Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60th Anniversary

Ridgerunner

Ridgerunner

Vice Admiral
I was kinda busy a few days ago to do Hiroshima on time, but better late than never!

Faced with the exact same circumstances again, I like to think that we'd do it all over again, instead of opting to take up to a million American casualties, and God knows how many Japanese casualties to continue with a conventional war.
 
Yeah I read the article on the memorial services held in Hiroshima and Nagasaka. It was an extremely sad situation...however, WW2 as a whole, was a sad situation. The A-bomb ended a war that would have taken possibly years to conclude with possibly millions of addtional casualties on both sides. For that, the A-bomb was possibly a lesser evil. However, its use was also a very sad moment because it was the first time in American history that we specifically targetted a civilian object and knowingly ordered its destruction. War is not meant to be waged on civilians...unfortunately that distinction over time has been blurred. A pity...
 
I won't take position to a discussion based on Hiroshima, but here are my redundant, but really impartial (I'm neither fan of the two mentioned forces, nor any which participated on the WWII) 2cents:

I think every use of an atomic bomb is naive. It's not only an explosion, it's radio-activity (which causes sub-molecular damages, which are irreparable to us, idependently of its half-life, btw) which can be transfered over the sea & atmosphere to reach the whole globe. And then there are dangers even untold. These past actions had distant (yes, a "foe which can defend himself" than people which were strict persecuted) similarity to a genocide, which took place in my homeland. I guess a navy blockade and bombards on military installation would have brought the Japanese Emperor to the conclusion to capitulate his military to the allied forces. Of course, that would hunger the population, but unrest would also occure, which could have agitated against the regime. Ok, stupid rant, it had all to do with timing in the whole war, right? But I think the a-bombs were big 2 faults in the war - not only of the humanistic/medical aspects and a cultural/psychological shock (the second wave of memetic kind followed and was also extremelly), because of the human ignorance of wielding with not understood powers towards natural enviroment. :mad: Even without any ecological grasp or ideology, it must be known that earth provides our lives for existance (more or less). That could wrote everybody, actually. But why can't react anyone of those powerful ones properly with such problems - economy can only function fluently if natural resources were offered - don't be a clueless hippie, think at least with a pragmatic spirit, if it is your only drive. I think our whole civilisatory system had a flawed initiation, therefore it was inevitably that everything developed to that state of today. Jep, that must be the simple reason.
 
Maj.Striker said:
WW2 as a whole, was a sad situation. The A-bomb ended a war that would have taken possibly years to conclude with possibly millions of addtional casualties on both sides. For that, the A-bomb was possibly a lesser evil. However, its use was also a very sad moment because it was the first time in American history that we specifically targetted a civilian object and knowingly ordered its destruction.
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That's actually not entirely true. Just a few months before Hiroshima, a fleet of B-29s fire bombed Tokyo and killed more than 100,000 civilians. Some of the reason behind the switch to fire bombs had to do with winds blowing conventional ordinance off course, but the napalm strike was also designed to create a firestorm that would rip through the wooden residential districts. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0310-01.htm That being said, Japan still didn't consider surrendering after that, which goes on to show that the ensuing conventional conflict would have been extremely bitter, and the atomic bombs were probably the lesser evil you describe.
 
Thats all well and good to use an excuse for your own crimes, but lets not forgot who started the war against us, and the attrocities commited on the POW's. Never really celebrated on VP day though, dropping a couple of bombs to force a surrender seems too much like a hollow victory, not like watching the old fils with our grandparents storming Berlin tearing down the swatstika and the Russians on the Riechstag :(
 
This isn't a thread about assigning blame. Posts that degrade into typical internet junk will be deleted. I don't know where your grandparents were, but some of us had them near Hiroshima or Nagasaki sixty years ago.
 
I appologize to anybody offended as I was only trying to point out that both sides did things that where very wrong in retrospect. Guess I just suck as using the written language.
 
dropping a couple of bombs to force a surrender seems too much like a hollow victory, not like watching the old fils with our grandparents storming Berlin tearing down the swatstika and the Russians on the Riechstag
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The allied campaign in Europe involved a similarly massive strategic bombing campaign - and aspects of it, like Desden, are debated on exactly the same moral level as the atomic bombs. For whatever reason, though, we've generally romanticized B-17s killing thousands of German people but are horrified that B-29s would kill thousands of Japanese people.
 
For whatever reason, though, we've generally romanticized B-17s killing thousands of German people but are horrified that B-29s would kill thousands of Japanese people.
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It's not so much the planes that horrify people, it's the strenght of the payload that gave people brown trousers. Altough by todays standards they're considered tame, just like the old Gatling guns that "would make war so bloody, so terrible, that nobody will ever wage war again"
 
Regardless, I want to say I'm sorry for the civilians who lost their lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaka....really I'm sorry for all the lives lost in WW2, its good to remember their loss, to realize that war can and does still happen and that it has consequences. Like Chris has said, I'm not interested in assigning a guilt or blame on anyone, I just wanted to pay my respects to the fallen.

I was not aware of the firebombs used prior to the A-bomb, my previous understanding that all strategic bombings by the american forces on Japan were targetting factories and military targets. (I do know, however it was the British who intentionally bombed German cities first...not Germany as most people would assume).
 
I was not aware of the firebombs used prior to the A-bomb, my previous understanding that all strategic bombings by the american forces on Japan were targetting factories and military targets. (I do know, however it was the British who intentionally bombed German cities first...not Germany as most people would assume).
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Well, this is all somewhat of a romantic myth - strategic bombing wasn't precise at all in the 1940s. Bombing an aircraft factory in Berlin meant getting as many bombers as possible to drop as many bombs as possible in the general area... it destroyed the rest of the city in the process.

I think in pretty much any case -- and probably including the fire raids and the atomic bombings -- the military had a specific military target in mind -- but in all practicality it was a pretense.
 
The structure of many Japanese cities was such that often times factories were built right in the middle of residential areas, or residential areas sprung up around factories. This made attacking them and limiting civilian casualties almost impossible. The fact that most of these factories and residences were made entirely of wood compounded the problem of human fatalities in an attack.

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the strategic bombing campaigns of WW II. While compiling my research I read parts of an RAF strategic bombing study conducted in 1943. It claimed that 2/3 of RAF crews were missing their targets by as much as 5 miles during night raids over German occupied Europe. USAAF daylight raids were more on target, but could hardly be considered "accurate." Military thinkers such as Giulio Douhet and Billy Mitchell were basically wrong in their pre-war assertions about conventional airpower.

BUT.....

I think the fact that one plane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and one on Nagasaki, wreaking all of that damage and death- that is what really grabs people by the collar. Others have mentioned the fire-bombings of Tokyo and Dresden and the destruction those cities experienced. They are entirely correct in asserting that the damage done there was considerable, but those raids were undertaken by hundreds of aircraft dropping non atomic ordinance. That is where most people draw the line, right or wrong.
 
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