Maggie's Farm

trashing the greatest generation for how they raised their children is pretty low. they earned several times over the right to raise their kids any damn way they wanted to.

they were "spoiled"?

is this something personal to you???

Fussel is usually a good writer, but here, he majorly sucks.

1. the atomic bombings have to be evaluated in the context of the air war against the Japanese home islands, which started with long range B-29 raids in '44. Initially high altitude daylight, precision efforts, they became effective when they d/evolved into low level, nighttime firebombing attacks that were intended to, and did, burn out over 40 cities. a March '45 raid on Tokyo killed more than either atomic bombing, and more than the number killed in the Dresden raid. Overall, around 900,000 casualties during the air campaign. the atomic bombings were among the last of these attacks.

that puts the atomic bombings in context. it was the air war that caused the Japanese to surrender, not the A-bombs by themselves. the ethics should be thoroughly debated and understood and not dismissed out of hand by Fussel's ad hoc bullshit. personally, I think the air war was mostly justified under the circumstances then and now known but with these caveats: where mission planners designated military targets, such as refineries, aircraft factories, even dispersed workshops, civilian deaths even on a mass scale were not the primary intent of the raids. the A bombs... murky waters, especially Nagasaki. the concept of a "just war" predates your Christianity (see, in particular, Augustine and Aquinas who I think are revered by Christians and protestants alike). harm caused to civilians should not be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage of an attack on a legitimate military target. at least that's how I learned it.

2. Fussel's reference to John Kenneth Galbraith belief that the bombs shortened the war by a couple of weeks is deviously wrong. Fussel does not refer to the post-war US Strategic Bombing Survey's evaluation of the air campaign concluded that Japan would have surrendered before an invasion was necessary. so any justification of the A-bomb's use that invokes this reason is bullshit, especially for a historian like Fussel.

3. according to the US military, without the A-bombs (assume Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed conventionally with similar numbers killed), area bombing would have ended the war sometime in November, '45 (that is, Galbraith was wrong in his "three week" assessment and Fussel almost certainly knew that, but wanted a strawman to kick over). so the primary beneficiaries were the Chinese, who had been dying at about 200,000 per month since the war began for them. but the invasion force was not among those saved by the bombs.

4. "thanking God" for weapons of this level of destruction is a gross blasphemy. but then, I'm no Christian.


disclosures: dad, USN '42 - '46, north atlantic, med, south pacific. uncle, USA, KIA, '42, the Philippines. me: peacetime.

the invasion wasn't going to happen, so, no the Bomb didn't save his life.

no, we interrogated your family.

an op ed piece in the sand iego trib isn't an impressive source for all those wrong statistics.

but nice try.

UNITED STATES STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY
SUMMARY REPORT
(Pacific War)

WASHINGTON, D.C.
1 JULY 1946



if you read the Survey summary, and I'm assuming you won't, you'll discover that the air war that caused the surrender was the long-range bombing offensive from the Marianas initiated in November 1944. you'll also learn that an A-bomb was worth the equivalent of a 200+ B-29 raid using incendiaries and high explosives, and that the air force could and did mount 800 plane raids.

you people focus on the A-bombs because why? history is hard -- the USSB didn't show up in your Ask search-- but atomic weapons have a certain cachet for the Tribune?

conservatives in general can be so dumb. you let libtards allow you to debate whether dropping atomic weapons on a city is moral or immoral (good luck!) by controlling the form of the debate. there's no room for a rebuttal that most of the deaths and destruction and ultimate surrender were caused by conventional bombing, and that the nukes were a part of that campaign.

even you can make a strong case that the air war as a whole was morally justified by military necessity: the necessity to hit factories, oil refineries, transportation hubs, other industrial targets by low level fire bombing because daylight precision bombing was impossible.

there is a huge moral difference that cavemen and modern troglodytes like 5.1.1 will not recognize between (1) intending to bomb aircraft assembly plants where mass death and (2) widespread area destruction results and intending mass death and widespread area destruction. the air war as a whole was more like (1), atomic bombings seen out of the big context are more like (2). one is morally defensible, the other isn't.

needs an editor. key point last paragraph:

there is a huge moral difference that cavemen and modern troglodytes like 5.1.1 will not recognize between (1) intending to bomb aircraft assembly plants where mass death and widespread area destruction results and (2) intending mass death and widespread area destruction.

you're barely ahead of your own strawman. well, not really. wars aren't fought under boxing rules, but they are fought under the 2,500 year concept of just war, expressed now in the Geneva Conventions, which Ask may or may not be aware of in which intentions, proportionality and military necessity are mixed together.

no one here is saying the air war as a whole wasn't morally justified. I find the chest thumping and gloating creepy.

what part of 6.1.1 do you disagree with?

"Sacrificing a million or so fighting men when it could be prevented is stupid."

you start on the path to enlightenment then you say something this stupid.

the wasn't going to be an invasion. what part of that concept do you not understand?????