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Obama To Become First US President To Visit Hiroshima Since 1945 Nuclear Attack (independent.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: The White House announced U.S. President Barack Obama will visit Hiroshima, becoming the first sitting American President to do so since the city was destroyed in 1945 by a U.S. nuclear bomb. President Obama and Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will visit the city on May 27th "to highlight his continued commitment to pursuing the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement. Obama said he hoped to visit both Hiroshima and Nagasaki when he first visited Japan in November 2009. "The memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are etched in the minds of the world, and I would be honored to have the opportunity to visit those cities at some point during my presidency," President Obama said at the time. At least 140,000 people died from the nuclear attack on Hiroshima on August 9, 1945. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second atomic weapon on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered to Allied forces within a week after that second attack.
So which US president(s) visited Hiroshima prior to 1945?
This is all a celebration of Obama. He is in "First President to do X" mode, in a vain attempt to make his terms in office, not look so horrible, when history ultimately judges it to be so.
The only question is if He will apologize for Pearl Harbor or not. You, mean America putting that island in the way of all of those Japanese planes and bombs.
This is ZERO republican, and 100% Obama.
I wonder if he'll get in any golf while he's over there?
Take a look at what the Japanese did in China. They made the Nazis look tame. I figure that they think they got off light and they did. You don't want to think about what would have happened if the Chinese had invaded Japan at the end of that war. The bombing of Pearl Harbor that everyone demonizes the Japanese for is not really the bad thing they did. On the scale of their infamous acts that was about .01 The way they treated POWs was horrendous but even worse was the way they treated defeated civilian populations. We can debate the dropping of the two bombs on Japan. Maybe they saved even more lives than they took, both Japanese and American. There is however no debate about the uncivilized behavior of the Japanese military.
Cue the millennials' halfwitted observation that the bombs were "unjust" ...
I wonder how many such millennials are here today because their great-grandfather did not have to be part of an invasion of the Japanese home islands.
... a few diplomats were interested in surrender. Diplomats who lived in fear of their beliefs coming to the attention of the militarists who would have promptly executed them for treason. Keep in mind that it was **ONLY** the emperors decision that enabled surrender. Even after that decision militarists assaulted the imperial palace to rescue to emperor from the "treasonous" advisors who were "lying" to him, to find and destroy the audio recording the emperor made to announce the surrender to the Japanese people, etc. The surrender nearly did not happen even after the god-like emperor made the decision. After the first atomic bombing the militarists were training troops/civilians to wear white sheets to protect them from the flash of this new weapon. The films of this looked like a friggin KKK training exercise. To the day of the surrender, the militarists, the people effectively running the country, thought they could inflict so many casualties on the Americans that they could negotiate a peace treaty. The suicide planes and boats were ready, the chemical weapons were targeted on landing beaches, school kids were learning to thrust a bamboo spear at americans, etc. Its is only the emperor's voice on the radio, speaking directly to the people, announcing the surrender, that ended this insanity. And the emperor did not make the decision until after the atomic bombs. He specifically cited these new weapons in his announcement.
And I wonder how many of their "Japanese friends" are only here because the war ended without such an invasion, without a famine inducing blockade that was one alternative to invasion, etc.
And before you start the "they were about to surrender" meme
In the twisted insane mathematics of war, the atomic bombs probably saved lives. We killed far greater numbers of people in the convention firebombing of Japan.
Do you all think it's accidental that as soon as we know who the candidates for president are going to be that Obama's approval ratings go up? It's as if people are saying, "Holy shit. Obama wasn't really so bad after all."
He's currently got a higher approval rating than Ronald Reagan at the same point in their terms.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It happened in the past. The people who remember it are almost all dead.
After all, I don't hate the current generation of Japanese for all the Americans their ancestors killed.
We are no longer enemies and I am glad for that.
At any rate, even after the first bomb, the Japanese government dithered on whether to surrender unconditionally.
There are official communications within the government that indicated the military leaders insisted Hiroshima wasn't a nuclear bomb. It was a large-scale conventional bombing (like Dresden) with a dirty bomb at the end, to make it look nuclear. The radiation levels were lower than expected, and the destruction less (see the modern day conspiracy theorists that insist there are no atom bombs), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... was still standing and was near ground-zero. The destruciton wasn't dissimilar to a conventional bombing, with scattered buildings left standing.
Japan surrendered both before and after Hiroshima. Though every surrender before Nagasaki included the conditions that the Japanese government be left as-was (including domination by the military in civilian affairs), and nobody be tried for war crimes. Both of those were unacceptable conditions at the time.
Learn to love Alaska
I'm always a bit baffled by how the world keeps looking at Germany and Japan's WWII histories. Germany's is 'What we did was horrible, never forget when we did' and Japan's is always 'What was done to us was horrible, never forget what happened to us.'
Anytime I see any sort of WWII memorial sort of thing here and there, it's almost always about either the Holocaust or the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings. Well, those are two very different things. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Rape of Nanjing, Unit 731, the so-called 'comfort women' (or to call that what it actually was, sexual slavery)...I mean, without even considering Pearl Harbor, let's not pretend that there wasn't one hell of a lead up to the bombings.
It just seems wrong that we spend so much more time talking about the thing that ended the war than the actions, and victims, that made those means necessary.
What amazes me is the fact that there are people who try to hold the current generation of Japanese... of any nationality actually... to blame for the misdeeds of old dead people from whom they happen to be descended. Real life is not Star Trek, and we are not Klingons. The "Sins of the Father" do not dishonor the next seven generations of real human beings.
Every decision maker involved in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is long dead. And if any members of the flight crew are still breathing, they're not long for this world. The same is true of Pearl Harbor, Dresden, the Holocaust, Stalingrad, Bataan, etc. To continue to bear a grudge, especially when you're not even the actual person who was wronged, and double especially against people who weren't involved and likely not even born at the time; is just batshit irrational.
Imagine all the people...
My father was in the 10th Mountain Division in Northern Italy fighting the Nazi's 1945 earning a Silver Star and Purple Heart. His company, being battled tested, was told next stop is the south Pacific... Then the Bomb was dropped and the course of history changed. Nevertheless I am not angry about Obama visiting Hiroshima. It is about time politicians paid attention to the past and understand the terrible power we wield and the horrendous consequence of war. Now maybe a Japanese leader will visit Nanking or a Turkish leader will visit an Armenian site. Bout time I say.
It is mathematically impossible for Obama to beat Reagan's record for vacation time while in office, no matter how are he tries...
Presidents get paid to make decisions, not to dig ditches by the hour. If a vacation helps clear his mind, so he makes better decisions, then that is a good thing. Eisenhower once cut short a meeting on a proposal to send troops into Vietnam because he had an appointment to play golf. If Lyndon Johnson devoted as much time to golf, then 58,000 American casualties could have been avoided.
The lifetimes of those involved.
Time to get over it.
It's time to stop cursing Alexander the Great. But some cultures pass down this hatred as part of their oral tradition to keep the hate alive.
Destroying the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Ukraine, what government working in Iraq, Afghanistan, screwing over our relationships with Russia, China, Saudi Arabia letting Turkey fail to religious fascism, getting walked over by Iran and Cuba. The man should stay home locked away till the end of year if he wants to stop the pain.
No apology of any type should be issued.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No tears shed even for the innocent killed?
Yes, it's a shame that the Japanese government was so willing to see so many of their own innocent people die. That is entirely, 100%, on them. Luckily the US was able to use the strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to greatly reduce the number of people that the Japanese government would otherwise have sacrificed in horrible, bloody, flaming "conventional" fighting before it was over. But yes, go ahead and shed tears for those victims of the government that the Japanese people allowed to run them into the ruin they experienced. It's a shame. Good thing the US was able to end it abruptly and save so many lives.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
So, no respect for Jefferson or any of the other founding fathers that were slave owners or benefitted from it?
Attempting to judge a man by modern mores isn't the brightest idea and you need to learn & understand his historical context before judging him.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
At the end of WWI, the Germans signed the Armistice while there were no invading boots on German soil. The German Army then launched on a very impressive campaign to deny their responsibility and claim they were doing just fine until they were stabbed in the back by civilian authorities, in one of the more impressive cases of military failure of moral courage I've seen.
Hitler and other conservatives argued hard that the Germans had not been beaten in the field, and used that lie to push for rearmament and a new war. The Allies were particularly anxious to make sure WWII didn't end in another twenty-year armistice (a French comment on the Treaty of Versailles), and wanted to make sure the Germans knew that they had been defeated militarily.
Also, in January 1945 the West was still reeling from the large German offensive in the Ardennes, popularly known as the Battle of the Bulge. The offensive had been contained by the end of the year, but still looked dangerous. (The Germans launched their last large-scale attack in the West at the very end of 1944.) The Western Allies really did want the Soviets to continue fighting.
You say that the Soviets were going to fight until they reached Berlin, but that wasn't at all obvious to the Western Allies at the time. The Red Army had expelled the invaders from the prewar Soviet Union in 1944, and had continued West from there, so there was no clear reason they wouldn't effectively stop pushing and let the Germans mass against the Western Allies. In 1944, the Soviets were still facing and killing many more Germans than the West did, and Western leaders were seriously worried about Soviet commitment. One big reason why the West wouldn't entertain a separate peace was that they feared Stalin would learn of it and do the same.
Also, your timing is wrong. In January 1945, Hitler was very much in charge, and the Germans were fighting hard in the West. Their morale started to waver in March and pretty much collapsed in April. I don't remember the details, but I believe the "surrender" offers you refer to came in April, when Goering and Himmler thought (incorrectly) that they could negotiate independently of Hitler. Their attempts were why Doenitz wound up as Fuhrer after Hitler's death; he was the high commander outside Berlin that Hitler thought he could rely on.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes