Monday, August 11, 2008

Tis the season for the weenies to whine about the use

of the atomic bomb on Japan. "WE are the only nation mean enough to use it", "Look at all the poor people we killed with it", etc. ad bullcrap. An awful lot of these people seem to care nothing for the death toll an invasion would have brought(they also seem to write off what Japan had done in every country they stomped over, but that's another gripe), just that "WE are the only country that has been unfeeling enough to actually use one of these weapons!"

A year or so ago I ran across Downfall: the end of the Imperial Japanese empire. Interesting book; takes the information used to plan the invasion and updates it with stuff that had not been declassified until a few years ago. Short version: the Japanese had a lot more troops in reserve in the home islands than we knew, well-supplied, and a lot more aircraft held back. And since there are only a few places you can make a massive amphibious invasion, they had prepared/were working to upgrade an in-depth defense plan with prepared positions. All of which means the toll on Allied troops invading would have been much worse than calculated; and the toll on Japanese, military and- especially- civilian, far worse yet.

I realize for the serious 'No Nukes No Matter What' people it won't matter, but it does to a lot of others. Dropping the bomb was a big decision, and I'm glad we did. It ended the fighting sooner, with much lower casualties. And if a lot of boobs can't deal with that, that's too damn bad.


DJMooreTX said...

Then there's the evidence that there were factions of the Japanese High Command who were willing to go around the Emperor in order not to surrender, up to and including trying to steal the for- broadcast recording of his surrender speech.

With Fat Man and Little Boy in hand, it would have been the height of callous irresponsibility not to use them.

DJMooreTX said...

By the way, that speech did not include the word "surrender", but only referred to the "provisions of the joint declaration", ie, Potsdam. It was basically a "stop fighting" order, acknowledging the impracticality of continued resistance.

Hirohito also gave his rationale for starting the war: "...We declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to insure Japan's self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement." It's hard to reconcile that with his actions in China and in the Pacific, though.


Given the mindset apparent in that speech, written after Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the surrender was a very narrow thing indeed.

See translation here.

Keith said...

If the bombs had been ready a couple of years earlier, tens of millions of lives could have been saved!

The Ruhr and Berlin could have been levelled, precipetating a German collapse before Stalin had had a chance to advance so far into Europe.

Was it 20 Million deaths following on his orders in the area his forces occupied?

An earlier Japanese surrender under threat of nuking would have left Mao with less time to establish in China and left the nationalists (fascist scum that they were, they were less murderous than the reds) stronger and better able to contain Mao, who's forces did not fight the Japanese.

Mao and his criminal scum murdered about 75 Million.

Mao's and Stalin's successors continue their murdering in Tibet, East Turkestan, Nepal, Georgia, North Korea, the fiddlipines...

Windy Wilson said...

I'd never heard that before about Hirohito's surrender. It wasn't a surrender, it was a politician's apology. "I'm sorry if anyone took offense at our reasonable defensive measures taken at Pearl Harbor in 1941. . .

But, the document signed on the deck of the Mighty Mo was a Settlement Document to end all settlement documents.