The Nuking of Nagasaki: Even More Immoral and Unnecessary than Hiroshima

[Mushroom]

Who was the person who ruled Japan after surrender and oversaw the drafting of their Constitution?

Emperor Showa.

 

[BS Filter]

Emperor Showa.

Wrong. General Douglas MacArthur. You really are full of crap.
After the defeat of Japan in World War II, the United States led the Allies in the occupation and rehabilitation of the Japanese state. Between 1945 and 1952, the U.S. occupying forces, led by General Douglas A. MacArthur, enacted widespread military, political, economic, and social reforms.

Office of the Historian › milestones

Occupation and Reconstruction of Japan - Milestones: 1945–1952 - Office of the ...​

 

[Mushroom]

Wrong. General Douglas MacArthur. You really are full of crap.
After the defeat of Japan in World War II, the United States led the Allies in the occupation and rehabilitation of the Japanese state. Between 1945 and 1952, the U.S. occupying forces, led by General Douglas A. MacArthur, enacted widespread military, political, economic, and social reforms.

No, he oversaw the occupation. He did not rule the country.

What, you honestly think that somehow a General would be appointed as the ruler of a country, with almost no oversight, ruling as a dictator?

He oversaw the occupation, supervised as a new Constitution was drafted, oversaw the dismantling of the Taisei Yokusankai, all with the full cooperation of the Emperor and the officials that were deemed innocent of any war crimes or having taken part in the prosecution of the war.

He was not a King, he was not a Dictator, the equivalent position would be he was the Military Governor, not unlike his previous in the Philippines. He had a lot of power and could veto decisions of the Government if he thought they were not in the interest of the Allied Powers, but he himself did not rule.

What, you honestly think he ruled the country? That just shows how little you really do understand about the Occupation of Japan. That the US would appoint a General as some kind of King to rule over another nation. With no oversight, no checks and balances, simply ruling as they saw fit and answerable to nobody.

I knew what you were going to say, and once again you did not disappoint me. And showed how little you know of what the Occupation really was. Emperor Showa was still the Emperor, the Prime Minister was still the Prime Minister and head of the Executive Branch. The Diet was still the legislative authority once it was reconstituted in 1947.

In fact, even during the Occupation he was not the "Ultimate Authority". That actually resided with the "Far East Commission". The decision had already been made to not break Japan into "Occupation Zones" like Germany had been, but to maintain a unified occupation with the US primarily holding all occupation duties. But the Commission was chaired by 13 members representing each of the Allied Powers, and they had the ultimate oversight. They could even veto decisions made by General MacArthur, and did most of the work behind the scenes. They actually made all the policies, the General simply carried them out.

As I said, you have an incredibly primitive view of the war, and also of the occupation I see. You actually do seem to believe that the US let some General act as a King of a foreign nation. By the same token, I guess you also believe that General Tommy Franks was the "Ruler of Iraq" after the Ba'ath Party was removed form power. Or that General Eisenhower was the "Ruler of Germany" when it was occupied.

 

[DudleySmith]

Wrong. General Douglas MacArthur. You really are full of crap.
After the defeat of Japan in World War II, the United States led the Allies in the occupation and rehabilitation of the Japanese state. Between 1945 and 1952, the U.S. occupying forces, led by General Douglas A. MacArthur, enacted widespread military, political, economic, and social reforms.
View attachment 615960
Office of the Historian › milestones

Occupation and Reconstruction of Japan - Milestones: 1945–1952 - Office of the ...​

Correct. From land reforms to their new Constitutional form of government was imposed by the SCAP, which was of course MacArthur in practice. It started changing when the economy didn't respond well in a few years and they kind of had to let the Zaibatsus reform and handle the markets. As your link indicates, the dictatorship started going away about three years after occupation. The Constitution MAcArthur wrote for them still remained for many years after though.

My Dad went into Japan as part of the occupation forces, from fighting in the Philippines. He did pretty good at gambling, about all there was to do there off duty for a long time, and was getting to know a lot of the locals. A month or so before he left he loaned a destitute local guy a couple of hundred in scrip to get his business back up and running, then got sent back home. He didn't expect to ever see or hear from the guy or the money again, but about five years later he got several packages of nice porcelains that somehow made it across the Pacific without getting broken in transit worth several times what he loaned the guy. Don't know how he found my Dad's address, but they kept in touch for a while after that. My brother still has the porcelains, and I have some jade stuff they did deals over after re-connecting.

 

[elektra]

elektra Mushroom DudleySmith Open Bolt

The way things are going lately you guys might get your death wish with a nuclear holocaust. Oh how happy you’ll be, except your likely to be dead.

I will be extremely happy cause the first place to be trampled and destroyed is where you sleep.

Socialism always leads to war, us conservatives will be here to save the world.

 

[Open Bolt]

So the history books are are wrong according to you?

No.

You are wrong according to the history books.

Notice the word "unconditional".

Notice all the conditions in the surrender terms?

 

[Open Bolt]

The way things are going lately you guys might get your death wish with a nuclear holocaust. Oh how happy you’ll be, except your likely to be dead.

Better dead than red.

 

[Open Bolt]

And I would again point out that Ike's 1963 account is supported by his son, by his biographer, by his 1955 letter to William Pawley, and by Gen. Bradley's account of the Stimson meeting.

General Bradley's fraudulent account certainly doesn't support Ike's account.

For example, are you ever going to address the mountain of evidence that nobody in the War Department believed that we would lose 500,000 men if we invaded Japan and that this estimate was recognized as erroneous and baseless? Even the War Department's experts on the subject, the S&P staff officers, stated in an official memorandum that the estimate was "entirely too high" (Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio, Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 1944-1945, pp. 567-568).

They may have felt that estimates of 500,000 dead were too high. But they were comfortable with predictions of 500,000 casualties, as that is the number of purple hearts that they ordered for the invasion.

I'm guessing you don't know that the 500K estimate originated with Herbert Hoover.

That is incorrect. It originated with the study conducted by William B Shockley.

Ironically, Hoover gave that wild estimate in the hope that it would discourage an invasion and would cause Truman to give the Japanese milder surrender terms.

Hardly a wild estimate. The "Shockley numbers" are higher than estimates for "Downfall alone" because Shockley gave numbers for the conquest of all of Japan, whereas Downfall only planned for the capture of southern Kyushu and then the Tokyo plain.

Hoover rightly believed that FDR had needlessly and treasonously provoked Japan to attack us in order to protect the Soviet Union and to enable him to drag America into the war.

Boy it sure does bother you that we opposed Japan's genocides.

 

[Open Bolt]

You are not informed. They tried several times to surrender.

Japan did not try to surrender until after both atomic bombs had already been dropped.

All they asked is don't murder our emperor.

Japan asked that Hirohito retain unlimited dictatorial power as Japan's living deity.

Dirty Harry Truman said fuck you and die you yellow slanty eyed MFers. Then after he mass murdered 200,000 defenseless women and children, he said okay you can keep your emperor.

Attacks on military targets are not mass murder.

What Truman said was that Hirohito was going to be subordinate to MacArthur.

They sent out multiple peace feelers. This is well known. Yes the military didn’t, but Japanese government officials did.

The military were the ones in charge. Peace feelers from other people were not terribly useful.

Yet even though Truman knew that the peace feelers were illegitimate, he pursued them anyway in the hopes that they might evolve into contact with the people who were actually in charge.

Unfortunately the people in charge in Japan killed off the peace feelers.

At any rate, mass murdering defenseless women and children can never be justified, except by stupid brainwashed statist Americans.

Attacks on military targets are not mass murder.

The truth is Japan was essentially defenseless, by summer 1945.

Defenseless except for the millions of soldiers and thousands of kamikazes waiting to pounce on our invasion.

This of course means Truman's act was one of barbaric proportions, unparalleled in all of human history.

This is getting silly. Japan refused to surrender, and we had every right to attack military targets.

The typical duped American can't bring themselves to accept this fact, even though it is evident.

It isn't a fact.

So they resort to lies and idiotic equivalences, to justify it.

No, they merely point out the truths that Japan was refusing to surrender, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets.

The sad consequence of this historical ignorance, is our leaders continue to commit horrendous acts of violence.

Hardly ignorance.

Horrendous acts of violence are often justified in today's world.

So let’s put your position stated another way. Since the Big Six wouldn’t surrender unconditionally, Truman had every right to mass murder 200,000 defenseless Japanese women and children.
Why don't you find this abhorrent?

At the time the atomic bombs were dropped, Japan was refusing to surrender period, regardless of conditions.

Attacks on military targets are not murder.

The atomic bombs did not kill anywhere near that many women and children. There were plenty of men in those cities.

The reason why people do not find the atomic bombs abhorrent is because they are horrified at the atrocities that Japan committed. And also because they recognize that the bombing of Hiroshima was absolutely necessary for the survival of humanity.

 

[Open Bolt]

all the needless American deaths that occurred because of Truman's refusal to pursue a reasonable negotiated peace, i.e., after Truman ignored several Japanese peace feelers (we know he was briefed on them),

Fake news. Truman did not ignore them. It was japan who killed off the peace feelers.

after he ignored the repeated warnings from his own Japan experts that the Japanese would fight to the death if they thought we were going to depose the emperor (Grew personally explained this to him in May),

More fake news. He did not ignore those warnings.

and after he refused to privately negotiate once he learned from Japanese intercepts that the emperor himself wanted to end the war

Even more fake news. Japan never gave Truman an opportunity for private negotiations.

and that the only obstacle was Truman's insistence on unconditional surrender (we know he was informed of this fact).

Even more fake news. That was hardly the only obstacle.

deaths would have been avoided if Truman had not refused to budge from FDR's "unconditional surrender" policy.

Even more fake news. Unconditional surrender was abandoned with the issuance of the Potsdam Proclamation.

For that matter, we would have had no war with Japan if FDR had not treasonously sided with the Soviet Union, had not imposed draconian sanctions on Japan for doing the same thing that Western powers had done a few decades earlier, had not rejected Japan's entirely reasonable peace offers to get him to lift the sanctions, and had not moved the Pacific Fleet to Hawaii and stationed B-17 bombers in the Philippines.

It sure does bug you that we opposed Japan's genocide of their Asian neighbors.

 

[Open Bolt]

What in the world are you talking about?

He was pointing out that you are completely wrong in every respect.

Are you really unable to grasp the point, or are you just being incredibly disingenuous?

Neither. I am sure he grasped your point. Your point, however, is completely wrong.

Let me try to break this down in simple terms, step by step:

* Months before Hiroshima, members of the peace faction began sending peace feelers through third parties to the U.S., such as the approach via a third party to Allen Dulles, such as the approach to the Soviets to mediate a peace deal with us.

* It was made clear in these approaches that the only real obstacle to obtaining a surrender was fear about the emperor's status in unconditional surrender. I documented this in a previous post where I reviewed some of the peace feelers.

OK so far.

* The peace advocates needed Truman to simply give assurance that the emperor would not be deposed in order for them, the peace supporters, to be able to overcome the hardliners' opposition, since the hardliners' trump card was that the Americans had given no assurance about the emperor's status.

You are wrong here. The hardliners were refusing to surrender no matter what. A guarantee of the Emperor's position would not have changed that.

* The hardliners on the Big Six could block any meeting of the council and could also block the convening of an imperial conference, since Japan was not a dictatorship. The emperor could not just snap his fingers and order the Supreme War Council to meet, much less to attend an imperial conference. There were checks and balances--that's how Tojo was forced to resign after the loss of Saipan, and that's how the next two prime ministers were both pro-surrender.

This is wrong as well. Japan was a dictatorship. The Emperor was the dictator, and the hardliners exercised dictatorial power in his name.

* If Truman had given assurance that the emperor would not be deposed, the Big Six hardliners would have lost their number one argument against surrender and would have then been under tremendous pressure to agree to convene the Big Six and to attend an imperial conference.

The hardliners were not against surrender because of the Emperor's status. They were saying no to surrender no matter what.

If they had refused, this would have given the peace faction a powerful justification to force an extra-constitutional showdown over surrender.

That would not have gone well for them.

 

[Open Bolt]

When are you going to deal with the point that the war could have ended in June if Truman had not refused to clarify the emperor's status in unconditional surrender?

Said point is completely untrue. Japan had no interest in surrender terms so long as they thought that the Soviets might help them escape the war without surrendering.

So killing over 200,000 civilians would have been an acceptable price to save one American soldier? Wow, that's just evil and vicious.

Spare me the pathetic whining. The entire population of Japan was worth the life of one American soldier.

And since Japan was refusing to surrender, we had every right to bomb military targets.

Your boy Truman was the one who refused to help the peace faction in the Japanese government and who therefore delayed surrender by weeks.

Fake news.

We've already covered this ground several times, and you simply refuse to deal with the fact that an invasion was not necessary,

Necessity is irrelevant. Japan was refusing to surrender, so we had every right to bomb military targets.

that by no later than June most of Japan's leaders wanted to end the war on terms acceptable to us,

Fake news.

The people in control in Japan were still refusing to surrender.

that Truman played right into the hardliners' hands by refusing to clarify the emperor's status,

The hardliners were refusing to surrender regardless of the Emperor's status.

and that Japan would have surrendered without nukes.

Luckily we got to nuke them first before they surrendered.

You somehow misread McNay's review, not to mention Hasegawa's book. If you had read McNay's review with any care, you would have seen that he explained that Hasegawa's point is that the only impact the nukes had was that it caused the peace advocates to push harder to try to get the hardliners to agree to surrender. The peace advocates needed no convincing. They had been trying to bring about a surrender for weeks. Hiroshima simply gave them another excuse to make another push for surrender. The point you keep ducking is that Hiroshima had zero impact on the hardliners.

The point that you keep getting wrong is that the status of the Emperor also had no impact on the hardliners.

The hardliners were refusing to surrender no matter what. It took an order from the Emperor to change that.

What a barbaric, un-American standard.

You don't speak for America.

FDR provoked Japan to war,

Japan provoked us into nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

no excuse for FDR and Truman to order bombing that deliberately killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese women and children.

Fake news. The atomic bombs did not kill that many women and children. And of those women and children that it did kill, none were deliberate.

The atomic bombings did not need any excuse. We have every right to bomb military targets.

That's like saying that if you provoke a smaller and weaker person to hit you first, that gives you the right to seriously injure him in ways that he can't prevent.

Maybe so. But as I just noted above, your depiction was factually inaccurate in just about every way possible.

 

[gipper]

Better dead than red.

That’s a good microcosm for all your posts. Dumb and simple.

 

[Open Bolt]

^^^^^Does all this justify Truman’s actions?

Yes.

Why can’t you admit Truman’s actions were undeniably a war crime, for which he should have hung?

Some of us refuse to admit to falsehoods.

Are you really trying to justify the bombing that killed 100,000 civilians, mostly women and children, because the Japanese had a small number of troops there?

Not mostly women and children.

And Japan had a large amount of troops there. It was also the headquarters in charge of repelling our invasion of Japan.

You care about Koreans, but not Japanese. WTF!

The Koreans were victims. The Japanese were perpetrators.

Committing greater atrocities to stop lesser atrocities is illogical, immoral, and abhorrent.

Not necessarily. But bombing a military target is in no way an atrocity.

Make no mistake, Truman’s action was a far greater atrocity than what the Japanese did.

Truman's action was not an atrocity at all.

Plus, as you now know, it was entirely unnecessary since Japan was incapable of offensive action, entirely defenseless, and seeking surrender.

Fake news. Japan was far from defenseless, and was refusing to surrender.

 

[DudleySmith]

Boy it sure does bother you that we opposed Japan's genocides.

^^^^ This. It bothers these Reds and neo-nazis a lot.

 

[BS Filter]

No, he oversaw the occupation. He did not rule the country.

What, you honestly think that somehow a General would be appointed as the ruler of a country, with almost no oversight, ruling as a dictator?

He oversaw the occupation, supervised as a new Constitution was drafted, oversaw the dismantling of the Taisei Yokusankai, all with the full cooperation of the Emperor and the officials that were deemed innocent of any war crimes or having taken part in the prosecution of the war.

He was not a King, he was not a Dictator, the equivalent position would be he was the Military Governor, not unlike his previous in the Philippines. He had a lot of power and could veto decisions of the Government if he thought they were not in the interest of the Allied Powers, but he himself did not rule.

What, you honestly think he ruled the country? That just shows how little you really do understand about the Occupation of Japan. That the US would appoint a General as some kind of King to rule over another nation. With no oversight, no checks and balances, simply ruling as they saw fit and answerable to nobody.

I knew what you were going to say, and once again you did not disappoint me. And showed how little you know of what the Occupation really was. Emperor Showa was still the Emperor, the Prime Minister was still the Prime Minister and head of the Executive Branch. The Diet was still the legislative authority once it was reconstituted in 1947.

In fact, even during the Occupation he was not the "Ultimate Authority". That actually resided with the "Far East Commission". The decision had already been made to not break Japan into "Occupation Zones" like Germany had been, but to maintain a unified occupation with the US primarily holding all occupation duties. But the Commission was chaired by 13 members representing each of the Allied Powers, and they had the ultimate oversight. They could even veto decisions made by General MacArthur, and did most of the work behind the scenes. They actually made all the policies, the General simply carried them out.

As I said, you have an incredibly primitive view of the war, and also of the occupation I see. You actually do seem to believe that the US let some General act as a King of a foreign nation. By the same token, I guess you also believe that General Tommy Franks was the "Ruler of Iraq" after the Ba'ath Party was removed form power. Or that General Eisenhower was the "Ruler of Germany" when it was occupied.

Where is a link to your claim?

 

[BS Filter]

I'm not wrong. And I'm certainly not going to admit being wrong when I'm not.

The timeline is as I said it was.

August 6: Hiroshima
August 9: Nagasaki
August 10: Japan offers a conditional surrender



No I'm not. Japan's condition on August 10 was that we allow Hirohito to retain unlimited dictatorial power.



Here is a third thing that you are wrong about. We backed off from unconditional surrender when we issued the Potsdam Proclamation. That was long before Hiroshima.



I've done my research. That's how I am able to point out all these errors that you keep making.

And I suppose you also believe that General Douglas McCarthur wasn't the guy in charge of the overhaul of Japan?

 

[BS Filter]

No.

You are wrong according to the history books.



Notice all the conditions in the surrender terms?

I notice all the "conditions" are from the USA. The USA totally changed Japan's military, economic system, and government.

 

[Open Bolt]

* Hasegawa also points out that Stalin urged Truman to continue to insist on unconditional surrender and not to give Japan any reason to hope for conditions (pp. 85-86). Stalin feared that if Truman softened his surrender demand, the Japanese would surrender before the Soviets could enter the war (p. 86). Truman followed Stalin's advice. Just great.

Truman did not follow Stalin's advice. The Potsdam Proclamation backed off from unconditional surrender.

But if Truman had followed your advice, he would have let Stalin have input into the Potsdam terms. And that would have meant following Stalin's advice.

* Regarding Truman’s falsehood that Hiroshima was “a military base” and that it was bombed to “avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians,”

Not a falsehood. That was the truth.

Dr. Robert Jacobs says the following in his review of the National Geographic documentary 24 Hours After Hiroshima:

The film reiterates the misleading claim that wartime Hiroshima was “a city of considerable military importance:​

Not misleading. That is the truth.

A communications center and assembly area hardly vest a city with “considerable military importance,”​

A large concentration of troops does however.

As does the fact that Hiroshima was the military headquarters in charge of repelling our coming invasion of Japan.

There are many points to consider here. First of all, as the film itself mentions, virtually every major city in Japan had been burned to the ground in the spring of 1945 by the firebombing squadrons of Curtis LeMay. Can it be that the US Army attacked and burned 67 cities, but preserved several targets of “considerable military importance” as showcases for future weapons?​

Yes, in fact.

And the records are quite clear on that matter.

The cities that were taken off the firebombing list (to preserve virgin targets so that assessments of the effects of atomic bombs could be made) were clearly of secondary importance to Japan’s ability to continue to prosecute the war.​

Fake news. No they weren't.

Consider the map below, printed in the New York Times on Friday August 10, 1945 (the day after Nagasaki was bombed). This map purports to show up to 30 important targets in Hiroshima and their scale of damage after the nuclear attack. The map shows conclusively that the two or three most important military targets (the Army transport base, Army ordnance depot, food depot and clothing depot) are all located in the Ujina port area, and are outside of the area of destruction. Almost all of the “targets” that are inside the area of destruction are bridges, hardly targets that were primarily of military importance. The map vividly reveals that the bomb did not target the military assets clustered at Ujina, but rather the city center: it targeted specifically civilian Hiroshima. (p. 3) (https://apjjf.org/-Robert-Jacobs/3446/article.pdf)​

The map is inaccurate. It leaves out the most important military targets, all of which were in the center.

* The cruel and unnecessary August 14 bombing included a bombing raid by 150 B-29s that dropped 700 one-ton bombs on Osaka.

Hardly cruel. We attacked military targets.

And entirely necessary, as the surrender would never have happened without that August 14 raid.

Surely, surely Truman had to have some understanding that Japan’s leaders were rather busy trying to formulate a reply to the Byrnes Note, which they received on August 11. Yet, he bombed them two days later, on August 13, and then again on August 14. No one thought to make any plans to recall the bombers if Japan sent a surrender message before the bombers took off or while they were en route.

Japan should consider themselves lucky that they wised up and surrendered before the next atomic bomb was ready to drop. It was only a few days away.

 

[Open Bolt]

What follows are three relatively short extracts from Dr. Peter Kuznick’s article “The Decision to Risk the Future: Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb and the Apocalyptic Narrative,” published in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 3, 2007. Dr. Kuznick is a professor of history at American University.

Inflated Casualty Estimates for U.S. Invasion of Japan:

This victor’s narrative privileges possible American deaths over actual Japanese ones. As critics of the bombing have become more vocal in recent years, projected American casualty estimates have grown apace--from the War Department’s 1945 prediction of 46,000 dead to Truman’s 1955 insistence that General George Marshall feared losing a half million American lives to Stimson’s 1947 claim of over 1,000,000 casualties to George H.W. Bush’s 1991 defense of Truman’s “tough calculating decision, [which] spared millions of American lives,” to the 1995 estimate of a crew member on Bock’s Car, the plane that bombed Nagasaki, who asserted that the bombing saved six million lives--one million Americans and five million Japanese. (p. 2)​

There was no inflation.

Those high casualty estimates were always that high.

Innumerable scholars have debunked the “half a million” myth,

The reality of those estimates is not a myth.

And try as progressive scholars might, no scholar has yet debunked reality.

and we know from internal War Department memos that senior military planners knew this estimate was baseless and implausible. But, as we can see, this hasn’t stopped the myth from not only being spread but from being padded.

Reality is not a myth. Nothing has been padded.

There were several reasonable versions of surrender terms that would have ended the war without an invasion, but Truman rejected every one of them, even after he learned, several weeks before Hiroshima, that the emperor wanted to end the war and that he hoped the Soviets would broker a peace deal.

Fake news. Truman never rejected reasonable surrender terms.

The Nuking of Hiroshima Produced Limited Military Casualties Because the Bomb Was Aimed at the Civilian Part of the City:

Fake news. The atomic bomb was dropped near the military headquarters and military barracks.

The military casualties were quite satisfactory.

American strategic planners targeted the civilian part of the city, maximizing the bomb’s destructive power and civilian deaths.​

They targeted the military heart of the city.

It produced limited military casualties.​

Fake news. The military casualties were quite satisfactory.

Admiral William Leahy angrily told an interviewer in 1949 that although Truman told him they would “only … hit military objectives …. they went ahead and killed as many women and children as they could, which was just what they wanted all the time.” (p. 2)​

Leahy was a goofy moron.

During the war before Japan surrendered, the only thing that Leahy had to say about atomic bombs was that, as an expert in explosives, he could guarantee that atomic bombs would never work.

Of course, when Truman announced the nuking of Hiroshima, he not only said that Hiroshima was “a military base” but that it had been chosen “because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” It is possible that Truman did not know this was an obscene lie; he may have been merely repeating what he had been told by his military advisers and/or by Byrnes.

Not a lie at all.

It does seem though that Truman was under the mistaken impression that nuking a military base would not result in collateral damage.

Over 100,000 civilians were killed at Hiroshima, most of them women and children.

There were plenty of men killed as well.

The Air Force Association and the American Legion Demanded that All Photos of Hiroshima Victims Be Removed from the 1995 Enola Gay Exhibit:

The exhibit was filled with anti-American lies. It is right that people forced it to be taken down.