Roman Catholic Bishop Wants Everyone to Call God 'Allah'

Steve, a ghastly but plausible interpretation. Japanese guinea pigs?

oralloy wrote:

dlowan wrote:

So..if Hussein HAD had nukes, and had dropped an A bomb on the pentagon, the fact that he happened to wipe out a few million civilians would not have caused you to call it terror, because it was a military target, one assumes?

Correct. Nuking the pentagon is actually one of my favorite examples to demonstrate why nuking Japan wasn't terrorism, although I tend to use a hypothetical nuclear war with the Soviet Union during the Cold War in my examples.

I made such a point at the bottom of page 10 of this thread.

Of course, nuking the Pentagon would justify us annihilating whoever did it. But I wouldn't say that the target was anything other than the Pentagon.

Then at least your nonsense is consistent.

oralloy wrote:

I find it highly unlikely that our bombing of Japan (counting both the napalm raids and the A-bombs) killed more than 400,000 civilians.

Not sure that such a toll says anything about the intent, if such is your argument

BTW...you need to add in the deaths from the A bombs since the attack.

If you deny that the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrorist acts, you have a rational case to back you, whether participants here agree with you or not.


If you deny that they were intended to cause terror in Japan you are flying in the face of reason...and stated intent.

Ah yes, it's good to see heads of States, through the use of semantics, writing themselves out of the ability to commit terrorism.

It's difficult to call carpet bombing anything other than what it is, an indiscriminate bombing designed to inflict terror and retribution upon a population.

Considering Hiroshima and Nagasaki hadn't been bombed up until the dropping of the A bomb, one would assume that they weren't for primary strategic significance in their war producing ability (as compared to other sites).

The selection criteria backs this up.

Considering the target selection criteria included the density of surrounding dwellings, one can only conclude that the death of civilians were included in the target selection criteria.

Before my recent digression to the actual subject of the thread, people were talking about the A bombing of Japan.

Towards the end of the war, when the Japanese had made representations through the Swiss about surrender terms, targets - "legitimate" or otherwise - were becoming scarce.

That is there was little of significance left in Japan that had not been damaged by conventional bombing.

The development of nuclear weapons was probably the single most significant event affecting geo politics to come out of WW2. Their use or threat of use would go on to dominate the relationship between states for decades to come, and still does. Truman was well aware of this in 1945.

The unpalatable fact is that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were completely unnecessary to end the war.

But completely necessary to understand what war might be like in future. The atomic bombings were experiments, to test the devices, measure their affects (on previously undamaged targets) and to find out what real uranium and plutonium weapons do to real live cities...hence no warnings.

In his diary Truman clearly writes with one eye to the future. He wanted to put some moral distance between himself and the awful reality of the atomic bombings.

After the bombings the Japanese suddenly surrendered. Although it might appear the two events were connected, they were not. Without assurances that the Emperor would not be humiliated, the Japanese high command were willing to fight on to the death, if necessary of Japan itself.

After the experiments with the atom bombs, the war ended and Hirohito (who should imo have faced war crimes charges) became the constitutional monarch. This arrangement could have brought the war to a close earlier in 1945...but then the bombs weren't ready.

JLNobody wrote:

Steve, a ghastly but plausible interpretation. Japanese guinea pigs?

Yes. IMO Truman stuck to the "unconditional surrender" formula, knowing full well it would never be accepted.

You misunderstand the selection criteria. They included the density in their calculations because they needed to flatten a large area of significance in order to make Japan fully realize the power of the bombs being dropped on them.

They of course knew that they'd be killing civilians, but the main point was to flatten something big.

The summary I produced above was entirely my own words, and I admit to one mistake, it was the Swedish not Swiss who the Japanese approached.

But I challenge anyone here, especially oralloy to read this site

http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/Churchill/Japan_surrender_attempts/MS.html

and maintain the atomic bombing of Japanese cities was necessary to end the war.

Steve 41oo wrote:

But I challenge anyone here, especially oralloy to read this site

http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/Churchill/Japan_surrender_attempts/MS.html

and maintain the atomic bombing of Japanese cities was necessary to end the war.

I'll read it in a second, but it is not my position that the bombs were necessary to end the war.

-- Just saw it was by David Irving -- haven't read it yet, but he is a Neo-Nazi Holocaust denier. I doubt I'll accept him as a credible source. I'll read on though.

FORMERLY SECRET FILES in London and Washington now reveal that Japan was trying to surrender, and had put out the most serious peace messages, three weeks before the atomic bombs were dropped; and that Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and the other Allied leaders were aware of this.

JAPAN 's military position was already hopeless. Her oil stocks were running low, and American air raids and naval bombardments were wrecking her war economy. A fire raid in March 1945 had already killed over 100,000 civilians in Tokyo. During May and June the bombing had reached a crescendo with individual raids by B-29 Super-fortresses cascading seven thousand tons of bombs into Japanese cities.

For Tokyo the writing was on the wall. On June 18, Truman's chief of staff Admiral William D Leahy voiced the opinion that a surrender could be arranged "with terms that can be accepted by Japan."

By that time Japan had begun running discreet surrender flags up the flagmasts of several of her diplomatic missions around the world, particularly in messages radioed to ambassadors in Moscow and Stockholm. They were using, intriguingly, a code -- PURPLE -- which they knew both the Americans and British were capable of reading.

There were however snags. The Japanese ambassador in Moscow was an indolent, opinionated diplomat who

On July 8, the Department learned that the Japanese military attaché at Stockholm had told Prince Bernadotte over dinner that the Emperor Hirohito would ask Sweden's King Gustav to contact the Allies when the right time came, and that he had stated only one Japanese condition of surrendering: namely, that the Emperor himself remain in office. (This term was subsequently adopted by the Allies).

The fact that Whitehall was aware of Japanese surrender attempts ever since July 13 is still concealed from British researchers.

Quote:

For Tokyo the writing was on the wall. On June 18, Truman's chief of staff Admiral William D Leahy voiced the opinion that a surrender could be arranged "with terms that can be accepted by Japan."

Perhaps he voiced such an opinion. But critics of the bombings like to take Leahy's post-war views and pretend that they were expressed during the war. And Irving is known for misconstruing reality. I'd want some reputable verification before I accepted that Leahy said such a thing at that time.

Admiral Leahy was the Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and the unofficial coordinator of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A close advisor to both presidents, he thought a Japanese surrender could be arranged without use of the atomic bomb and without an invasion of the Japanese mainland. He felt that demands for unconditional surrender would only encourage Japan to fight on and cost American lives.

[quote="oralloy"] [quote]For Tokyo the writing was on the wall. On June 18, Truman's chief of staff Admiral William D Leahy voiced the opinion that a surrender could be arranged "with terms that can be accepted by Japan."

Admiral Leahy was the Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and the unofficial coordinator of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A close advisor to both presidents, he thought a Japanese surrender could be arranged without use of the atomic bomb and without an invasion of the Japanese mainland. He felt that demands for unconditional surrender would only encourage Japan to fight on and cost American lives.

It wasnt just Leahy who thought the atomic bombings unnecessary

http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm

and I'll just leave the last word with

BRIGADIER GENERAL CARTER CLARKE
(The military intelligence officer in charge of preparing intercepted Japanese cables - the MAGIC summaries - for Truman and his advisors)

"...when we didn't need to do it, and we knew we didn't need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs."[/b]

I've wondered myself why the Allies insisted on the use of the term Unconditional Surrender.

From what I have read, there were only two impediments standing in the road of Japan surrendering prior to the end of the war, and those were the use of the term 'Unconditional Surrender' (rather than some other term that didn't cause the Japanese to lose so much face), and the reassurance that the office of the Emperor would remain.

Those weren't a big deal to grant.

We relented on the phrase "unconditional surrender" in the Potsdam Proclamation before the bombs were dropped. All that was required was the "unconditional surrender of Japan's armed forces".