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Old 10-18-2006, 08:46 AM   #80
Mace MacLeod
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TK, here's some reading for you in your spare time, just so you have a general idea who the US and western allies were fighting in the pacific theatre:

The political, military and social context of A-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in no way resembles this world situation today in any way, shape or form. First, a conventional military invasion of the Japanese Home Islands would have resulted in far more civilian casualties than the bombings. Japan was prepared to fight down to the last man, woman and child to defend the Emperor, and defeat was still considered unthinkable right up to the very end. Projected US casualties were 500,000 to 1,000,000 for an invasion. Totenkoph mentions Okinawa--this is a very small taste of what awaited an army trying to invade Japan. General Ushijima knew that his men on Okinawa were doomed and that it was only a matter of time before they were wiped out, but that didn't stop them from fighting to the last and taking as many Americans with them as possible.

Secondly, the A-bomb blasts were also an announcement to the USSR, who the western allies knew weren't going to be friends for long after the fall of Berlin and Tokyo. Stalin is right up there with Hitler in the "All-time Horrible People" list, and where the western armies actually did liberate conquered countries and territories, the Soviets just kept the areas for themselves. Nowhere was this more true than Poland, which was the country the UK, France et al declared war on Germany to save, remember? How many more millions of people died in the Soviet Union? We'll probably never know.

Finally, while I do feel sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I also feel sympathy for the millions of Chinese, Philipino, Malasian, Burmese, Korean and Thai civilians slaughtered by Imperial Japan. And TK, if you think that American detention camps were inhumane, maybe you should talk to a few of my family members who were captured and thrown into Japanese POW camps. Oh wait, you can't talk to them, because they were beaten, starved and tortured to death. Seriously, you need to read a few history books to remind yourself just who we were fighting and why.

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