The myths that flow from US propaganda; the myths that stick

Er, no. Japan's communication only said "please allow Prince Konoye to come and talk to you guys".

Had there actually been any outline of Japan's plan presented, it would have described Japan and the Soviets scheming together to allow Japan to end the war in a draw instead of surrendering.





That's a bit disjointed. The author should decide whether he is trying to portray Stimson as being for or against dropping the bombs, and then stick with that portrayal, instead of jumping from one position to the other with each succeeding paragraph.

In any case. Japan refused to surrender. If they were really so ready to surrender, then it is their own fault for not having surrendered.





That is completely untrue. Truman, like everyone else, had no idea what would make Japan surrender.





While it is true that people hoped the A-bombs would have the side effect of making the Soviets start acting civilized, it is not true that this is why the bombs were dropped.

Everyone was already planning on nuking Japan into surrender just as soon as the bombs were ready. The Soviets were just yet another reason to do what everyone had already decided to do.





Nope. The use was precipitated by the desire to make Japan surrender.

The Soviet issue could not advance any further a schedule that was already being pushed as hard as possible.





It should be noted that he only said this years after the war was over when it was safe to consider options in hindsight.

He certainly said nothing like this before the bombs were dropped.





Well, it was definitely true that we were going to defeat Japan one way or another.





The real purpose of *building* the bombs was to counter the Nazis if they also built them.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-real-reason-america-used-nuclear-weapons-against-japan-it-was-not-to-end-the-war-or-save-lives/5308192


Why Were Bombs Dropped on Populated Cities Without Military Value?

Even military officers who favored use of nuclear weapons mainly favored using them on unpopulated areas or Japanese military targets … not cities.

For example, Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy Lewis Strauss proposed to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal that a non-lethal demonstration of atomic weapons would be enough to convince the Japanese to surrender … and the Navy Secretary agreed (pg. 145, 325):

I proposed to Secretary Forrestal that the weapon should be demonstrated before it was used. Primarily it was because it was clear to a number of people, myself among them, that the war was very nearly over. The Japanese were nearly ready to capitulate… My proposal to the Secretary was that the weapon should be demonstrated over some area accessible to Japanese observers and where its effects would be dramatic. I remember suggesting that a satisfactory place for such a demonstration would be a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood… I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height above such a forest… would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. It seemed to me that a demonstration of this sort would prove to the Japanese that we could destroy any of their cities at will… Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation…

It seemed to me that such a weapon was not necessary to bring the war to a successful conclusion, that once used it would find its way into the armaments of the world…

General George Marshall agreed:

Contemporary documents show that Marshall felt “these weapons might first be used against straight military objectives such as a large naval installation and then if no complete result was derived from the effect of that, he thought we ought to designate a number of large manufacturing areas from which the people would be warned to leave–telling the Japanese that we intend to destroy such centers….”

As the document concerning Marshall’s views suggests, the question of whether the use of the atomic bomb was justified turns … on whether the bombs had to be used against a largely civilian target rather than a strictly military target—which, in fact, was the explicit choice since although there were Japanese troops in the cities, neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki was deemed militarily vital by U.S. planners. (This is one of the reasons neither had been heavily bombed up to this point in the war.) Moreover, targeting [at Hiroshima and Nagasaki] was aimed explicitly on non-military facilities surrounded by workers’ homes.

Historians Agree that the Bomb Wasn’t Needed

Historians agree that nuclear weapons did not need to be used to stop the war or save lives.

As historian Doug Long notes:

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission historian J. Samuel Walker has studied the history of research on the decision to use nuclear weapons on Japan. In his conclusion he writes, “The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisors knew it.” (J. Samuel Walker, The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Historiographical Update, Diplomatic History, Winter 1990, pg. 110).

Politicians Agreed

Many high-level politicians agreed. For example, Herbert Hoover said (pg. 142):

The Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945…up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; …if such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the [atomic] bombs.

Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew noted (pg. 29-32):

In the light of available evidence I myself and others felt that if such a categorical statement about the [retention of the] dynasty had been issued in May, 1945, the surrender-minded elements in the [Japanese] Government might well have been afforded by such a statement a valid reason and the necessary strength to come to an early clearcut decision.

If surrender could have been brought about in May, 1945, or even in June or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the [Pacific] war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the gainer.

Why Then Were Atom Bombs Dropped on Japan?

If dropping nuclear bombs was unnecessary to end the war or to save lives, why was the decision to drop them made? Especially over the objections of so many top military and political figures?

One theory is that scientists like to play with their toys:

On September 9, 1945, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, was publicly quoted extensively as stating that the atomic bomb was used because the scientists had a “toy and they wanted to try it out . . . .” He further stated, “The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment . . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it.”

However, most of the Manhattan Project scientists who developed the atom bomb were opposed to using it on Japan.

Albert Einstein – an important catalyst for the development of the atom bomb (but not directly connected with the Manhattan Project) – said differently:

“A great majority of scientists were opposed to the sudden employment of the atom bomb.” In Einstein’s judgment, the dropping of the bomb was a political – diplomatic decision rather than a military or scientific decision.

Indeed, some of the Manhattan Project scientists wrote directly to the secretary of defense in 1945 to try to dissuade him from dropping the bomb:

We believe that these considerations make the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan inadvisable. If the United States would be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race of armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons.

Political and Social Problems, Manhattan Engineer District Records, Harrison-Bundy files, folder # 76, National Archives (also contained in: Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 1987 edition, pg. 323-333).

The scientists questioned the ability of destroying Japanese cities with atomic bombs to bring surrender when destroying Japanese cities with conventional bombs had not done so, and – like some of the military officers quoted above – recommended a demonstration of the atomic bomb for Japan in an unpopulated area.

The Real Explanation?

History.com notes:

In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective …. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S. President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War.

New Scientist reported in 2005:

The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.

Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.

“He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species,” says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, US. “It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity.”

***

[The conventional explanation of using the bombs to end the war and save lives] is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US.

***

New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman’s main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.

According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was “looking for peace”. Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.

“Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan,” says Selden.

John Pilger points out:

The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.” The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success” of “the experiment”.

We’ll give the last word to University of Maryland professor of political economy – and former Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and Special Assistant in the Department of State – Gar Alperovitz:

Though most Americans are unaware of the fact, increasing numbers of historians now recognize the United States did not need to use the atomic bomb to end the war against Japan in 1945. Moreover, this essential judgment was expressed by the vast majority of top American military leaders in all three services in the years after the war ended: Army, Navy and Army Air Force. Nor was this the judgment of “liberals,” as is sometimes thought today. In fact, leading conservatives were far more outspoken in challenging the decision as unjustified and immoral than American liberals in the years following World War II.

***

Instead [of allowing other options to end the war, such as letting the Soviets attack Japan with ground forces], the United States rushed to use two atomic bombs at almost exactly the time that an August 8 Soviet attack had originally been scheduled: Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. The timing itself has obviously raised questions among many historians. The available evidence, though not conclusive, strongly suggests that the atomic bombs may well have been used in part because American leaders “preferred”—as Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Martin Sherwin has put it—to end the war with the bombs rather than the Soviet attack. Impressing the Soviets during the early diplomatic sparring that ultimately became the Cold War also appears likely to have been a significant factor.

***

The most illuminating perspective, however, comes from top World War II American military leaders. The conventional wisdom that the atomic bomb saved a million lives is so widespread that … most Americans haven’t paused to ponder something rather striking to anyone seriously concerned with the issue: Not only did most top U.S. military leaders think the bombings were unnecessary and unjustified, many were morally offended by what they regarded as the unnecessary destruction of Japanese cities and what were essentially noncombat populations. Moreover, they spoke about it quite openly and publicly.

***

Shortly before his death General George C. Marshall quietly defended the decision, but for the most part he is on record as repeatedly saying that it was not a military decision, but rather a political one.


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Hiroshima was a huge military center and was Japan's primary military port. Most of Japan's invasions of their neighbors were launched from Hiroshima.

There were tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers in Hiroshima; most of them were awaiting deployment to the beaches to stand in the way of our coming invasion. Hiroshima was also the military headquarters in charge of repelling any invasion of the southern half of Japan.


The primary target of the second A-bomb was Kokura Arsenal, a massive (4100' x 2000') arms-production complex that was supplying the Japanese military with all sorts of weapons. The secondary target was Niigata (another big military port, sort of a lesser version of Hiroshima). The tertiary target was the Mitsubishi Shipyards, a massive warship construction facility near Nagasaki.

Due to technical and weather difficulties, the bomb ended up being dropped on Urakami, an industrial zone north of Nagasaki. There it destroyed both the Mitsubishi Steel Works and the Mitsubishi Torpedo Works.

Before Japan attacked us, Pearl Harbor had been regarded as immune to air-dropped torpedoes because the water was so shallow that the torpedoes would hit the ocean floor and embed themselves in the mud. This was the only harbor in the world (outside Japan) that had such a natural defense against air-dropped torpedoes. In order to attack us, Japan had to find a way to modify their torpedoes so that they would defeat these unique defenses. The aforementioned Mitsubishi Torpedo Works was the place that did those modifications.

(The damage to the torpedo factory was quite satisfactory. )



The A-bombs were dropped on Japanese military targets.



What a coincidence.

Hiroshima was a large naval installation.

Both Kokura Arsenal and Nagasaki were large manufacturing areas.

Leaflets were dropped warning civilians to leave.



Untrue.



The reason Hiroshima had not been bombed previously was because it was being explicitly saved so that the A-bombs would have a target.

The reason Nagasaki had not been bombed previously was because it was hard to pinpoint using radar guidance, which gave it a natural immunity to nighttime bombing raids.



The targeting at Hiroshima killed half of the Japanese soldiers stationed there and flattened the military headquarters in charge of repelling the invasion.

The targeting north of Nagasaki caused nearly total destruction of both the Mitsubishi Steel Works and the Mitsubishi Torpedo Works.



That's a rather silly question to even address.

Of course if you took away any one weapon system, we still would have won the war.

But that did not change the fact that we still needed to fight the war, and we had to use some weapons in order to do that.



Strange how Japan flatly refused any negotiation whatsoever until the day after Nagasaki.



It was not until after Nagasaki that Japan was even willing to contemplate surrender "with a guarantee of Hirohito's unlimited dictatorial power".

It seems unlikely that Mr. Grew's proposal about "allowing Hirohito's line to continue as a powerless figurehead" would have found much favor with Japan.

Note in particular that Mr. Grew's proposal was worded in a way that was rather ominous to Hirohito. It strongly hinted that the powerless figurehead would be his son.



Because we were at war with Japan, and Japan had not yet surrendered.

This malarkey is pretending that, if the war could have been won without using the A-bombs, then the A-bombs were used for some reason other than winning the war.

That is logical idiocy. Just because the A-bombs were not strictly necessary, that does not mean the motive was not to win the war.

And even though it was possible to take any one weapon system and say "the war could have been won without it", it was still necessary to take some of those weapons and go attack Japan with them.



There was only one top military or political figure who objected to dropping the bombs: Ike.

Ike voiced his objections to only one person: Stimson.

When Stimson called Ike an idiot, Ike let the matter drop and didn't tell another soul.

Ike was rather late in voicing his objection. It would have been too late to stop the bombings even if Ike had managed to be persuasive.



As if the reason we went to war with Japan was "because we wanted to play with our weapons".

Anti-war kooks are a disgrace to humanity. Just saying.



Those alleged "historians" are pretty goofy. If we needed to demonstrate the bombs to Russia, we could have invited them to witness some nuclear tests.

If that didn't work, we could have just started nuking Russian cities. I'm sure they would have noticed. Japan noticed.



It is funny the sort of malarkey that comes out of the mouths of anti-war kooks. (And note: these anti-war kooks are not in any way historians.)

There is no evidence for the silly claim that the the US did not have the goal of making Japan surrender.

A crime against humanity would require the deliberate targeting of civilians. As has already been established, these were strikes on military targets.

As for "beginning the process of annihilating the human race", last time I checked we're still here.



The notion that "Truman didn't care if we won the war with Japan" is ludicrous.



Context is everything.

Japan wanted to end the war in a draw (much the way the Korean War later ended). They were not trying to surrender.

That's why the records do not indicate any surrender offers at that time.



Nope. Neither MacArthur nor Leahy said any such thing during the war.

Ike only voiced his objection to one person: Stimson. After Stimson called Ike an idiot, they both agreed to let the matter drop. Truman was never informed of Ike's views.



"Seldon is a retard," says Oralloy.



Stimson and Truman were both very well aware that a handful of cities were being spared conventional bombing so that there would be targets for the A-bombs.



He was answering a question from an anti-war kook, and was too polite to call them a retard.

The premise of the question does not even make sense.

Surrender was the goal. The A-bombs were tools used in the furtherance of that goal.



Ugh. Do we have to?

Gar Alperovitz is a fraud who deliberately spreads untrue information about the A-bombs.



This bit of nonsense is premised on another bit of retarded logic that makes sense only to anti-war kooks.

Apparently instead of attacking on multiple fronts, we are expected to only attack on only one front at a time. We were apparently supposed to wait until the Soviets were done attacking Japan before we attacked again.

Were we also supposed to wait until the Soviets were done attacking Germany before attempting D-Day at Normandy?

And incidentally, the A-bombs were dropped because they were ready. It was the Soviets who rushed their schedule. They moved their invasion forward a couple weeks when Truman informed them at Potsdam that the A-bombs were functional.

“The Joint Chiefs told Truman to expect over 1,000,000 American casualties and even larger number of Japanese dead in the pending attack on the home islands.”

This is false. There’s no record of the Joint Chiefs of Staff formally studying the decision and they never made an official recommendation to the President, according to Alperovitz. Additionally, the Joint Chiefs never claimed to be involved. The claim of 1 million casualties as a result of an (unnecessary) American invasion is a complete fabrication. It originated from a 1947 Harper’s article by Secretary of War Stimson. Stimson invented the number. It is not based on a shred of historical evidence.

For his part, President Truman randomly selected the number of American lives ostensibly saved as a result of dropping the bomb. He said it would “save thousands of American lives.” He later remarked, “It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think they were and are.” He also said, “I thought 200,000 of our young men would be saved by making that decision.”

http://www.globalresearch.ca/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-american-high-school-textbooks-perpetuate-the-big-lie/5344701

The Enduring Myth of Hiroshima

By John LaForge
Global Research, August 07, 2014
Consortium News 6 August 2014

The U.S. atomic destruction of 140,000 people at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki was never “necessary” because Japan was already smashed, no land invasion was needed and Japan was suing for peace. The official myth that “the bombs saved lives” by hurrying Japan’s surrender can no longer be believed except by those who love to be fooled.

The long-standing fiction has been destroyed by the historical record kept in U.S., Soviet, Japanese and British archives — now mostly declassified — and detailed by Ward Wilson in his book Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).



Image: The mushroom cloud from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945.

Greg Mitchell’s Atomic Cover-Up (Sinclair Books, 2011) also helps explain the durability of the “saved lives” ruse. Wartime and occupation censors seized all films and still photos of the two atomic cities, and the U.S. government kept them hidden for decades. Even in 1968, newsreel footage from Hiroshima held in the National Archives was stamped, “SECRET, Not To Be Released Without the Approval of the DOD.” Photos of the atomized cities that did reach the public merely showed burned buildings or mushroom clouds — rarely human victims.

In Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial, (Grosset/Putnam, 1995) Robert Lifton and Mitchell note that Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, “left nothing to chance.” Even before Hiroshima, he prohibited U.S. commanders from commenting on the atomic attacks without clearance from the War Department.

“We didn’t want MacArthur and others saying the war could have been won without the bomb,” Groves said.

In fact, MacArthur did not believe the bomb was needed to end the war, but he too established a censorship program as commander of the U.S. occupation of Japan. He banned reporters from visiting Hiroshima or Nagasaki, expelled reporters who defied the ban and later said that those who complained that censorship existed in Japan were engaged in “a maliciously false propaganda campaign.”

That most people in the United States still believe the “saved lives” rationale to be true is because of decades of this censorship and myth-making, begun by President Harry Truman, who said Aug. 6, 1945, “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. … That was because we wished this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”

In fact, the city of 350,000 had practically no military value at all and the target was the city, not the base three kilometers away.

Taking President Truman at his word, the 140,000 civilians killed at Hiroshima are the minimum to be expected when exploding a small nuclear weapon on a “military base.” Today’s “small” Cruise missile warheads ¾ which are 12 times the power of Truman’s A-bomb ¾ could kill 1.68 million each.

Official censorship of what the two bombs did to people and the reasons for it has been so successful, that 25 years of debunking hasn’t managed to generally topple the official narrative.

In 1989, historian Gar Alperovitz reported, “American leaders knew well in advance that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not required to bring about Japan’s surrender;” and later, in his 847-page The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (Random House, 1995), “I think it can be proven that the bomb was not only unnecessary but known in advance not to be necessary.” The popular myth “didn’t just happen,” Alperovitz says, “it was created.”

Kept hidden for decades was the 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey’s conclusion that Japan almost certainly would have surrendered in 1945 without the atomic bombs, without a Soviet invasion and without a U.S. invasion. Not long after V-J Day in 1945, Brig. Gen. Bonnie Feller wrote, “Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan’s unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either of these events took place.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-star general and the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, said in his memoirs he believed “that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”

Adm. William Leahy, the wartime Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in 1950, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material success in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

Feller’s, Ike’s and Leahy’s opinions were conspicuously left out of or censored by the Smithsonian Institution’s 1995 display of the atomic B-29 bomber “Enola Gay.”

Admiral Leahy’s 1950 myth-busting and censor-busting about the Bomb could be an epitaph for the nuclear age: “I was not taught to make war in that fashion,” he said of Hiroshima’s incineration, “and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”


http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-enduring-myth-of-hiroshima/5395102

JTT,

Stfu.

Oral > You

You're just copying and pasting.

He's explaining.

You LOST.

you took the words right out of Oralboy's mouth, it musta been while he was kissin' you.

Are you copy and pasting?

Yes.

Is he explaining?

Yes.

Can he suggest himself as an auto-biography?

No.

So how can Oral say what I said when I am using a different perspective that is not used by first-person references?

Therefore your bratty remarks do not work on me.

If you're going to make a claim, be sure that your relation point isn't mounted on your own delusions of reality, else you get contradictions that are evident above.

Spewing propaganda doesn't equate to explaining.

It's not propaganda when they are explaining it from the heart and mind.

He's not copy and pasting.

You are.

It's you spreading propaganda.

While Herbert Hoover was not in any official office at the time, Truman was relying on him for advice and was granting him access to classified information (nothing about the A-bombs however).

On May 30, 1945, Hoover sent Truman a memo where he listed the potential invasion as costing 500,000 to 1,000,000 American lives.

In July 1945, the War Department commissioned a study of potential casualties from prominent scientists, who were provided access to classified intelligence in order to complete their study. The study predicted that the invasion would cost 400,000 to 800,000 American lives and 1,700,000 to 4,000,000 American casualties.

As for the necessity of the invasion, Japan was free to surrender at any time. Had they refused to surrender, the invasion would have gone ahead.

Now that is really hilarious.

More smegma, Oralboy.

It's hilarious because it's true.

We wouldn't be laughing at jokes if they weren't true.

People laugh at things because they are physiologically preserving their composure, like lightning spreads nitrogen to preserve our planet's composure.

When you laugh at me, you're preventing yourself from losing composure to the fact that you cannot argue my points.

Comedians speak more truth than politicians.

Laughter is the key to recognizing truth, that is, if you are not afraid of admitting to your own lies.

Wrong. Japan did not sue for peace until the day after Nagasaki.



Hiroshima was a huge military center and was Japan's primary military port. Most of Japan's invasions of their neighbors were launched from Hiroshima.

There were tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers in Hiroshima; most of them were awaiting deployment to the beaches to stand in the way of our coming invasion. Hiroshima was also the military headquarters in charge of repelling any invasion of the southern half of Japan.



The city was riddled with military bases. Half of the Japanese soldiers therein were killed.



Gar Alperovitz is not in any way a historian.

His "necessity" nonsense is a straw man argument.



Japan was free to surrender before the bombs were dropped if that is what they preferred. No one was stopping them.

To be fair, I have a bit of an advantage over him here. He's confronting me on a subject that I have a great deal of expertise on.



Well, JTT pasted the same article twice today, and I confess I copied part of my response to the second one from my answer the first time he posted it.

But I did write out my original reply from the heart and mind as you put it.

Bombings Worse than Nagasaki and Hiroshima

by Laurence M. Vance


The world knows all too well about the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima on Monday, August 6, 1945 (“Little Boy”), and on Nagasaki on Thursday, August 9 (“Fat Man”). “Dropping the bombs ended the war,” said President Harry Truman.
They may have ended the war, but they did not end the bombing of Japan.

On August 14, 1945, after the two atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan, and after Emperor Hirohito had agreed to surrender because “the enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage,” General Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, to boost his already over-inflated ego (he was made a five-star general in 1944), undertook a completely unnecessary act of terror from the skies over Japan that had never before been seen. In their 1953 book The Army Air Forces in World War II, Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate state:

Arnold wanted as big a finale as possible, hoping that USASTAF could hit the Tokyo area in a 1,000-plane mission: the Twentieth Air Force had put up 853 B-29's and 79 fighters on 1 August, and Arnold thought the number could be rounded out by calling on Doolittle's Eighth Air Force. Spaatz still wanted to drop the third atom bomb on Tokyo but thought that battered city a poor target for conventional bombing; instead, he proposed to divide his forces between seven targets. Arnold was apologetic about the unfortunate mixup on the 11th and, accepting Spaatz' amendment, assured him that his orders had been “co-ordinated with my superiors all the way to the top.” The teleconference ended with a fervid “Thank God” from Spaatz. Kennedy had the Okinawa strips tied up with other operations so that Doolittle was unable to send out his VHB's. From the Marianas, 449 B-29's went out for a daylight strike on the 14th, and that night, with top officers standing by at Washington and Guam for a last-minute cancellation, 372 more were airborne. Seven planes dispatched on special bombing missions by the 509th Group brought the number of B-20's to 828, and with 186 fighter escorts dispatched, USASTAF passed Arnold's goal with a total of 1,014 aircraft. There were no losses, and before the last B-29 returned President Truman announced the unconditional surrender of Japan.
This was the largest bombing raid in history. Yet, many timelines of World War II do not even list this event as having occurred.

But although this was the largest bombing raid, it was not the deadliest. In fact, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan were not even the deadliest. Because high-altitude precision bombing was viewed as not effective enough, the Army Air Force began using incendiary attacks against Japanese cities. After months of studies, planning, and several incendiary bombing test runs, Tokyo was firebombed on the night of March 9, 1945, by low-flying B-29's with increased bomb loads. Seventeen hundred tons of bombs were dropped in a densely populated area (an average of 103,000 people per square mile) of twelve square miles. The result was just what one would expect: as many as 100,000 dead, over 40,000 wounded, over 1,000,000 made homeless, over 267,000 buildings destroyed. The water boiled in some small canals because of the intense heat. This was the most destructive air attack in history. It killed more people than the dropping of an atomic bomb.


The Tokyo firebombing raid was followed by larger ones against Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe, some of Japan's largest cities. Then Nagoya was hit again. All in all, 1,595 sorties had flown in 10 days, dropping over 9,300 toms of bombs. Japanese cities — large and small — were continually hit with conventional and incendiary bombs through the end of the war.

But the bombing of Japanese cities was not war, it was wholesale murder. How, then, does this act of terrorism continue to be defended almost sixty-five years later? Simple. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. In fact, nothing U.S. forces did to Japan during the war matters because of Pearl Harbor.

But even if FDR didn't have prior knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and even if the United States didn't provoke Japan into firing the first shot (See Robert Stinnett's excellent book Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor, which persuasively argues that he did have prior knowledge and did provoke Japan into firing the first shot), Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor still doesn't justify bombing the civilian population of Japan. Why is it that the 9/11 attacks on America are considered acts of terrorism but a 1000-plane bombing raid on Tokyo after the dropping of two atomic bombs isn't?

Pearl Harbor or no Pearl Harbor, the bombing of Tokyo on August 14, 1945, was a despicable act — worse than the firebombing of Tokyo, worse than Hiroshima, and worse than Nagasaki — because it was so unnecessary.

August 17, 2009

Spewing propaganda isn't a measure of expertise, Oralboy.

Let's get our facts straight.

This was after both A-bombs, yes.

This was after Japan had offered to surrender so long as we agreed to Hirohito retaining unlimited dictatorial power as Japan's living deity.

It was after our reply to Japan that Hirohito was going to be subordinate to MacArthur.

It was NOT after Japan's acceptance of Hirohito's subordinate status to MacArthur.


The description of the raid as "a completely unnecessary act of terror" is silly. It was a standard conventional bombing raid, much like the raids that had been destroying Japanese cities all summer.


And note that this bombing raid was actually influential in ending the war. The Japanese Army was attempting a coup when the raid happened. And right when our bombers flew over Tokyo, there were Japanese soldiers trying to seize and destroy the recording of the Emperor's surrender speech that was intended to be broadcast later that day.

While our guys were not targeting Tokyo that night, the power to Tokyo was cut off anyway (to prevent our pilots using city lights as targeting) just in case. This two hour blackout wreaked havoc with the Japanese soldiers who were frantically searching for the hidden recording.



Indeed he did. As did Admiral Nimitz and General LeMay.

I've been waiting to pounce, should you ever cut-n-paste something claiming that these guys opposed using the bombs.

Unfortunately the people who write the articles that you cut-n-paste seem to have wised up and stopped claiming these guys as opponents of using the bombs.



The 9/11 attacks targeted civilians.

The bombing of Japan was aimed at military targets.



Tokyo was not bombed in this raid. The bombers merely passed over Tokyo on their way to a different target.

The August 14 raid bombed the cities of Kumagaya and Isesaki.

As for the raid's necessity, Japan was free to surrender earlier if they wished.

And considering the coup and the impact of the blackout on the search for the Emperor's recording, it may well be that this bombing raid was critically necessary.