Those are both excellent reviews, ironically published in leading right-wing newspapers, of two recent, by all accounts extremely harrowing books, which repeat the views that I and others have articulated here, and refute the rubbish spouted here by the apologists for atomic terror down to the last detail.Originally Posted by parentheses
Pity you can't. Pity that you can't make a morale case for your none existent alternative.
Can you tell me the monthly death toll for the conflict in the far east towards the end of the war?
It's a pity that you're an apologist for the rape of Nanking.
It's a pity that you're an apologist for the Japanese actions which were causing hundreds of thousands of deaths of civilians in the 1940's.
Pity that you don't seem to realise that blockade and conventional bombing was killing hundreds of thousands every month in Japan.
Pity you can't tell us why other people deserved to live less than those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Pity indeed that you can't make a single sentence of coherent valid argument.
Pity indeed.
Guess the Japanese should accepted defeat instead of dragging out the war with little regard to their military or civilian population. Many Japanese are alive today thanks to Trumans brave decision to force the issue and end the war.
Ah, I am glad you're back. Remember this:
How about here just for starters...
Yea that old one. We should thank the Brits from saving us from the Spanish Armada/ Napolean etc. It was English scum and shonens like you ...
Do you think it's morally acceptable to intentionally kill innocent people for no other reason than to save the lives of other innocent people?
A few more quotes from Paul Ham
Now the idea in the American narrative is that the bombs led to the prompt and unconditional surrender of Japan. Well firstly they didn't surrender unconditionally. Their sole condition was the retention of the emperor, which America accepted.PAUL HAM: He'd seen Okinawa. And one of his advisors said “we don't want a score of bloody Okinawas.” And the invasion plan was effectively shelved in early July.
So it wasn't a case of either the bomb or the invasion. They weren't going to go ahead with the invasion regardless of whether the bomb worked for the simple reason that they weren't going to tolerate the sorts of casualties that might be inflicted upon them. And they knew that country, the country was defeated.Lateline - 28/10/2011: Ham challenges role of atomic bomb in WWIISo what is the point of the bomb? Well you are reduced to believing or not believing what they said at the Interim Committee and the Target Committee, which is “we want to shock them into submission by, with a huge show of our power.” And Hiroshima and Nagasaki and two other cities were preserved precisely for that reason, as pristine targets. There were very few other cities still standing, they were the only two targets left. And if you read the book you'll realise just how chilling this process is of preserving these cities for the bomb so that we could show off, so that we could show off the power of the weapon to the world.
Did you miss the part where the one soul spoke of the difference between the words "defeat" and "surrender"? Apparently not. Since they were defeated well before the invasion of Okinawa, even, but they didn't surrender.
And helps if the writer would get the facts correct:
The bombs were dropped - and ignored so far as the government was concerned. Three days later, on August 8, Stalin declared war on Japan. Russian troops entered Manchuria, aiming to reach Japan itself.
Nagasaki was not bombed until after the Soviets began their invasion of Manchuria, so he's got the timing wrong.
And for more dishonesty:
Only then did the Emperor intervene and order his sobbing Chief Ministers to make peace, ‘to bear the unbearable and tolerate the intolerable’. He broadcast to the nation: ‘The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’. He did not use the word surrender at any point. His order to the armed forces mentioned the Soviets’ invasion but not the atom bombs as a reason to stop fighting.
Why did the war situation not develop to Japan's advantage? From that same recorded speech:
But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone--the gallant fighting of our military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of out servants of the State and the devoted service of our 100,000,000 people--the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.
Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
No mention of the Soviets at all.
For yet more dishonesty:
including Eisenhower and McArthur. All said afterwards it was ‘militarily unnecessary’.
And yet MacArthur said that the invasion of Japan would not fail. Which is two points, since he wanted invasion over the bomb, and if the invasion was shelved, that would be news to MacArthur, since he never once spoke or wrote of the same having occurred. And by the way, for how dim some of you are, when the Chinese intervened in Korea, MacArthur proposed dropping a-bombs on the five major Chinese cities. How's that for sparing the innocents?
And I'd really love someone to post the evidence for this claim:
Beneath these justifications there was another, more emotive, reason for the bomb. Americans wanted revenge for Pearl Harbor and this was it.
And Mr. Ham is otherwise largely a nobody in terms of history:
Paul Ham - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
He's an expert? In economics and economic history. And he's written a whopping total of three books.
His name pulls up 365,000 Google search results.
And here is the fatal flaw in his argument:
By early 1945, US air superiority and its naval blockade had so strangled Japan’s economy and war machine that the White House and the Pentagon had ruled out a land invasion as, in just months, an economically stricken Tokyo would have been forced to surrender.
You can't "force" anyone to surrender. They have to make that decision on their own. And they might decide to crash dive your ships instead.
For even yet more lies from this loon:
A censorship regime “every bit as rigorous as totalitarian Japan’s”, says Ham, was used to suppress reports of subsequent deaths and gross disfigurements from radiation poisoning.
Right, and so Hersey's Hiroshima proves the point. For the nitwits who feed on these lies:
Hiroshima is the title of a magazine article written by Pulitzer winner John Hersey that appeared in The New Yorker's issue for August 31, 1946, one year after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, at 8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945. The article was soon made into a book.
Note the date. And the book has as many stories as one needs to know the effect of the bombs. You can start and end with the Japanese soldiers that Father Kleinsorge saw, whose eyes had literally melted down their faces.
Lastly, how about some confirmation bias:
He said that he chose this topic because ‘I have always felt that there is something wrong with American narratives that attempt to justify the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in a nuclear holocaust.’
So, he always felt...And so no surprise that he claims to have found what he's been looking for all along.
Almost forgot, but more "innocents" dying in war, from this loon's work:
Through the eyes of 80 survivors, from 12-year-olds forced to work in war factories ...
He says, forced. They may have felt it their duty to the Emperor and the nation. And don't get me wrong, I am not crediting 12 years old with consent here. But their parents, most of them, probably did consent, because that was the way they were raised and taught. As I've said, they were the closest we've ever come to a nation in arms. And using 12 year olds to make those arms kinda helps make the point.
Edited to add: The 12 year olds make another point as well. Willingness to surrender, since according to even Mercurial, we can bomb the bejebus out of war factories, where those 12 year olds are working. So how willing were they to surrender, when they put their 12 year olds in harm's way? I don't suppose that the ham named Ham ever asked that question either, though it's obvious from what he relates.
And the bit about a communist Japan, well, hardly. The Japanese weren't entirely dim and they likely rather knew that the Soviets amphibious capacity was nil. So there goes any invasion.
The so-called experts, usually pundits instead, otherwise don't know much. Take one of Ham's supporters:
Japan lost nearly all of its 117,000 troops defending Okinawa in June; after that, kamikaze attacks on American naval vessels abated.
The kamikaze attack abated because Japan was saving them to attack the troop transports on any invasion. This nitwit seems to imply that the Japanese simply gave up. No. No point in wasting planes against ships that aren't carrying the invasion force.
This is also false as well:
After the Battle of the Philippine Sea in 1944, the once-formidable Japanese fleet was no more, except for vessels tethered in home ports.
Someone might want to remind this loon of the Battle off Samar and the Battle of Surigao Strait.
And what was shelved was the US plans to invade China as well, since recall, the Japanese had their war in China. That was shelved, as being viewed as a diversion.
Here are, by the way, the Japanese troop dispositions near the end:
As is obvious, that's Honshu. Here's Kyushu to the south:
That's August 18, 1945, for both locales. For how good or not, our intelligence, etc., was, our estimate of their troop dispositions on Kyushu:
And for what "haters" like the loon Ham always fail to mention:
In an effort to minimize the losses among the civilian population and to counteract false propaganda concerning Allied aims spread by the Japanese High Command, the Twentieth Air Force and the Far East Air Forces on 28 July began dropping warning leaflets to announce seventy-two hours in advance the names of the cities marked for destruction. In addition to notifying all civilians to flee to safety, the leaflets advised them to "restore peace by demanding new and good leaders who will end the war."
Yeah, so in that "racial war" (the loon Ham's phrase) wherein we intended to have our "revenge", we dropped warning pamphlets to give them 72 hours notice, so they might find safety, as we simply wished to destroy their capacity to make war, and along the way, by doing that, demonstrating to them that we have the power to ensure their prompt and utter destruction if need be.
And now to end with what I said above, this loon is lying through his back teeth, the invasion being shelved would be news to MacArthur. Here:
Reports of General MacArthur: The Campaigns of MacArthur in the Pacific, Volume I
The same includes:
The end of the war in Europe had not only released additional ground, air, and naval forces for the war against Japan but it had also enabled the Soviet Union to mass its forces for an attack upon Manchuria and northern China. The veteran armies of General MacArthur were poised and ready for an invasion of Kyushu and Honshu. The warning to surrender or be destroyed had not been composed of idle words. Stark and ruinous defeat was already a frightening certainty for the Japanese.
No report by MacArthur or his staff that the invasion plans were shelved until after the Japanese surrendered by accepting Potsdam.
And dimwits, again, you've a pathetically false morality, since you single out the a-bomb as some special evil. Again, it isn't. From that same work:
Never before in history had one nation been the target of such concentrated air power. (Plate No. 130) In the last fifteen days of the war, the Fifth and Seventh Air Forces flew 6,372 sorties against Kyushu alone. Forty-nine per cent of this devastating effort was directed at manufacturing areas and docks. The remaining percentage was divided among enemy shipping, air installations, and lines of communication. Thus, with a deafening crescendo of blasting bombs, the Far East Air Forces culminated their blows against Japan. During the last seven and one-half months of the war their planes had destroyed or badly damaged 2,846,932 tons of shipping and 1,375 enemy aircraft, dropped 100,000 tons of bombs, and flown over 150,000 sorties.26
I would imagine that all that killed rather more humans than Fat Man and Little Boy.
And nitwits:
Bombing and blockade without invasion MacArthur found to be the least acceptable alternative. Such a strategy "would prolong the war indefinitely," and it assumed that the Japanese could be subdued by air power alone "in spite of its demonstrated failure in Europe."
So may not have been a fan of the bomb, but that might be because of what appears right above. He may not have understood the bomb(s). May have also wanted yet more glory. Who can say? I can't, but I know that he didn't shelve any invasion plans until after the surrender.
Last edited by yobosayo; 20th August 2012 at 07:53 AM.
Do I believe it was morally acceptable to use the atom bombs? Yes.
1) it was a logical and reasonable extension of the strategic bombing campaign. All sides had either through intention or consequence attacked civilian ares. It's arguable in a total war for national survival - that there's no such thing as a civilian. All that was different between the thousand plane raids where at the end of the war, only 20% of bombs directed, actually landed within 1/2 a mile of its aim point.
The only thing that was markedly different was the destruction from a singe weapon. Radioactive fallout was kept to a minimum (though not completely eliminated) due to the bombs being airburst initiation.
100,000 people burnt to death in Tokyo in one night. That's what people don't appreciate - if Atom bombs were not used, even not allowing for an invasion which would have been a complete bloodbath, given what happened during the pacific campaign and the mass civilian suicides on Okinawa - the war would have still been persecuted with terribly destructive conventional bombing and starvation. Months or a year.
2)Then you actually have the civilians in japanese occupied territories of which in china alone, 100,000 were dying every month from starvation and IJA barbarity. The question I've asked in this thread is why, did other people deserve to live less than others? Or do more than than others?
A korean civilian and a Japanese one? Chinese? British? Dutch?
My position is that the atom bombs ended the war many months earlier than would have otherwise been possible. Japan was completely isolated, poised to repel an invasion from an overwhelming force, yet no surrender was forth coming, regardless of a soviet land grab of Manchuria. Why exactly the Japan would have thought that unconditional surrender was somehow acceptable - despite Sato stating repeatedly that nothing else was on the table, just because the soviets of all people decided to grab Manchuria has some reasoning problems.
The bombs, saved lives.
And it is telling, that nobody has come up with what they think is a morally acceptable way to persecute the way from the allied side.
I'm sorry, but there is no morally acceptable reason for the use of a nuclear weapon on a civilian target. There never has been and there never will. Would it have been acceptable for the US to drop a nuclear weapon on North Korea, when there was up to a million Chinese soldiers coming across the Korean boarder in 1950. Hundereds of thousands of civilians and military personnel's lives would have been saved and the war would have ended sooner. Surely this action would have been morally acceptable. How about taking out Hanoi with a nuclear weapon during the Vietnam war. Same potential result, hundreds of thousands of lives saved and a war ended quickly in which an enemy that would have never given up, submits due to the threat of complete annihilation. Do these arguments for the use of a nuclear weapon sound familiar?
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