Warbird Information Exchange

I look at it with a little more different view. If you get in a fight with someone, you had better be ready to handle anything theu can throw at you. If I bully(Japan) sees someone that they think is weak(the U.S.) and forces them into a fight(Pearl Harbor), then the weaker kid beats the crap out of the bully(atomic bomb), I don't feel bad at all for the bully. That is as simple as I can make it.

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Chris Henry
EAA Aviation Museum Manager

Wow! It's scary to know all that stuff about Harry Truman, a Democrat. Not in sufficent control to prevent the dropping of "the bomb" on innocent women and children and not willing to negotiate enough with the Japanese leadership to effect a surrender... I'm ashamed at my elected leaders!

I'm learning a lot from this thread!

Now bdk, I wasn't alive at the time.
This is only what I have read, and what they taught at the school way back when...
Truman was in control, he just was not aware of everything going on around him. (Truman wasn't elected, but took control after Franklin D. Roosevelt died.)
He was thrown into the fire very quickly. Byrnes knew the ropes to pull, and pull he did. Truman looked to Byrnes to advise him of what was going on.

I could be wrong... He who wins the fight (politics and war) often writes the book about it.

But if anyone out there has heard something different, I am interested in knowing.

Like one of the earlier poster said, there is spin on everything.

My only fear is that if options were available, we should really take a hard look at them, and not leave it to one guy, or one small committee.
When the death of civilians is involved, then it should be a real hard look. Some of the Japanese may have acted like animals, but they are not animals. That must be taken into account.

And yes mustangdriver, I would beat the bully too.
Crush him!
But I would give it some thought before I would go an beat his sister and little brother if I knew the bully would be licking my boots in a week.

Live the good life!

I know what you mean, but I think we did just that. When was the last time Japan bombed someone?

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Chris Henry
EAA Aviation Museum Manager

Some interesting points and thoughts. However:

No, not at all. The Japanese surrendered unconditionally. What occurred afterwards was decisions made by Allied high command and politicians; the Japanese got what they were given. There was no 'changing' to 'conditional'.


Indeed. But Stalin had agreed to the unconditional surrender requirement along with the other allies. Russia might have been prepared to negotiate with Japan - or just take territory; and Japan was hoping that Russia was the least dedicated of its enemies, but Russia would have broken its agreement regarding unconditional surrender - and I can't see the other Allies underwriting a Russian-Japanese negotiated peace.

Your or my being 'tired' is utterly irrelevent, I'm afraid. Stand up and take it. One of the problems with history is human beings like simple, straightforward stories and rationalise complex situations into simple ones - which are what's remembered. Coupled with bad history being easier to do and remember, this results in a lot of myths. Just think about all the stories of the American Civil War or War of Independence which are simplifications that make good kid's stories.

The article in the paper was very poor and heavily slanted. A good game to play is spot where the emotive adjectives have been put...

Incidentally your 'bully' metaphor is all very well provided one assumes the entirety of the population (the 'body') was in agreement with the actions of the dictator (the 'head'). In the case of totalitarian dictatorships, that doesn't follow.

I also note the rather odd problem that crops up (mentioned by Scott) that some people today find a informed population that in part disagrees with the conduct of the war unacceptable - with a 'shoot the messenger' element of blaming the press. Every military has adequately proven that they cannot be trusted to conduct a war (effectively and within the constitutional or ethical limits of its nation) without external oversight, and direct press influence goes back to the Crimea. But you can't have it both ways; democracies are founded on the concept of an open debate, and thus a consensual war. (However, that's another whole can of worms.) The Russian front cannot have occurred as the slaughterhouse it did, without it being two totalitarian leaderships. Russia bled Germany white - just look at the numbers which are inconceivable in the west.

Regards,

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James K

"Switch on the underwater landing lights"
Emilio Largo, Thunderball.

www.VintageAeroWriter.com

JDK. I will give you the first one. The surrender was unconditional on paper and in intent. You are right. They did change it later.
Allowing for some limited condition may have been worth more consideration by Byrnes, and presented to Truman as a worthy option.
The only deal breaker was getting rid of the emperor. Hard to say if it would have made any difference in the long run.

As to the idea that Russia would have broken its agreement regarding unconditional surrender.
Russia couldn't get a surrender until they declared war first.

Russia wasn't at war yet. They were to enter a little later in the fall. Not in Aug as they did when we dropped the bomb. There was some evidence that russia was already massing troops. Russia also knew Japan to be weak. The Russians may have pressed the US for peace, but with or without the Soviets, Japan was beaten.
It was only a matter of time. Japan also knew this. (the US had broken their code, so the US knew too.)

Prior to Russia's entry into the war, they were being used as a communication channel to attempt a conditional surrender between the US/England and Japan.

Hard to say what would have happened if the US waited longer. But with the death of civilians, it should have been reviewed directly by Truman, and not pre-reviewed and finalized by Byrnes.

JDK thank you for you input. It is nice seeing people look/research into the subject and realize that there is lots more to just dropping the bomb and saying all done. This should be talked about. For us and our children. So that no one ever forgets the sacrifices that were made for our peace today by our fathers, and grandparents.

Regards,

I agree that it should be talked about, but when we get to the point when we are saying that those poor Japanese people got bombed, well that is where I stop. Those people went to war with us. We bombed them to stop a war. If they are going to blame anyone, then they can blame their government not ours.

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Chris Henry
EAA Aviation Museum Manager

Sorry mustangdriver,

There is no blame. If there is a next time... and I hope not, things should be reviewed by more people.

You must have misunderstood my post, or I didn't write it correctly.
I am not using the words "poor Japanese people got bombed"

I mean"poor non-combatants got bombed" That goes for anyone who is not actively engaged (or will be engaged) in combat and is just standing there. Dutch, English, POW, Japanese...so forth.

1.) As to those combatants who were fighting against the United States, stuff happens... too bad.

2.) As to those who were non-combatants standing next to the guy with the gun, the United States did try to minimize losses by precision bombing and it is unfortunate that bad things happened to them. Such is War. The goal is to not hit non-combatants.

3.) As to those who were targeted for psychological impact... that is what should be considered and reviewed. The bomb on the first city was targeted not at the military outpost on the outside of town, but at town center. Main reason for target, was psychological impact. (and ease of finding the target) But psychological was the primary reason. That is why the town was off limits to standard bombing prior to the bomb. To assess damage and impact the Japanese govt.

What is done is done, but civilians regardsless of race or state they belong to should be protected.

As to the active combatants and the enemy... to bad...bye bye.



Best Regards,

Bluedharma - good points. It might sound semantic, but deciding to re-enstate the Emperor and other Allied actions have noting to do with conditionality or surrender - after the fact - what happened was a one sided control on a new page.

Which comes around again - the Japanese people had little or no say in the establishment of their 'government' which was actually effectively a military Junta. The freedoms that many (Americans and Australians) take for granted in being able to vote, or stand for government (and don't use) were simply not available to pre-war Japanese people. As ever, it's the poor bastards on the ground that collect as a result of the leadership's actions. Despite the Emperor's utter failure to lead, he got given 'another go', while the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who may or may not have been behind the war but were certainly never asked what they'd like to do were vaporised and irradiated for (arguably) a greater good. To see that those Japanese people got some kind of reward for their personal choices is (IMHO) naive. But then it's always easier if you 'demonise' your enemy than to fight a just war morally.

The US was magnanimous and pragmatic rather than vengeful in victory, with the result of a stable Japan as part of the community of nations. Why is it hard for some of those people's children to understand that process?

Regards,

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James K

"Switch on the underwater landing lights"
Emilio Largo, Thunderball.

www.VintageAeroWriter.com

I did not mean what you or JDK were saying, my rant is more on what was in that link. Sorry for the mix up.

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Chris Henry
EAA Aviation Museum Manager

I've thought about this one for a while, in particular, the Japanese guy with the news crew who said "I would have fought to the death if the A- Bombs didn't work".

Well, those 2 bombs saved him too. I had an uncle getting ready to invade Japan and it saved him.

Going back almost 150 years, remember that "War is Hell", and it has been since the beginning of time. All the Generals and arm chair generals who made up the cool quotes were really never there.

The Japanese started it by invading China in the 1930's. They treated POWs pretty poorly, there was the Bataan Death March, Pearl Harbor, etc. They were a much worse enemy than the Germans were by a long shot.

They got what they deserved. Civilian deaths? Well when you are losing and the enemy brings the war to your shores, they happen. Civilians are a part of the war machine too. When the Allies couldn't destroy the UBoat pens in France, they leveled the towns that housed the workers that worked on the UBoats making them uninhabitable. If the Japanese had invaded Los Angeles, don't you think they would have lined up "Rosie the Riveter" and shot her and her airplane making friends? Would the Germans have made a firebomb raid on Brooklyn or Washington DC given the opportunity?

It simply amazes me what the enemy produced as far as weapons are concerned with quality and quantity. The air war over Germany hurt, but never really stopped production. As it always has, it took a ground war to stop hostilities. But their weapons at their best were far from innovative to the degree of the A Bomb.

What we did in the Manhattan Project was the most impressive feat ever done by mankind. READ "Making the Atomic Bomb" The Pullitzer prize winning book, it is amazing what everyone did to pitch in to this effort. The scale of spending and resource allocation was beyond anything ever attempted. Those 2 Japanese cities (along with a few others) were saved from damage for a long time so that they could do special damage assessments on a "virgin" target. They could have been easily destroyed by conventional raids.

The degree of difficulty in building a nuclear weapon is immense. The people who did the work, were the people who invented the science of it all. Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Szilard, Teller, were some of the greatest scientific minds that ever walked on this planet.

I think of it like this:

The A Bomb was a SCIENCE project; The Apollo Program was an ENGINEERING project.

Basically Scientists had to invent the science that underlaid the bomb, Apollo took existing science and used it to invent equipment that could take men to the moon.

Nobody could really agree on what was going to happen when you popped THE BOMB off. Some thought it would start a irreversible chain reaction and the resulting fire would destroy life on earth. There was no good answer as to the effect of an nuclear bast.

Those 3 weapons (1 at Trinity and 2 over Japan) were more engineering test devices than tactical weapons. They took a lot of work to put together and they were nothing like a normal "ready to use weapon". Even later in the mid 1950s when the Russians had the bomb (but no way to deliver it to the US in a meaningful manner) we had something in inventory like 15 weapons. But if you wanted to use one, it took a special crew of about 12 men 2 days to assemble it. There were only 2 of these crews in the country to do it. The weapons had a shelf life of about 18 months and then you needed to build new atomic weapons since the old ones had deteriorated.

Well you will never guess why they built a Hydrogen Bomb? They wanted a device that worked more efficiently and used less atomic material that was in short supply. The extra explosive power (of several magnitudes) was a nice by-product.

Back to the Japanese, we gave them a nice BRIGHT LINE, or "a line in the sand". We let them know that the war was over and if they didn't agree, their country and culture would be a memory.

Unfortunately we don't do that anymore. A few Nukes in Iran in 1979 would have changed things in the Middle East for many years to come. As I type this, there is an article from my hometown newspaper on my desk about a friend from college, one of my best friends, Major Mike Mundell who was killed by an IED on Jan 8, 2007 and how he missed the annual golf tournament he played in every year. Mike was a really good man with 4 teenage children who didn't have to die. Do you think his kids, m,e or the hundreds of people who knew him would have cared if dropping a H-Bomb on Bagdad would have saved him, even if 500,000 civilians were killed. No, all that matters is that a friend of 30 years is gone. Nearing the end of WWII, I can assure you there were thousands of American families that wanted to see the war over at any cost. Especially if the cost was borne by those who started the war.

When my father saw the Vietnam wall shortly after it was built, he stared at the name of a cousin who was killed there and commented that "their whole country wasn't worth one American life".

While I rambled here, the point is, if it had to be dropped or not, the A-Bomb communicated the end of the war to the enemy, it showed that Americans can do about anything we need to do to solve a problem.

In the future, maybe the other guys need to consider three things.

America invented the "bomb";
Americans were also the only ones to ever use it in anger;
America did it twice.

Praise the Lord and pass the Plutonium.

The bast__rds got what they deserved.

Mark H

I am sorry to hear of the loss of your friend. My condolences.
Regards,

Is this a contest to see who can be the most long winded while getting thier point across?
I can't spend all day trying to keep up with this thread.

Regards,
Mike

Mark, you wrote some very heartfelt comments about nuclear Bombs. I'll comment on two points. I am sorry to hear of your friend killed in Bagdad. It doesn't seem a 39 year old Father of 4 should be there. If you voted in the last two elections, did you vote for the candidate who sent him there? Will you keep doing it next time? Also you wrote about the Bomb on Japan, " those bas* rds got what they deserved". But to a large extant that is not true. There was no prime miltary target, no place where the emperor or the military leaders were grouped. Those we killed were to a large extant not the ones responsible for the Death March, etc. We got a few of them in war crimes trials, but some like the emperor escaped punishment. It was the civilians in those cities who we hit. Maybe it was necessary, maybe peace could have been acheived without the Bomb. That is what much of this discussion is about.

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Bill Greenwood
Spitfire N308WK

Bill. I did vote in the past elections and everyone since I was able to vote. I live in an area with some strong political beliefs and I didn't (and wouldn't) vote Republican. Of course Bill and Hillary are another problem completely.

The problem with the Japanese population was that they didn't rise up against the government (for whatever reason) to stop the war, which was now being carried into their living rooms (and not on Satellite TV either). Sometimes sacrifices need to be made and if there was a flow of information about the 2 bombings, then someone needed to say "Hey can we stop this all before OUR CITY IS NUKED??" IF not then the civilians have to suffer.

To an extent, if you look at Hiroshma and Nagasaki, it was more a live fire test, than an actual tactical strike. The brass really wanted to know what the "gadget" would do to those cities. Maybe dropping it on the Empoeror's Palace would be more approiate, but then nobody knew what they would do and what if the walls of the palace protected the emporer? It would not be good for our side. So it was a better decision to pop 2 small cities.

I know in the former Soviet Union, there is a memorial to the Russian Civilians that died in WWII (the number in a prior post was a LOT lower), but I remember it as 15 million. They understood the sacrifice and made it, but of course they were on the "defensive" not the "offensive" (I'm trying to get across that the Russians were not the agressors and they didn't start the war). The civilians knew they had to fight and they did a heck of a job (and they had a crappy government too).

We have problems here at home that someone needs to look at. Spending is out of control, the war in the Middle East and the war on Terror will ensure that the USA will go bankrupt kind of like the USSR did when they tried to match the "STARWARS" SDI program. As cool as F-22s, B-2s, and Trident Subs are, we really can't afford them. (don't get me wrong I'm not against a strong America, but its hard to really justify these weapons) But then, you can figure out where my investment portfolio is at ................. Because they are going to keep buying them like they had a spring white sale............

Bill, check your BILLSKIER mail for a note for your son,

Mark H