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Censored Nagasaki Bomb Story Found
EccentricAnomaly writes "In 1945 journalist George Weller snuck past the American occupying forces and became the first American Journalist to see the devastation left by the atomic bomb that fell on Nagasaki. His story infuriated MacArthur, who had it quashed. The Japanese paper, Mainichi, has now published Weller's account. CNN has a story discussing how it was found." From the Mainichi article: "As one whittles away at embroidery and checks the stories, the impression grows that the atomic bomb is a tremendous, but not a peculiar weapon. The Japanese have heard the legend from American radio that the ground preserves deadly irradiation. But hours of walking amid the ruins where the odor of decaying flesh is still strong produces in this writer nausea, but no sign or burns or debilitation."
"The atomic bomb may be classified as a weapon capable of being used indiscriminately, but its use in Nagasaki was selective and proper and as merciful as such a gigantic force could be expected to be."
Certainly disagree with the choice of words here. Selective and proper ? Maybe. Merciful ? definitely not !
-- Ravi
And like today people are prepared to measure moral conduct on a relative scale. Sure we torture people...but they are bad people and we are good so that makes it OK. This story shows that the world is a better place with full disclosure. How can one make intelligent policy decisions if with an awareness of conscequences.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
I think a better question would be "Why didn't the Japanese surrender immediately after Hiroshima?"
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Don't you think it's Ironic that a Hammer was used to bang something?
It's not Ironic. A bomb that is designed to be dropped from altitude being dropped from an Airplane is... logical.
I know Irony is a hard thing to grasp, but let's put forth some effort, shall we?
Irony would be something like, "They spent years designing their plane for safety during takeoff, but never thought to do something to stop it from crashing during landing."
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"Qua!?"
we dropped it within a mile of a prisoner of war camp, although I suppose it makes sense when combined with the knowledge that the pow camp existed so close to many manufacturing plants. Sense that it may make, I still wouldn't want to be the guy to decide to drop an atom bomb within a mile of an allied pow camp.
Has to be asked- was it entirely a coincidence that the camp was situated near the manufacturing facilities?
I doubt it; it seems a logical tactic to discourage bombing of the most likely targets. If so, the Japanese were likely not the first, and certainly not the last to use prisoners as hostages in this manner.
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While slightly OT, the Dresden bombings was the biggest _blind and useless_ destruction during WWII, Hiroshima and Nagasaki included.
Why? Simple. While the japan A-bomb attacks can be justified in some twisted way by the reasoning that it forced Japan to capitulate, the Dresden bombings' target was to destroy the railway infrastructure nearby. The bombings killed a lot of people there and the railway was operating at full capacity just 3 days after the attack.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Sense that it may make, I still wouldn't want to be the guy to decide to drop an atom bomb within a mile of an allied pow camp.
It's really easier than you think - it's all about dilution of responsibility. During the Vietnam War someone noted that while in theory nobody would accept burning children alive, some children are being burnt alive due to decisions made in a long chain of command where everyone is responsible for just a tiny bit of the whole process - from workers in plant making napalm bombs, to the pilot who is "just following orders", to Robert McNamara, who deals just with abstract figures, maps, tables etc. So you would be just the guy who draws an arrow on the map. Or the guy who is just pressing the button. In your own conscience, you would feel 100% innocent.
If i had any mod points and hadn't already commented I would have totally modded you up for that comment.
.. for that matter anyone charging off to war or helping 'the machine' should give a long hard thought to that statement.
very well put and it is a thought that perhaps more americans charging off to war in hopes of financing college should think of
If? The United States "conventionally" bombed Japan mercilessly during WW2. Read up on the bio of Curtis LeMay to get a sense of what that was all about. (He was the Strategic Air Command General who ordered and executed the firebombing of Tokyo, which destroyed about half of Tokyo, a city the size of New York, in one night.)
Cheers,
Richard
It certainly should never have been used on a civilian target , At-least this quash shows that perhaps they had a little shame about it
I don't know that 'shame' enters into it when dealing with the military. My best guess is that they figured they had a job to do, realised the tactical advantage atomic weapons would bring, and realised that an adverse public reaction would possibly rob them of this advantage.
Quite frankly, I'd assume that the high-ups in the US military saw the general public as little more than a hindrance to their objectives; at best, viewed in a patronising, paternalistic manner.
That having been said, was the target bombed because it was civilian, or was it bombed because of its manufacturing facilities?
Of course, the irony is that, whilst the US military may have been zealous in concealing unpalatable information, the Japanese regime were 100 times worse, and continue to deny or obfuscate their actions during WWII to this day.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
They're taking the effort to censor right now reports and imagery from Iraq right, of death, injuries and suffering to locals and americans alike, even coffins returning to America, so clearly someone fears that allowing this full publicity in the US would have some significant effects...
sudo ergo sum
Showing the effects of just about any weapon of war will sicken a normal person. And yet, somehow, we keep on managing to figure out ways to dehumanize opponents enough to justify in our minds waging war on them.
Japan got what they had coming to them. Looking at the effects of the atomic bombings in isolation and going "Oh, how awful" is worthless. You have to look at the whole war and take actions like the atomic bombings in the context of the time.
I live in Japan currently, my wife is Japanese and my children are half-Japanese (I am American). I enjoy Japan and I like the Japanese people. It's hard to imagine now how a war like WWII could have been fought by them.
My landlord, at 80+, was in the Army and served during WWII. He's a nice old man who likes to garden and play with my kids. I've never had a conversation with him about what he did during the war though it wouldn't surprise me if he had been running around with a bayonet through Nanking or poking POWs along the Bataan trail. It was what you did at that time and somehow there is a collective insanity that sweeps men up and gives them license to run amok.
My grandfather drove landing boats in the Pacific during WWII. He never talked much about it, but my grandmother told me he used to wake up in cold sweats in the middle of the night after he got back. I knew other men from his generation who had been to war and must have been through and done terrible things. Yet they came back and went back to normal lives and did normal things and we sat and ate dinner with them. And we, as a society, condoned what they had done and dreamed up ways to kill more people faster and easier while still being concerned about what kind of car to drive and what kind of school the kids should go to.
Death comes to us one at a time. Each life lost is a tragedy. Atomic weapons changes these tragedies into statistics but make no mistake, each death is still a tragedy. And each life lost to a bullet is just as much a tragedy as one lost to a nuke. War is terrible and destructive and to be avoided. Let's not pretend that some ways of making war are better than others.
They would'nt have agreed to an unconditionnal surrender without the bomb.
They would, however, have agreed to a conditional surrender, which included, for example, keeping their emperor as head of state.
Funny thing, they got to have their conditions in the end anyway. Therefore the bomb was really useless as far as Japan is concerned. It was dropped for other reasons.
Disobeying orders in war time can get you shot. If I where to be ordered to kill someone else (an enemy) or get shot myself I know what I would choose.
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There is a difference between media making us aware of something we should know about, and media making us obssessed with something that is going to make it money.
Too often media focusses on the latter, and we wring our hands about the deaths of 5 in location X, while ignoring the deaths of 5 million in location Y.
When it comes to the deaths of people, Math Matters. Just because something pulls at our heart strings does not make it a a significant effect. Yes, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were bad and the victims suffered terribly, but they were a drop in a huge bucket of human misery that resulted from that war. And there were far larger atrocities that were glossed over completely.
Starvation, for example, is probably a worse way to go than radiation sickness. And when things go bad, it often happens by the 10's of millions, not 10's of thousands.
We should have just bombed the entire country into the stone age with conventional weapons, and then invaded. Sure, several times as many Japanese civilians (and 100K+ more Allied soldiers) would have been killed that way, but at least we wouldn't have used nukes.
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America always has been, and still is, nothing more than an overgrown bully.
How do you explain Omaha Beach as the action of nothing more than an overgrown bully?
Or for that matter, US intervention in WWI?
Or when the US came to the aid of South Korea when it was invaded by Communist armies?
I look around the world, and I see a lot of dead Americans buried in a lot of graves on foreign soil, and I'm afraid I don't see how most of those dead could possibly be construed as the result of the actions of nothing more than an overgrown bully.
Perhaps you could explain this to me.
The Former Soviet Union used to have a technical word, called, 'Neutral.' 'Neutral' was anyone who could not possibly hurt the Soviet Union.
Nations like Hungary and Czechoslovakia?
The Rest of the World will not deal with our stupidy much longer.
I'm more concerned about having to deal with yours.
I can't believe they call it an "atomic attack"
Yeah! They should have called it a "kitten parade"! Or possibly a "neutron-assisted aliveness readjustment"! Or a "celebration of freedom"!
I like "kitten parade" best.
You _do_ realize that it was, actually, an attack? Using an atomic weapon? Hence 'atomic attack'? With no big evil liberal conspiracy? If they'd called it an 'unneccessary atomic attack on a civilian target' _that_ might have been slanted. Just referring to 'the U.S. atomic attack' is simply a handy way of, well, referring to the U.S. atomic attack.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
The Museum in Hiroshima holds that 40,000 of the Hiroshima victims were POWs - but that they were POWs from Asia, rather than European or US.
Of the 5 shortlisted targets for the two bombs, none of them would have been particularly free from collateral damage, however.
What's more interesting is the whole question of whether the atomic attacks were necessary to end tha war - I shall say no more on this here but I invite all readers to look into it - it wasn't as easily justified as you may think.
In your own conscience, you would feel 100% innocent.
And you would be lying to yourself. The guy who draws the arrow is as guilty as the guy who presses the button, who is as guilty as the guy who gives the order, and so on.
I agree that that's the way people rationalise it to themselves, but convincing yourself that you're 100% innocent doesn't make it true.
Of course, were I ever to find myself in the same situation, doubtless I would act in the same way; I'm not saying I'm any better. We're all human in the end.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
To know why Japan surrendered to the US, you have to know the following things:
- How many Japanse soldier were situated in China: hundreds of thousends.
- How many Russian divisions were about to engage the Japanse army in China: 3
- Was the *smallest* russian division bigger or smaller than the complete Japanese presence in China: Bigger
- Didn't the Russian have far better equipment than the Japanese: Yes, the Russians had just fought a war against Germany, the Japanese had fought against peasants.
- What would Russia have done after they would have annihilated the Japanese forces in China: Figure that one out for yourself.
The Top Brass have a clue.
The Administration doesn't.
The army gets their orders from untrained civilians (in this case). They knew Iraq was a bad idea and being poorly planned, but they took their orders and executed them like good soldiers ought to.
And before you blame them for following stupid orders blindly, the people who are truly at fault are the US citizens for willfully putting such incompetence in charge of such a powerful weapon.
is largely misplaced.
The Japanese occupied China for 12 years. In just one incident, they slaughtered more than a quarter of a million Chinese in retaliation for the Doolittle raid on Japan. Thousands of prisoners were abused, tortured and murdered by the Japanese. They performed experiments with chemical and biological weapons on living people. Chinese are still being injured by leftover stocks of Japanese chemical weapons, yet the Japanese still refuse to take responsibility for what they did.
While the nuclear strikes were terrible things, when one remembers the brutality and sheer animalistic behaviour of the Japanese, it's hard to not think "what goes around, comes around". The Japanese people were treated a hell of a lot better after their surrender than any of the peoples they conquered.
Anyone who thinks the nuclear weapons used in Japan were the horrors of that war need to spend a bit more time reading history and a bit less time trying to get themselves read on Slashdot.
Go read up on the firebombing of Japanese cities, or European cities.
The attack on Tokyo killed far more people, destroyed far more of the city than both of the nuclear weapons. There's little evidence to suggest that radioactivity has caused any more deaths in the last 60 years than the release of toxins in normal fires did in other cities. Cancer clusters just are easier to track.
Even ignoring the fact that it stopped the war early, the use of the nuclear weapons both saved American lives, and saved the lives of countless Japanese civilians who would've been killed in the firestorm that followed a mass bombing of those cities.
War is ugly. Spend a little time learning about weapons systems over the last 500 years, learn about their effects, both immediate and long term before passing judgement. Don't mistakenly assume efficiency at killing equates to the level of inhumanity. And definitely don't base your idea of what these wars were like on a few individual-oriented movies like Saving Private Ryan. Wars for the last hundred years were based on the concept of impersonal massive destruction, most of it far more horrifying than a nuclear blast.
Dresden would have been over run by the Russians,
There's the truth of it, by the time time Dresden happened, Germany had become a political football. The focus had shifted from winning the war, to beating the Russians. Under this time pressure, some slighly unethical decisions were made.
Inflicting unnecessary harm on another country always comes back to bite you in the ass, even when they are "paying the price".
Germany paid the price after WWI, and that basically led to WWII.
It is MUCH stickier than that.
Folks, war is not a simple thing, and trying to make it sound simple is foolish. In war, there are things that happen that undeniably should not--I won't justify that. But there are too many people that question things that a) can't be changed and b) try to make all war seem evil.
A) is not so bad, as we can learn from past mistakes--and I think that the military would avoid using nuclear weapons (talking about US military, as well as European militaries) at all costs. There can be, however, a point beyond which it is no use to travel in your inspection of the past.
B) is foolish in the extreme. I had a coworker who, at one point, stated that she felt ALL war was wrong, and there was no point at which it would be justified to fight a war. This is foolish. At some point (and what point that is is debatable) there comes a time where if you do not fight, you allow innocent civilians to be slaughtered by an enemy who will torture and rape and abuse, just because the enemy has the ability to do so (I don't think that the majority of us would have liked it if Nazi Germany had won). In the case of WWII, if no one had opposed Hitler, then we still would have had concentration camps and the Holocaust. I don't think that appeals to most of us.
Does that justify, then, the use of nuclear weapons? I don't know. I do know, however, that there is NO way that you can ever be certain that if we hadn't done that that the Japanese (at that time) wouldn't have ended up winning the war. Maybe we would have had to use the nuclear bomb, but instead of hitting Japan, an enemy-occupied US city (possible). From a military standpoint, you always stop the enemy before they take your land. Especially when it is a war across oceans, where if Japan had taken and held Hawaii, it would have given them a major advantage.
So, "just following orders" is more complicated than you seem to think. That's why we aren't in the military (or I assume you are not). I, at the very least, would want to know why I should storm a particular hill or destroy a particular area. Sometimes an action may seem odd, or even wrong, but in the interest of winning a war, it may be absolutely essential. Without knowing the entire picture, however, you can't always be certain that an action is not the best thing. I'm not talking about rape or abuse or defying the Geneva conventions (those are always wrong, and then the soldier should take the moral ground and refuse, knowing that the senior officer might just have him severely punished (and in some cases killed), but defying the orders all the same), but about taking a village or bombing a particular target. So while I agree that there are some situations and actions that are extremely hard to justify (rape is never justified in my mind), don't be quick to judge a soldier's defense that he was just following orders. If the Milgram studies taught us anything it was that authority is more powerful than we tend to think, and that most people will obey orders when asked to do something the would never do on their own (shocking someone with a supposedly lethal charge)--just because they were told to do it by someone with authority (experimenter). Think about it a little more before you discount that particular defense!
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
First British Bombing raid on Berlin: 23 Aug 1940
First German Bombing raid on London: 7 September 1940
They Japanese were big on forced labor camps. Given this, I'd say there is a pretty obvious reason for the camp to be located near manufacturing facilities.
Why?
Nuclear myths
"Always look on the bright side of life."
That link says some pretty bizarre things. Instead of one 20 megaton warhead, we are supposed to take comfort that MIRVs carry a dozen warheads of "only" 300 kilotons and "therefore" the cities wouldn't really be destroyed. According to Wikipedia, the Nagasaki bomb was a whole whopping TWENTY kilotons. So call me crazy but I figure a MIRV would effectively destroy a metropolis.
Remember, nothing will work. CARS newer than the early seventies won't work. The EMF will take out everything solid-state. In WWII electronics meant tubes and cars were mechanical. Without an intrastructure, will offshore oil rigs have a port to unload in? Will there be oil refining? How will it get transported and distributed? Even if you have a nuke plant outside of town and can string some distribution back up, will even a nuke plant run forever without lubrication or is beef tallow adequate?
A person better hope oil gets distributed because, even with the die-off, those cans in the grocery store won't last long. And plows and combines don't run on hay. How many farmers _have_ work horses (did you know there are differences between riding horses and plow horses?), much less have the equipment and knowledge and two-bottom plow to hitch them up to?
It is tempting to say that we would only slip back to the Romans without oil and electricity but we would still have to relearn how to create the intense fire in a primitive iron foundry.
And there would still be the sticky little problem of overpopulation. Tribes _are_ a social organization. Tribes are not a post-war state of anarchy. And according to my old anthropology book even in established hunter and gather societies:
"Equipped with knowledge of virtually every edible plant and with effective means of exploiting most vegetables and animals, population density varied according to the abundance of resources. It ranged from one person per square mile--and rarely more than this--to one person per 50 to 100 square miles." (Anthropology Today, CRM, 1971)
Do the math of what the first few years of a post-nuke world would be like without an infrastructure for gas and electricity.
In the main, it really needs to be said that survivalists are losers. They are so often people who are marginalized and fantasize that if society were only shattered, they would have the opportunity to rise to the top. Because society hasn't valued them, they dismiss the importance of society. But instead of some noble savage fantasy, a post-nuke world would more likely offer them the opportunity to club a widow to steal the last can of spaghettios from her children.
I don't necessarily see how "all war is evil" necessarily equates to "we must never go to war." I'm sorry, but all war is evil. But sometimes, if there are no other viable alternatives, we have to deal with that necessary evil. Try to avoid war at almost all costs...but sometimes it is necessary to step up to the plate. But there's no use in glorifying war or trying to make it sound better than it is; war is hell. People die. Civilians and soldiers. Teenagers will be screaming for their mother as they try to keep their guts from spilling out. Civilians will be burnt alive or killed by shrapnel. Children will see their parents cut down in front of their eyes. War is an evil act. Period. But in very specific instances, it does do some good. Sometimes evil acts have that effect. That doesn't make them less evil.
This, of course, is why people decided that full-blown pacifism is the only way - because once a cycle of violence starts ever step simply escalates and becomes "justified" by the previous atrocities.
Now, granted, the Japanese culture of war was *extremely* harsh and the atrocities commited were extreme. But that doesn't make other atrocities okay.
War is about the demonization of the enemy - the psychology that makes a Japanese soldier feel okay about (horribly) torturing someone to death to maintain order in a camp is exactly the same as the one that lets someone feel okay about killing (horribly) tens of thousand of civilians in an attempt to force an opponent into surrender. War is a nasty, violent, terrible thing and glorifying it only leads to more atrocities - no matter how bad your enemy is.
No, the reason is that publishing photos of hundreds of coffins containing dead American soldiers will make the reality of what is happening 'hit home' to the America public --- death of thousands of Americans will no longer be just some abstract number, it will suddenly seem much more real, and it won't seem so much like the US is "kicking ass" over there, as is currently the perception. So there is absolutely no doubt that publishing pictures of hundreds of coffins would cause support for the war to plummet quickly (and almost certainly would have cost Bush his re-election).
So true -- and in general, the point that people take the nuclear weapons as something completely distinct from "strategic" bombing campaigns, on both sides of the war, is ever so appropriate to make. By the time we got to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki moment, those were natural extensions of the logic of those campaigns. Truman (one of my least favorite Presidents) had authorized the use of the bombs as soon as they'd work, and they were used without another decision on his part basically. For us to look back and deal with them alone has to be deeply wrong.
That doesn't mean there isn't something to be learned, though, or that we should accept the rationale that you offer for why they "worked" even on those "logic of the war" terms without scrutiny.
Even ignoring the fact that it stopped the war early, the use of the nuclear weapons both saved American lives, and saved the lives of countless Japanese civilians who would've been killed in the firestorm that followed a mass bombing of those cities.
And now we're off in the land of wishfully-accepted wisdom, positing possible events and their potential consequences. This line of thinking is certainly out there, it's worth thinking about -- and it's exactly where people who want not to deal with the morality of those bombs would like us all to come to a full stop.
Unfortunately "it stopped the war earlier and saved lives on both sides" asks us to accept that those arguments are true when they're essentially speculative. There was very real debate within the US's own armed forces about the potential costs of an invasion. There were different plans among the different services for how the end could come with Japan. They disagreed about what to do, and to suggest that there was a clear answer is a lie. To lump all that together and say "Okay, but it worked because the war didn't go any longer" avoids several questions -- "Why not drop the first bombs somewhere other than on a densely-populated city?" and so on -- and can amount to self-censorship that's just about to that head-in-the-sand point by now.
For one example: When the Smithsonian exhibit around the Enola Gay got neutered in the 1990s, one of the suggested additions to the exhibit, supposedly for "balance," was a display with a purple heart and a (quite high) estimate of the number of Purple Hearts that were prevented by the bombings. Some pretty major right wing influences, stirred up partly by "Air Force" magazine (which is a trade publication largely for purchasers of modern air weapons), wanted those fictional body counts included in the exhibit. Alas, the good folks at the museum are not especially fond of the idea of displaying fictional Purple Hearts. Partly, you know, they feel a responsibility not to insult those who got the real thing. Partly they just don't want to make things up to put on display -- and the proposed revisions weren't to be attributed to any particular primary source, they were meant to be in the neutral narrative voice of the exhibition's information panels. They chose to simply display the plane with almost no exhibit at all. Just a shiny fuselage.
Second example, and the one that horrifies me: Chester Nimitz, judging by both remarks of his own in October of 1945 and by comments of his widow, regretted the bombs horribly.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I do that. Regularly. I consider it a quality I'm proud of.
Forgotten history is doomed to repeat itself. The USS Arizona, if memory serves, is one of the most popular tourist magnets for Japanese tourists. Why aren't either hypocenter of the atomic bombs detonations a destination for Americans? The Japanese seem keen to remember their lessons.
Deciding that any race is worth more, or less, than another is a quality I never wish to have. Do you really think the US has the high road by comparing the slaughter of 2400 volunteer servicemen to the murder of nearly a quarter of a million women, children and old men in Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Do you honestly expect me to think that it takes 100 Japanese lives to make up for a single American? Or do I add up all the atrocities committed by the Japanese soldiers and then decide how many Germans to slaughter to compensate for Nazi atrocities?
This, of course, is why people decided that full-blown pacifism is the only way - because once a cycle of violence starts ever step simply escalates and becomes "justified" by the previous atrocities.
... oh maybe 3 months between 6th and 7th grade.
And I think that lasted for about
The first culture that goes completely "pacifist" will be run over by one that doesn't believe in their ideals. While that might seem harsh, that's reality.
While the men went off to war, the women went to work in defense plants and other facilities to aid the war effort. Children helped with scrap metal drives and such, while seniors tended "Victory Gardens".
Would Japan have been justified in wiping out a couple of major US cities if it had developed the capability to do so?
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The difference is we didn't have total mobilization. We still had schools which educated children in math and literature, not spear drills. We still had hospitals servicing civilian needs, not off-limits to everyone but the military. We still had plumbers and electricians and carpenters building civilian housing, not forcibly conscripted into working exclusively on military projects.
If you're asking me if the defense plants were valid targets, sure. If the Japanese had somehow been able to bomb Rosie the Riveter, that would've been entirely appropriate within the laws and customs of war. The instant a civilian starts working for a military purpose, they stop being a civilian. In wartime Japan, more than ninety percent of the population over age twelve was working for the war effort. Hence, there were very few civilians in Japan.
And, of course, the people torturing your grandmother weren't the ones who got the bomb dropped on them.
Not the point - dropping the bomb led to Japan's surrender, which is why (presumably) the people torturing his grandmother stopped doing so, and released her. Otherwise, the torture would have continued.
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It's not moral absolutism. He didn't say "you are completely morally responsible for the soldier burning the child." He says, correctly, that you are paying for it.
And thus are part of a shared responsibility for it. If we live in a society with a representative government, then the policies of that government are the responsibility, to some extent, of the people who live in it. Responsibility is not exactly the same thing as moral culpability: responsibility can be collective (e.g., a company has to honor its debts even if no person who created the debt is still there.)
But it is a problem to think that you can enjoy all the benefits of a nation-state without sharing in the responsibility for the actions of that nation-state, particularly if there is some representative system at hand.
It's great to see so many people trying to be philosphical about something that they can not comprehend. I am completely speculating (but so is most everyone else here), but I would think at least 95% of the people posting were not born or even in gestation during WWII. Heck, your parents probably were not either.
You have read a couple of history books that give you some highlights about a war. The highlights often have some spin, or perhaps your history teacher adds some spin to them. Here is a news flash... people die during war. Sometimes they die a gruesome death. Sometimes war is necessary. Many times, we would rather not go to war, but we must, so we do. And in all of the times that we go to war, people die. It is a tradgedy to lose a human life, but it does become necessary. It is painful. It sucks. It is life.
Quit trying to condemn people. You have not been there. You can say what you would have done... but not even you know what you actually would have done. It is the same BS that is going on right now. Just give it a rest, because you really do not know what you are talking about.
Politics, Life, and More on my Aspiring for the Future
Those who live in fear like scared little children are the one's who believe such lies as you just said.
"This, of course, is why people decided that full-blown pacifism is the only way"
Um... how? In the example specified, how would "full-blown pacifism" have stopped the torture mentioned in the parent post?
This wasn't a one-time event, people were being put through this on a daily basis both within Japan as well as in Japanese holdings in China, before, during, and even after both atomic bombings. This is one of the reasons why Nagasaki was only three days after Hiroshima, to put a stop to the continual torture.
Of course, if no bombs were dropped and insteaed of forcing surrender out of Japan the US went "full-blown pacifist" and simply stopped prosecuting the war, things wouldn't have changed. There'd be no reason for Japan to release all its Chinese and Western prisoners (they were spoils of war gained "fair and square" as far as the IJA were concerned), they would have continued to be abused until their deaths, at which point they'd be replaced by even more Chinese slaves (and probably more Westerners, too, once Japan decided they needed even more natural resources). The violence wouldn't have ended, in many ways it would have gotten worse, the only difference is that, in your version, Pilate would have been able to wash his hands of it.
They had to be nuked. Sure, that's not something to be happy about, but simpy disliking something doesn't make it less necessary. Contrary to popular belief, violence does solve things, and this is a shining example of it.
And as for the civillian deaths, there was little (if any) difference between "civillian" and "soldier" in the eyes of Japan, both for their enemies as well as their own people. Many (if not most) of those civillians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were drafted by the government to work in factories making war materiel. With Japan prosecuting "total war" like that, it's very difficult to say who was really a civillian and who wasn't.
"This, of course, is why people decided that full-blown pacifism is the only way - because once a cycle of violence starts ever step simply escalates and becomes 'justified' by the previous atrocities."
What bothers me about this position is that it is purely self-serving. Much like the smug vegan or self-assured decrier of the death penalty, the entire position of 'pacifism' is one of putting your own moral/mental comfort above the physical well-being and reality of others.
Pacifists rarely think through their position enough to find alternatives to the actions they dislike. They simply separate themselves to absolve themselves of responsibility - to make themselves feel good. And I find that reprehensible.
It is the easiest thing in the world to be against something, or to judge it with all the knowledge of history. And it is no better to be blindly 'against' something than to be blindly 'for' it.
Yes, the military censored the executions and brutal treatment the Japanese gave President's Bush's friends after they crashed and were captured. They did this for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was simple. The things the Japanese did were unimaginable to the American public; should the public have discovered at the time, the sentiment towards the Japanese may have turned from conquering them to annihilating them.
You think the Vietnam war was tough? Go back and find out what really happened in the Japanese conflict. Vietnam vets have no right to complain. When the Pacific Theater vets came back, they didn't complain. My own grandfather has never talked about what happened in Guadalcanal as a Marine foot soldier. All we know is that he was one of the handful of surviving troops. Most of his buddies never set foot on the sand.
One story I heard from a Pacific War vet told how he felt so bad for shooting a Japanese in the back as he was preparing to throw a grenade on his friends. He thought shooting someone in the back was unconscionable! He thought maybe he should've whistled or yelled to get him to turn around. All the while, he knew that his friends would go to get water and the Japanese snipers would wait until their backs are turned to shoot them. He knew the torture that his captured friends would endure. He knew that the Japanese would wrap themselves with bamboo so they could stay alive for a few moments longer after getting shot. I mean, the Japanese were far, far, worse than anything you or I could imagine.
And as you know, none of this was let out to the public. No one knew what was really happening there except the military. All these parents would get messages saying their children died honorably in battle defending their troops, when in truth, they were brutally beaten, tortured, and executed, usually by beheading. That's what was censored.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
"There was a strong voice in the Navy urging that we simply blockade Japan, saving more lives than either of the options you present."
Not quite. What they were actually saying was "give the blockade more time." It had been up for months prior, slowly starving the islands, but there was no sign of wavering in the Japanese military command. Instead, they send the Yamato off with no fuel (thanks to the blockade), with the intent of beaching her on Okinawa and acting as static guns.
"Then there is the whole world of diplomacy and surrender, which, I assure you, was in fact an option."
Diplomacy? With the same country that had negotiators pretending to negotiate a peaceful resolution to their invasion of China with the US while an attack fleet was steeming towards Pearl Harbor at the same time? "Fool me once, shame on you..."
What conditions would they push for in that diplomacy? That the US abandon support for China? Hang on to some of the islands they grabbed in 1941?
Yes, there were parts of the Japanese government looking for peace, but they had no power in their government. Those in power were waiting for the eventual invasion of the home islands and forcing the US into a pyrrhic victory in order to negotiate from more strength. And to that end they gave spears to children. They only surrendered when the atomic bombs demonstrated there was no hope to make the victory costly for the US beyond the price tag of the bombs.
"The United States was very clear on insisting on unconditional surrender, and many parts of the Japanese power structure were ready for this,"
Yeah, the parts that had no power. These were some of the same voices that said going to war with the US was a bad idea back in 1941, but if anything they lost influence as Japan lost captured territories over the years (since it became easier to see us as filthy gaijin invaders).
"and then allowed the emperor to stay anyway."
Not in the way they wanted. The constitution MacArthur forced down their throats, the one that reduced the political influence of the emperor to that of a figurehead at best, is not one that they would have accepted voluntarily. One of the less etherial reasons parts of the Japanese government wanted to leave the emperor's office unchanged is that the military forces effectively ruling the country used their power in his name. They knew that, if their offices relied more on a popularly-elected legislature, they'd be replaced with people like the peaceniks they were busy supressing.
John of England got to keep his throne, too. But there was still the little matter of the Magna Carta...