

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Japanese_War_(1945)



> ... the preliminary report prepared by the Army team that investigated the Hiroshima bombing, the one that gave details about what had happened there, was not delivered until August 10. It didn’t reach Tokyo, in other words, until after the decision to surrender had already been taken. Although their verbal report was delivered (to the military) on August 8, the details of the bombing were not available until two days later. The decision to surrender was therefore not based on a deep appreciation of the horror at Hiroshima.



Russians attacked on August the 8th. This wasn't anything to do with 6th August Hiroshima, but long planned, even before end of war in Europe.



> the Japanese military understood, at least in a rough way, what nuclear weapons were. Japan had a nuclear weapons program. Several of the military men mention the fact that it was a nuclear weapon that destroyed Hiroshima in their diaries. General Anami Korechika, minster of war, even went to consult with the head of the Japanese nuclear weapons program on the night of August 7. The idea that Japan’s leaders didn’t know about nuclear weapons doesn’t hold up.



About 1/2 the Hiroshima casualties would not be till after surrender. Three days before surrender 70,000 killed at Hiroshima vs 120,000 approx already in Tokyo alone:


> The *first of the conventional raids*, a night attack on Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945, remains the single most destructive attack on a city in the history of war. Something like 16 square miles of the city were burned out. An estimated 120,000 Japanese lost their lives — *the single highest death toll of any bombing attack on a city*.





> In the summer of 1945, the U.S. Army Air Force carried out one of the most intense campaigns of city destruction in the history of the world. Sixty-eight cities in Japan were attacked and all of them were either partially or completely destroyed. An estimated 1.7 million people were made homeless, 300,000 were killed, and 750,000 were wounded. Sixty-six of these raids were carried out with conventional bombs, two with atomic bombs. The destruction caused by conventional attacks was huge.



*In the three weeks prior to Hiroshima, 26 cities were attacked by the U.S. Army Air Force. Of these, eight — or almost a third — were as completely or more completely destroyed than Hiroshima*


> General Anami on August 13 remarked that the atomic bombings were no more menacing than the fire-bombing that Japan had endured for months. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki were no worse than the fire bombings, and if Japan’s leaders did not consider them important enough to discuss in depth, how can Hiroshima and Nagasaki have coerced them to surrender?





> Even the most hardline leaders in Japan’s government knew that the war could not go on. The question was not whether to continue, but how to bring the war to a close under the best terms possible. The Allies (the United States, Great Britain, and others — *the Soviet Union, remember, was still neutral*) were demanding "unconditional surrender."



*One way to gauge whether it was the bombing of Hiroshima or the invasion and declaration of war by the Soviet Union that caused Japan’s surrender is to compare the way in which these two events affected the strategic situation.*



> The impact of the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria and Sakhalin Island was quite different, however. Once the Soviet Union had declared war, Stalin could no longer act as a mediator — he was now a belligerent. So the diplomatic option was wiped out by the Soviet move. The effect on the military situation was equally dramatic. Most of Japan’s best troops had been shifted to the southern part of the home islands. Japan’s military had correctly guessed that the likely first target of an American invasion would be the southernmost island of Kyushu.



The claim that Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings ended the war is contentious. The claims of how many US soldiers and Japanese it saved are pure speculation that ignores the worsening situation of Japan, the Russian attacks and possible blockade tactics. It's pure after the fact USA revisionism to justify something more about sending a message to Stalin and avoiding post WWII Russian involvement with Japan. The 1905 war is one reason why Japan surrendered to USA rather than USSR

Read the whole article
http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/


> The Soviet declaration of war also changed the calculation of how much time was left for maneuver. Japanese intelligence was predicting that U.S. forces might not invade for months. Soviet forces, on the other hand, could be in Japan proper in as little as 10 days. The Soviet invasion made a decision on ending the war extremely time sensitive.



Very pro Republican, conservative Fox News:


> As the United States dropped its atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, 1.6 million Soviet troops launched a surprise attack on the Japanese army occupying eastern Asia. Within days, Emperor Hirohito's million-man army in the region had collapsed.
> 
> It was a momentous turn on the Pacific battleground of World War II, yet one that would be largely eclipsed in the history books by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the same week 65 years ago. But in recent years some historians have argued that the Soviet action served as effectively as — or possibly more than — the A-bombs in ending the war.


Yet the Russians had only started a massive movement of resources from the West now that they had consolidated occupation of 1/2 Berlin and Eastern Germany, Baltic States etc.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/0...ive-key-japans-wwii-surrender-eclipsed-bombs/

In 2009 the Japanese and Russians still negotiating ...
http://www.historynet.com/russia-and-japan-set-to-sign-treaty-ending-world-war-ii.htm


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## Mirannan (Aug 7, 2015)

There is another issue here. The atomic bombings might well have prevented the partition of Japan, or even their complete takeover by the Russians; and it might also have prevented WWIII.


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## AnyaKimlin (Aug 7, 2015)

Mirannan said:


> There is another issue here. The atomic bombings might well have prevented the partition of Japan, or even their complete takeover by the Russians; and it might also have prevented WWIII.



Or they might just have dropped an atomic bomb because it was the biggest most powerful weapon they had and thought it might be cool to try it out.  Harming innocents and children didn't really figure much in decisions made during WWII


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## KyleAW (Aug 7, 2015)

Honest question, as a person with interest in WW2 but not all the facts. What would have stopped the US inviting a Japanese dignitary to witness an A-bomb test, using that as a threat of force if Japan didn't relent? It would still be bullying but without having to possibly use the bomb.

Thanks if people have thoughts on this!


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## Ursa major (Aug 7, 2015)

AnyaKimlin said:


> Or they might just have dropped an atomic bomb because it was the biggest most powerful weapon they had and thought it might be cool to try it out.  Harming innocents and children didn't really figure much in decisions made during WWII


I don't think coolness had anything to do with it (although, as I mentioned in an earlier post, campaigns of attack do have a momentum all of their own); letting people know -- and not necessarily only those in Japan -- what atomic weapons could do on the "battlefield" was the whole point, I think.

Note: If the USSR was ever cuddly, it was not so under the far-from-genial Uncle Joe, who'd gone as far to agree with Germany, before the start of the war, on the partition** of Poland. The idea that they should be given at least a foothold in East Asia***, as well as Central Europe (which could hardly be avoided), would have seemed even more ludicrous back then than it appears today.




KyleAW said:


> Honest question, as a person with interest in WW2 but not all the facts. What would have stopped the US inviting a Japanese dignitary to witness an A-bomb test, using that as a threat of force if Japan didn't relent? It would still be bullying but without having to possibly use the bomb.
> 
> Thanks if people have thoughts on this!


In terms of practicalities, rather than other considerations (e.g. avoiding allegations that the test was a fraud, or geopolitics), the point of using the bomb in anger wasn't just to show the power of the device, it was that it could be delivered into defended airspace (i.e. that the bomb really could be carried by an aircraft).



** - I suppose that there's an outside chance that if the Soviet forces had entered Poland at the same time as Germany's, rather than 16 days later, Chamberlain might have said the following on September the 3rd 1939:





> This morning, the British ambassadors in Berlin and Moscow, respectively handed the German and Soviet governments final notes stating that unless we heard from them, by 11 o'clock, that they were prepared at once, to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now, that no such undertaking has been received from either government, and as a consequence, this country is now at war with Germany and the Soviet Union.



*** - This was well before the success of Mao in China.


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 7, 2015)

KyleAW said:


> What would have stopped the US inviting a Japanese dignitary to witness an A-bomb test, using that as a threat of force if Japan didn't relent?


Probably pointless as likely it was as much or more a demo to the Russians, and "delivery" is everything. The USA could have destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki more completely in a night each of conventional bombing. 

So convincing the Japanese of the power of a single bomb in demo wouldn't have met USA needs.


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 7, 2015)

Ursa major said:


> The idea that they should be given at least a foothold in East Asia***, as well as Central Europe


You mean more of a foothold. Korea was SUPPOSED to be divided between USSR and USA (They agreed before end of war, not sure if at Yalta). But neither side actually put in enough troops, esp USA, so Korea was nearly completely taken by North Korean communists*.

Korean Proxy war could have been in Japan too after WWII. But it was most unlikely to result in WWIII,

c.f The 1950 Korean War, Indo-China (French before USA vs Vietcong), USSR Berlin blockade, 1948 East German suppression, 1956 Suez war and Hungarian suppression,  Cuban Crisis,  1968 Czech  suppression.

The USSR was NEVER cuddly. Hitler was convinced Stalin and Western Allies would attack each other. Stalin was smarter than that which why apart from 1939 fight, USSR was neutral to Japan till Europe was sorted.

[*The reason that the UN supported action in Korea was complicated and partly because he Soviet Union, a veto-wielding power, had boycotted the Council meetings since January 1950, protesting that the Republic of China (Taiwan), not the People's Republic of China, held a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. So the UN supported the American action]


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## Ursa major (Aug 7, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> You mean more of a foothold.


I was discounting the situation there as Korea was, in effect, a Japanese overseas possession (from about 1910, I think), dirt poor (when compared to the Japanese homeland, which had been a "first world" country for quite a long time) and, because of its location, not an easy place to defend against Soviet incursions.

Northern Korea wasn't gifted to the Soviet Union. If the Soviets had taken over much of Japan, that would have been seen (in the US and elsewhere) as the US letting them do it.


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## KyleAW (Aug 7, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Probably pointless as likely it was as much or more a demo to the Russians, and "delivery" is everything. The USA could have destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki more completely in a night each of conventional bombing.
> 
> So convincing the Japanese of the power of a single bomb in demo wouldn't have met USA needs.



That is kinda my point, if it was an end the war measure then there was to my mind a reasonable way to try and avoid using it. If it was used to intimidate the Russians then it meets that goal.


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 7, 2015)

Ursa major said:


> Northern Korea wasn't gifted to the Soviet Union


It in essence was.


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 7, 2015)

KyleAW said:


> If it was used to intimidate the Russians then it meets that goal.


Unacceptable.
But all the other Japanese Cities bombing were just as much war crimes. The Atomic Bomb drops were not actually worse.


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## KyleAW (Aug 7, 2015)

Agreed. In a roundabout way I guess I'm saying there was a way that the US could have used the threat of the A-Bomb (or at least tried to use the threat) instead. But if they ultimately were more interested in the Russians then, well, it is more of an atrocious act really. I kill your people to scare their people? Ouch...

And yes there was some awful bombing of Japan by the US. Not much that wasn't bad about it really


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## Ursa major (Aug 7, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> It in essence was.


It's only a "gift" when there's a choice of outcome _in practice_. No choice, no gift.


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## Ursa major (Aug 7, 2015)

KyleAW said:


> But if they ultimately were more interested in the Russians


I think that though this was an important consideration, it was really just a very useful by-product of what was seen as the best way of defeating the Japanese (i.e. using nuclear weapons rather than indulge in what would have been a very difficult, very costly, invasion).


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## MWagner (Aug 7, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Should leaders or countries be actually apologising for wrong actions of people 70 to 75 years ago? Or 100 years ago (WWI) or Boer War, Or 1905 Russian - Japanese war, or Ireland 1916 (both sides criminally wrong). Saying it was wrong isn't same as Apologising.  Are the nations that committed war crimes on both sides 1936 to 1945 worried about compensation claims?



I expect they are worried about compensation claims. And about looking like they're shaming their own soldiers who may still be alive. We tend to have more latitude about these things once everyone who was involved is dead. Although it's worth noting that many Southerners in the U.S. are still proud of the Confederacy and assert that the Civil War was all about state rights, and that was 150 years ago.


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 7, 2015)

MWagner said:


> assert that the Civil War was all about state rights


It's certainly suited the North at the time to claim it was only about Slavery. It seems to me it wasn't just about the Slaves.


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## MWagner (Aug 7, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> It's certainly suited the North at the time to claim it was only about Slavery. It seems to me it wasn't just about the Slaves.



_The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.

- Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, March 21, 1861._

The state right that the states of the slave-holding south were concerned with was the right of new states of the union to become slave states. When it became apparent that right wouldn't be extended, and that the balance of population and power in the union would inevitably weigh against them, they took their ball and went home.


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 7, 2015)

MWagner said:


> hey took their ball and went home.


Also stupidly tried to coerce the British by withholding cotton from them. That just encouraged the British to boost production in Egypt, India etc. There was a program about "The Cotton Famine" recently BBC R4. When the Confederates realised how stupid this was they couldn't ship anyway due to Union Blockade. After the War the Cotton Factors were gone and the World Cotton prices had dropped due to British Empire production.

The Confederates picked wrong issues and then mismanaged themselves?


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## svalbard (Aug 9, 2015)

about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Flibcom.org%2Fhistory%2F1945-us-responses-atomic-bombing-hiroshima-nagasaki&tabId=1

Interesting qoutes.


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 9, 2015)

svalbard said:


> https://libcom.org/history/1945-us-responses-atomic-bombing-hiroshima-nagasaki&tabId=1


Fixed your link.

Yes, confirms my thoughts that the A-bombs were not about saving US lives or Ending the War, but about the Russians.


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## Ursa major (Aug 9, 2015)

Big decisions are often based on a lot of things. Because something happens to serve one purpose neither means that other stated purposes are false nor that the happened-to-be-served purpose was a big part of the decision (although it probably was a major, though not dominant, consideration in the case of Hiroshima).

We also have to take into consideration from where those making such comments are coming. I'm thinking along the lines of those with a hammer seeing all problems as nails, something we have seen more recently (with advocates of air power thinking that an opponent could be conquered, as opposed to just defeated, by bombing alone). Even setting aside personal and career-based considerations, some people simply find it difficult to accept that solutions other than those of which they can easily conceive might be the best ones (for their side, if not for the enemy).


*EDIT*: As an aside, I wonder if Eisenhower's view would have been the same if he'd have been in charge of, and responsible for, attacking Germany from the east, as opposed to the west. One gets the (perhaps false) impression that Germany's campaign in the east was more of a fight to the death affair -- for political, and probably racial, reasons -- than the one in the west, with casualty figures to match.


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## svalbard (Aug 9, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Fixed your link.
> 
> Yes, confirms my thoughts that the A-bombs were not about saving US lives or Ending the War, but about the Russians.



Thanks Ray.



Ursa major said:


> Big decisions are often based on a lot of things. Because something happens to serve one purpose neither means that other stated purposes are false nor that the happened-to-be-served purpose was a big part of the decision (although it probably was a major, though not dominant, consideration in the case of Hiroshima).
> 
> We also have to take into consideration from where those making such comments are coming. I'm thinking along the lines of those with a hammer seeing all problems as nails, something we have seen more recently (with advocates of air power thinking that an opponent could be conquered, as opposed to just defeated, by bombing alone). Even setting aside personal and career-based considerations, some people simply find it difficult to accept that solutions other than those of which they can easily conceive might be the best ones (for their side, if not for the enemy).
> 
> ...



The qoute that really interested me was Truman's diary entry from July 18 1945. I must researchthis more because I find it amazing and criminal that he would have ignored a message about Japan seeking to surrender.


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## BAYLOR (Aug 9, 2015)

70 years ago today Nagasaki. Another grim anniversary .


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 9, 2015)

Ursa major said:


> I wonder if Eisenhower's view would have been the same if he'd have been in charge of, and responsible for, attacking Germany from the east, as opposed to the west.


Well, after expected initial reverses the Russians beat the Germans and without  Eisenhower in the West, the French might be ironically speaking Russian today. Prior to revolution posh Russians spoke French.


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## Ursa major (Aug 9, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Well, after expected initial reverses the Russians beat the Germans and without Eisenhower in the West, the French might be ironically speaking Russian today. Prior to revolution posh Russians spoke French.


Sorry to be pedantic, but this has nothing to do with the topic at all. Besides, it isn't exactly convincing, for 1) without US and UK help (in terms of supplies), the Russians would have had to rely entirely on their own resources; 2) without the allied threat in the west, Germany could have put all its efforts into fighting the Soviet Union, with a result that is hard to predict. The Russians running France would be, I suggest, one of the less likely outcomes.


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## Ursa major (Aug 9, 2015)

svalbard said:


> The qoute that really interested me was Truman's diary entry from July 18 1945. I must researchthis more because I find it amazing and criminal that he would have ignored a message about Japan seeking to surrender.


Would the US have accepted a German surrender while little or no German territory was under western allied occupation? I suspect not**.


** - Although what would have happened if the Soviet Union had been in the process of pushing past Berlin when the offer to the US and UK came, goodness only knows. And if the western allies had accepted it, would the Soviet forces have immediately stopped their advance?


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## BAYLOR (Aug 9, 2015)

Ursa major said:


> Would the US have accepted a German surrender while little or no German territory was under western allied occupation? I suspect not**.
> 
> 
> ** - Although what would have happened if the Soviet Union had been in the process of pushing past Berlin when the offer to the US and UK came, goodness only knows. And if the western allies had accepted it, would the Soviet forces have immediately stopped their advance?




Russia would taken all of Germany and put in a puppet regime.


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## Venusian Broon (Aug 9, 2015)

svalbard said:


> The qoute that really interested me was Truman's diary entry from July 18 1945. I must research this more because I find it amazing and criminal that he would have ignored a message about Japan seeking to surrender.



From memory, the US and the UK had already told Japan what it needed to do - unconditional surrender.  I believe the Japanese were trying to negotiate a surrender with 'strings attached' with the Russians and therefore was deemed unacceptable.

The allied leaders had at least remembered the end of WW1 where they had not totally defeated the German army, which helped lay in the foundations for resentment and anger that sparked WW2. They were steadfast that occupation of the enemies homelands and unconditional surrender was the only option available.

As for the Germans in WW2 - if they had unconditionally surrendered I actually guess they would have accepted it, even if the Western allies had little German land under occupation. Germany I believe had already been carved up into four zones by agreement of the big three in Yalta. As it stood, the US and British forces actually advanced much quicker into Germany than anyone thought possible - the US army reached deep into what became East Germany at the end - possibly because the Germans deliberately folded in the West to allow them to 'beat the Russians' to occupy the country. Hence there was quite a lot of rearrangement of occupying forces after the war ended to the pre-decided zones.

EDIT - and as part of this reorganisation, the Russian gave up territory that they had occupied - for example big parts of Austria, so this was a two-way process that seemed at least to follow agreements that the big 3 had shook hands on.


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 9, 2015)

Ursa major said:


> if the Soviet Union had been in the process of pushing past Berlin


They went far past Berlin. Look at Berlin vs East German border. They changed their minds about  Berlin and blockaded the other Allies.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki was mostly about the fact the Russians did so well in WWII. I don't deny they got a lot of help from USA and that the Italian, North African and Normandy Fronts made a huge difference. But in the West the impression is that USA practically won WWII with Plucky UK and British Empire. The Russian impact was noticed and it made for a lot of Gloom in USA after VE and before VJ.

Just as Sykes Picot was a malicious agreement by French, UK (and sop to Imperial Russia ) before end of WWI (1916), the Yalta Agreements were before end of WWII.  Then there was Potsdam, partitioning Vietnam. The USA (Truman?) wanted to redress the balance and send a strong message to Stalin. No way can Russian Advances in Western Europe not be part of the story of the A-Bomb.


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## Venusian Broon (Aug 9, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> They went far past Berlin. Look at Berlin vs East German border. They changed their minds about  Berlin and blockaded the other Allies.



I have to disagree with you Ray, The US army actually ended up well over the agreed borders of zones of control into what became East Germany by May '45. The Soviets also left a lot of Western Czechoslovakia alone and a large bit of Austria (West of Vienna) alone. Most of the territory of Germany was taken by the US and the UK. (I have a different map available that is more detailed, but doesn't put the final zones of control on.)

I guess the Soviets had invested a lot of their forces in capturing Berlin and faced the most stubborn resistance, hence the largest casualties and probably felt there was little need to push further West, despite what you're implicating. I suspect the oft quoted 'But Alexander went as far as Paris!' was probably an example of Stalin's sardonic humour. (Although I fully admit to not knowing whether this is the case)

I agree with you that there can be a degree of misinformation about 'who beat the Germans' in the West. If you were to simplify WW2 to it's broadest brushstroke it was The Eastern Front 1941-45.

Here:


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 9, 2015)

Venusian Broon said:


> I agree with you that there can be a degree of misinformation about 'who beat the Germans' in the West. If you were to simplify WW2 to it's broadest brushstroke it was The Eastern Front 1941-45.


*That's all I'm trying to say*, and obviously ALL of Berlin is well inside East. The Western Allies specifically pushed East as fast as they could once the German defence in the West collapsed. It was a bit of race


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## BAYLOR (Aug 9, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> *That's all I'm trying to say*, and obviously ALL of Berlin is well inside East. The Western Allies specifically pushed East as fast as they could once the German defence in the West collapsed. It was a bit of race




One wonders if the US and and Uk decided by design to let Russia have all the glory of taking Berlin . Along with the glory Russia took a lot casualties .


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 9, 2015)

Nagasaki bombed instead of Kyoto?


			
				BBC said:
			
		

> he was particularly emphatic in agreeing with my suggestion that if elimination was not done, the bitterness which would be caused by such a wanton act might make it impossible during the long post-war period to reconcile the Japanese to us in that area *rather than to the Russians*".
> Tensions that led to the Cold War were already brewing and the *last thing the Americans wanted to do was bolster the Communist cause in Asia.*
> That was when Nagasaki was added to the target list instead of Kyoto. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not military targets either.
> As we know today, hundreds of thousands of civilians, including women and children, were killed. And while Kyoto may have been the most famous cultural city, the other cities also had valuable assets.


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33755182

Also
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33839055
and
http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-33769566



> In reality, historians say he [Truman] gave the order to start using the new weapon only after about 3 August and he was not fully involved in detailed decisions.
> Prof Wellerstein says there is documentary evidence that the President was surprised by the devastation caused by the first bomb, especially that so many women and children had died, and the second and more powerful bomb - that hit Nagasaki - was dropped only three days later.
> That call came from the military director of the bomb project, General Leslie Groves, who led the Target Committee and lost the battle to keep Kyoto at the top of the list.
> He said in a letter dated 19 July that he wanted to use at least two and as many as four atomic bombs on Japan.


Note that it was Roosevelt that attended the Yalta Conference, non-USA folks might not realise the time line of Roosevelt dying, Truman becoming president and VE day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt#Last_days.2C_death_and_memorial

On April 12, 1945, Afternoon US Time Roosevelt died.
Truman succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945 (with no election).
VE day is a month later; the act of military surrender was signed on 7 May in Reims, France and on 8 May in Berlin, Germany.
July 1945 first successful Bomb test in USA

3rd August Truman Agrees to drop the Bombs. Military though to decide how many. Plans for  four ...
6th Hiroshima Bomb
7th or 8th Russians end Neutrality and make rapid progress attacking Japan on 8th so Japan War cabinet meeting is called for Morning of 9th (Japan Time), Build up since May, attack was inevitable.
9th Nagasaki Bomb, Russians estimated to be only 10 days from major gains in Mainland North Japan.
It's evident that the Japanese are discussing surrendering (Since morning of 9th August BEFORE 2nd Bomb dropped!) so 3rd and 4th bomb drops are cancelled.
On August 15 Japan agrees to surrender to USA (actually 14th in USA?), rather than have the Russians make further gains.
September 2 Japan signs surrender.
VJ day: August 15 is the official V-J Day for the UK, while the official U.S. commemoration is September 2
What ever about the the 1st bomb, the only reason for dropping the 2nd on the 9th can have been a message to Stalin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
(pro-section totally ignores Russians ending Neutrality and their invasion of the less well defended North)


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 9, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> et Russia have all the glory of taking Berlin . Along with the glory Russia took a lot casualties


I doubt at that stage Stalin cared how many:

Great Patriotic War


> *The battles on the Eastern Front constituted the largest military confrontation in history*. They were characterized by unprecedented ferocity, wholesale destruction, mass deportations, and immense loss of life variously due to combat, starvation, exposure, disease, and massacres. The Eastern Front, as the site of nearly all extermination camps, death marches, ghettos, and the majority of pogroms, was central to the Holocaust. *Of the estimated 70 million deaths attributed to World War II, over 30 million, many of them civilian, occurred on the Eastern Front*.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Patriotic_War#Casualties
Nearly 15 Million Soviet/Russian Civilians died prior to battle for Berlin.


> Over 11.4 million Soviet civilians within pre-1939 borders were killed, and another estimated 3.5 million civilians were killed in the annexed territories


Perhaps that's why Germans at that stage were surrendering in the West and Fighting in the East, was any Surrender actually going to be accepted in the East at that stage? 
Military losses by USSR alone were over 10Million on the Eastern Front. Much of that before Berlin.


> Axis troops who captured Red Army soldiers frequently shot them in the field or shipped them to concentration camps to die. Hitler's notorious Commissar Order called for Soviet political commissars, who were responsible for ensuring that Red Army units remained politically reliable, to be summarily shot when identified amongst captured troops.


It was inevitable that the Germans and Russians would fight without quarter by April and Early May 1945 till there was a complete Surrender.


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## Venusian Broon (Aug 9, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> One wonders if the US and and Uk decided by design to let Russia have all the glory of taking Berlin . Along with the glory Russia took a lot casualties .



Again from memory of filmed interviews, I do believe that there was an understanding in US/UK high command that Berlin was 'Soviet' (in the Soviet zone of control) and thus they hadn't planned to reach this objective - it was to be left to the Russians to capture. However many of the gung-ho US generals, finding that German resistance had for various reasons practically collapsed in the west started to get frustrated as they felt they could have reached Berlin from the west before the Soviets did (or perhaps at the same time and thus able to take part in the Battle for Berlin). However it all got a bit political at that point and there was some restraining of the more vigorous firebrands in the US army.


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## BAYLOR (Aug 9, 2015)

Venusian Broon said:


> Again from memory of filmed interviews, I do believe that there was an understanding in US/UK high command that Berlin was 'Soviet' (in the Soviet zone of control) and thus they hadn't planned to reach this objective - it was to be left to the Russians to capture. However many of the gung-ho US generals, finding that German resistance had for various reasons practically collapsed in the west started to get frustrated as they felt they could have reached Berlin from the west before the Soviets did (or perhaps at the same time and thus able to take part in the Battle for Berlin). However it all got a bit political at that point and there was some restraining of the more vigorous firebrands in the US army.



General Patton for example?


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## Ursa major (Aug 9, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> They went far past Berlin.


As VB has pointed out, the borders between the three** zones (UK, US, USSR) had been agreed long before the fighting was over and do not represent how successful or not those three countries' armed forces were in seizing German territory.


** - The French zones (in Berlin, in the rest of Germany and in Austria) were carved out of the British and American zones in those areas, which is why the Soviet zones look a lot larger once the four-party divisions were implemented (not to mention that the western allies had no share in any territories east of the Oder-Neisse line, which mostly went to Poland***).

*** - The Soviet Union kept the territories it had taken from Poland in September 1939 and lost in 1941 (and lost again in 1991, to Belarus, Lietuva and Ukraina).


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 9, 2015)

Ursa major said:


> the borders between the three** zones (UK, US, USSR) had been agreed long before the fighting was over and do not represent how successful or not those three countries' armed forces were in seizing German territory


Yes. Yalta etc. All of which was criminal and dishonest like 1916 Sykes-Picot, which is partly responsible for all the Middle East Troubles 1922 till now.


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## BAYLOR (Aug 31, 2015)

thaddeus6th said:


> Stayed out of this debate until now, because of the coverage on the news.
> 
> Lots about the people who died. Little on the context. As I understand it, more died in the bombing of Tokyo (conventional bombing). Nothing about the potential Japanese and Allied casualties if an invasion had occurred, which would have been horrendous.
> 
> Were the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a good thing? No. But were they the lesser of two evils? Yes.



One million Us casualties if we invaded.


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## Ray McCarthy (Aug 31, 2015)

BAYLOR said:


> One million Us casualties if we invaded.


Zero proof. Likely only a few 10s  thousand as the USA would have mounted a blockade till all the Japanese fighting the Russians who were 10 days away from major North Island Cities. That's why the Japanese surrendered to the USA.


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## BAYLOR (Aug 31, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Zero proof. Likely only a few 10s  thousand as the USA would have mounted a blockade till all the Japanese fighting the Russians who were 10 days away from major North Island Cities. That's why the Japanese surrendered to the USA.



The battle Okinawa gave us a hint of just what would have happened had we invaded the main Islands of Japan. The Us suffered 40,000 casualties and the Japanese over a 108,000.   if we'd invade the home islands of japan it would likely have been a whole lot worse.


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## steelyglint (Sep 1, 2015)

Without the bombs the Japanese would have fought against US invasion until the last man. When the invasion force overcame the defence and started moving inland they would be finding entire towns and villages of suicide victims. I seem to recall something about part of the Emperor's radio broadcast (a massive cultural shock in itself) being to prevent hara kiri. The way of life, saving face, etc., in the face of such a situation, left little option.

I might have stood behind those who suggested using the first one where the Japanese could see and appreciate the destructive force they faced becoming victims of, but detonated somewhere with a lower population. Of course, the question arises: would it be convincing enough? Seems they decided not.

.


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## Temperance (Sep 1, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Zero proof. Likely only a few 10s  thousand as the USA would have mounted a blockade till all the Japanese fighting the Russians who were 10 days away from major North Island Cities. That's why the Japanese surrendered to the USA.


Downfall by Richard B Frank gives a detailed breakdown of the Allied decision making process about invasion/blockade. There was no clinical blockade waiting for surrender, just millions dying of starvation and fire bombings that make Tokyo look pleasant. A single bombing raid which killed far more than both nukes.

Especially as the Soviets had no ability to invade the home islands.


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## Ray McCarthy (Sep 2, 2015)

Temperance said:


> Especially as the Soviets had no ability to invade the home islands.


That's simply untrue.


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## BAYLOR (Apr 22, 2016)

Ray McCarthy said:


> That's simply untrue.



Russia would have gotten on control of half of Japan, had they invaded.


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## Ray McCarthy (Apr 22, 2016)

BAYLOR said:


> would have gotten on control of half of Japan


Which I maintain was major factor in the decision to surrender to the USA.  Neither the Japanese nor Russians had forgotten the 1905 war and everything after that.


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## BAYLOR (Aug 7, 2016)

Today is the 71 anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.


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