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

[Unkotare]

The conditions offered were the same ones we ultimately accepted after slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians.

.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

The conditions offered were the same ones we ultimately accepted after slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians.

.

No they were not dumb ass.

 

[Unkotare]

The conditions offered were the same ones we ultimately accepted after slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians.

.

No they were not dumb ass.

Tell it to General MacArthur, revisionist.

 

[HenryBHough]

So many Jap sympathizers who should be in internment camps even to this day., Rooseveldt had it right but Truman failed to carry through.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

The conditions offered were the same ones we ultimately accepted after slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians.

.

No they were not dumb ass.

Tell it to General MacArthur, revisionist.

Be very specific and link to a document FROM Japan to the US BEFORE August 9 1945 that offered to surrender with only one demand that the Emperor be maintained.

 

[Vandalshandle]

Whatever labored, embarrassing arguments one can make for the nuking of Hiroshima cannot be made for the nuking of Nagasaki just three days later. From my article "Did We Really Need to Use the Atomic Bomb Against Japan?":

On August 9, 1945, just three days after we nuked Hiroshima, and before Japan’s leaders had sufficient time to process and respond to our nuclear attack on Hiroshima, we dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, which was home to Japan’s largest Christian population. The atomic bombing of Nagasaki was even more inexcusable than the nuking of Hiroshima. . . .

On August 9, we nuked Nagasaki, just three days after Hiroshima, and hours after the Soviets began to maul the Japanese army in Manchuria,, and while Japan’s civilian leaders were understandably absorbed with trying to process what had happened to Hiroshima and with responding to the Soviet attack in Manchuria. Surely Truman and other high officials knew that three days was not enough time for Japan’s government to formulate a formal response to the unprecedented use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and to the Soviet invasion in Manchuria. Even McGeorge Bundy, who helped Henry Stimson write his defense of the atomic bombing of Japan, acknowledged that Truman was too quick to nuke Nagasaki:​

"It is hard to see that much could have been lost if there had been more time between the two bombs. . . . Such a delay would have been relatively easy, and I think right." (https://miketgriffith.com/files/immoraluse.pdf)
​

The Japanese were not even able to get a scientific team to Hiroshima until August 7, the day after the attack. Meanwhile, Japan's leaders were getting conflicting, fragmentary information about what had happened in Hiroshima. Some Army officials were telling the government that the bombing of Hiroshima was merely a very large conventional bombing raid, and they were suppressing information about the kinds of wounds that had been inflicted. There was no Internet back then, no fax machines, no Skype.

Surely it was obscene for us to nuke Nagasaki just three days, 72 hours, after we had nuked Hiroshima.

So Solly, Japan.....

 

[RetiredGySgt]

Reread the documents OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS from this event, The Emperor offered to surrender under one condition after Hiroshima, that he remain Emperor God and Ruler of all Japan. He did this IN OPPOSITION to the Government leaders that had 4 demands , one of which was NO OCCUPATION and another was voluntary disarmament. The sole condition the Emperor demand was NOT acceptable to Washington and the second bomb was dropped after which again the Government of Japan REFUSED to surrender and the Emperor over rode them and accepted Unconditional surrender. In response the Army staged a Coup to prevent the Emperor from making the announcement but were stopped. The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II: A Collection of Primary Sources

 

[Unkotare]

So many Jap sympathizers who should be in internment camps even to this day., Rooseveldt [sic] had it right but Truman failed to carry through.

Had what right?

 

[Unkotare]

The conditions offered were the same ones we ultimately accepted after slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians.

.

No they were not dumb ass.

Tell it to General MacArthur, revisionist.

Be very specific and link to a document FROM Japan to the US BEFORE August 9 1945 that offered to surrender with only one demand that the Emperor be maintained.

You have had mountains of evidence and page after page of documents presented to you only to have you go into Rain Man mode and stay there repeating your revision of over and over and over. Take it up with General MacArthur, Rain Man.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

The conditions offered were the same ones we ultimately accepted after slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians.

.

No they were not dumb ass.

Tell it to General MacArthur, revisionist.

Be very specific and link to a document FROM Japan to the US BEFORE August 9 1945 that offered to surrender with only one demand that the Emperor be maintained.

You have had mountains of evidence and page after page of documents presented to you only to have you go into Rain Man mode and stay there repeating your revision of over and over and over. Take it up with General MacArthur, Rain Man.

You have not EVER linked to an official document EVER, what you have linked to are memoirs and opinion pieces. I have OFFICIAL Japanese intercept documents and US Government documents. Either link to an official document or admit you are full of SHIT.

 

[Unkotare]

General MacArthur is awaiting your call, Rain Man.

 

[Andylusion]

Whatever labored, embarrassing arguments one can make for the nuking of Hiroshima cannot be made for the nuking of Nagasaki just three days later. From my article "Did We Really Need to Use the Atomic Bomb Against Japan?":

On August 9, 1945, just three days after we nuked Hiroshima, and before Japan’s leaders had sufficient time to process and respond to our nuclear attack on Hiroshima, we dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, which was home to Japan’s largest Christian population. The atomic bombing of Nagasaki was even more inexcusable than the nuking of Hiroshima. . . .

On August 9, we nuked Nagasaki, just three days after Hiroshima, and hours after the Soviets began to maul the Japanese army in Manchuria,, and while Japan’s civilian leaders were understandably absorbed with trying to process what had happened to Hiroshima and with responding to the Soviet attack in Manchuria. Surely Truman and other high officials knew that three days was not enough time for Japan’s government to formulate a formal response to the unprecedented use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and to the Soviet invasion in Manchuria. Even McGeorge Bundy, who helped Henry Stimson write his defense of the atomic bombing of Japan, acknowledged that Truman was too quick to nuke Nagasaki:​

"It is hard to see that much could have been lost if there had been more time between the two bombs. . . . Such a delay would have been relatively easy, and I think right." (https://miketgriffith.com/files/immoraluse.pdf)
​

The Japanese were not even able to get a scientific team to Hiroshima until August 7, the day after the attack. Meanwhile, Japan's leaders were getting conflicting, fragmentary information about what had happened in Hiroshima. Some Army officials were telling the government that the bombing of Hiroshima was merely a very large conventional bombing raid, and they were suppressing information about the kinds of wounds that had been inflicted. There was no Internet back then, no fax machines, no Skype.

Surely it was obscene for us to nuke Nagasaki just three days, 72 hours, after we had nuked Hiroshima.

No, pretty much every Japanese person I've talked to, said that the nuking of both helped end the war.

What most of the people who want to sit around and blather about how bad the nukes where, what all of you miss, is that we were fire bombing these people.

Do you want fire bombing is? It's where you set so much of a city on fire, that the fire fuels itself and incinerates most of the of the population.

If you ask me, which death I would prefer... I'll take getting vaporized in a nuke, over slowly roasting alive in a mass inferno.

We had pilots come back from these mission so traumatized by these human infernos, that they said in their late 70s and 80s, that they couldn't stand the smell of a BBQ, or camp fire, because it brought back the memories of the smell of burning human flesh, that they in the planes could smell.

These fire bomb missions were beyond horrific. In fact, many of the people in congress that approved of the nukes, did so specifically because they were horrified by the fire bomb missions they were doing.

But you have to keep this in the context of the broader war with Japan. We had just fought on islands where Japanese soldiers that were starving, and unsupported, and dug in so deep, we had to use flame throwers to burn them out. Out of tens of thousands of soldiers, barely a thousand surrendered, even when they no longer had ammunition, they were coming out with grenades to blow our people, and themselves up. On top of that, a hundred thousands civilians caught in the crossfire were killed. Throw in there waves of suicide bombers flying themselves into ships....

If all that does not make you understand why nukes were necessary.... Look at this....

The Japanese military was training girls..... school girls.... to attack US soldiers with pitch forks and polls.

I simply do not even have the ability to understand the psychological damage that would have happened on BOTH sides... if we had not dropped those bombs, and if our soldiers had landed on Japanese soil, and been forced to mow down school girls with pitch forks.....

It is beyond my ability to understand how much damage would have been done to the Japanese to have their daughters and young boys slaughtered by our military... or how many of our own men would have been utterly mentally destroyed having to choose between their own lives, and the lives of these young girls.

So when you sit here and question in retrospect whether or not a nuclear bomb should or should not have been dropped... you need to look at it through THEIR EYES.... IN THEIR TIME. Pretty easy for you in your comfy chair, at your computer, in your air conditioned home, to say that they should have acted differently, when you would never have to step over the bodies of the dead soldiers who did not fire, and the bodies of the young girls shot by those that did.... and explain to future generations that you did have a couple of bombs that might have ended the war, but decided to not use them.... you know because that would be horrible.

The two atomic bombs together killed roughly 200,000 people.

I for one, based on what I've read, and first hand accounts of Japan leading up to, and during WW2... am I absolutely convinced that millions would have died if Japan had refused to surrender, and we had landed on the mainland in a state of war. Millions. Guaranteed.

If you want to learn more about it, read a book called Hiroshima by John Hersey. In it, at one point a group of women is in a build that is hit by the bomb. The woman are trapped under the rubble, and start singing a song about them working in service to the Emperor. The lone surviving woman, talks about how each voice in the dozen of women, dies out one by one, singing to the Emperor to their last breath. These are people who were ready, willing, and trained to die for the Emperor.

The bombs were required. They just were. I'm so glad the men in charge were willing to do it, so that we could save Japan. They would have fought us until there was nothing left of us, or them, if we had not.

 

[Unkotare]

What an absolute load of crap. "All the Japanese people I have spoken to" = fabricated bullshit. Pilots dropping incendiary bombs unable to BBQ because of the smell of burning flesh - as they flew by high and fast = poor fiction. Kids 'training' with bamboo spears was meant to be propaganda for domestic consumption to bolster rapidly waning public support for an obviously lost cause. That you are still swallowing propaganda that wasn't even meant for you over 70 years ago suggests you are a remarkably gullible buffoon.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

General MacArthur is awaiting your call, Rain Man.

LINK? to something other then an un sourced book.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

What an absolute load of crap. "All the Japanese people I have spoken to" = fabricated bullshit. Pilots dropping incendiary bombs unable to BBQ because of the smell of burning flesh - as they flew by high and fast = poor fiction. Kids 'training' with bamboo spears was meant to be propaganda for domestic consumption to bolster rapidly waning public support for an obviously lost cause. That you are still swallowing propaganda that wasn't even meant for you over 70 years ago suggests you are a remarkably gullible buffoon.

YOU LYIMG PIECE of human excrement, the Japanese REFUSED to surrender I have documents to prove it, they also cut bamboo and made bamboo spears fpr the civilian population to human wave attack the invaders that is NOT propaganda they were training them to do it.

 

[Ernie S.]

Here's the thing. At the time, it was just another weapon in a war that saw all sorts of weapons used by all sides... Horror on a level most of us couldn't understand today.

Later on, when Nukes became an existential threat to the species, people asked why we used them, but at the time, there was no question. We were at war, they started it.

It's a wonderful case of applying modern values to people in the past who would have looked at you funny.

It did not have to be a question of whether we used them or not

Did we have to choose targets where 150,000 civilians were killed?
Could a non lethal “demonstration” have yielded the same results?

Drop one in a low populated or strictly military area and let the Japanese evaluate the results. Then tell them we have dozens just like it and would target Tokyo next

Unfortunately, yes. We had to inflict massive casualties in order to break their will to fight

 

[JoeB131]

defense does not take much training at all compared to offense
you are ignorant on the subject also

I was in the army for 11 years... How about you? Let me guess, you probably wet yourself when you realized you might have to shower with negroes.

 

[JoeB131]

Your opinion is meaningless to me. I hope you are offended

Your opinion is meaningless to everyone because as usual, you don't know what you are talking about.

 

[JoeB131]

Unfortunately, yes. We had to inflict massive casualties in order to break their will to fight

Um, no, they were already willing to surrender. We just refused to let them do it on their terms until Russia entered the war and we realized we might have to share the spoils of war.

 

[JoeB131]

It would have made Fallujah look like a playground.

Says who? These figures that came out saying, "Millions of Casualties" didn't come out until the war and the government had to justify why it vaporized hundreds of thousands of civilians.