bluemanc
Well-Known Member
ALLIED lives,lets get that crystal clear.stonerblue said:bluemanc said:Well that caused a fuss.
Some people trying to change History,using the Bomb on Japan DID save lives & in no way were they ready to surrender.
Saying they were ready to surrender is a huge difference from Unconditional Surrender.
Two B-29 incendiary raids over Tokyo. One of these raids killed about 125,000 people, the other nearly 100,000, how many would have died to achieve full air supremacy.
An horrific way to end a War it really was,but as i said the bottom line is it saved 100's of 1,000's of Allied soldiers lives.General MacArthur's staff anticipated about 50,000 American casualties and several times that number of Japanese casualties in the November 1 operation to establish the initial beachheads on Kyushu. After that they expected a far more costly struggle before the Japanese homeland was subdued. There was every reason to think that the Japanese would defend their homeland with even greater fanaticism than when they fought to the death on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. No American soldier who survived the bloody struggles on these islands has much sympathy with the view that battle with the Japanese was over as soon as it was clear that their ultimate situation was hopeless. No, there was every reason to expect a terrible struggle long after the point at which some people can now look back and say, "Japan was already beaten."
A month after our occupation I heard General MacArthur say that even then, if the Japanese government lost control over its people and the millions of former Japanese soldiers took to guerrilla warfare in the mountains, it could take a million American troops ten years to master the situation.
That this was not an impossibility is shown by the following fact, which I have not seen reported. We recall the long period of nearly three weeks between the Japanese offer to surrender and the actual surrender on September 2. This was needed in order to arrange details: of the surrender and occupation and to permit the Japanese government to prepare its people to accept the capitulation. It is not generally realized that there was threat of a revolt against the government, led by an Army group supported by the peasants, to seize control and continue the war. For several days it was touch and go as to whether the people would follow their government in surrender.
The bulk of the Japanese people did not consider themselves beaten; in fact they believed they were winning in spite of the terrible punishment they had taken. They watched the paper balloons take off and float eastward in the wind, confident that these were carrying a terrible retribution to the United States in revenge for our air raids.
so because the US was taking a battering on the battlefield, dropping bombs on civilian women and children (please not 'civilian' is the operative word here) killing hundreds of thousands was legitimate was it?
Under certain circumstances i can do globalist BUT not on this,just for 1 second imagine the carnage if a ground assault had happened.
Japan had 1,000's of students to call on for suicide (NOT Science students though)strikes,its an horrific thought.
<a class="postlink" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&cad=rja&ved=0CFsQFjAH&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kilroywashere.org%2F006-Pages%2FInvasion.html&ei=uSYnUvreF-eq7QbFxoDIDQ&usg=AFQjCNEVZnueJXAJRy0YDFNuEOCDApnd1g&bvm=bv.51495398,d.ZGU" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j ... 5398,d.ZGU</a>
Was it worth the risk?methinks not.