Maggie's Farm

I think its a cool idea to honor someone with bigger stones than most men and certainly bigger than all supporters of the abomination that was the ante-bellum-South-gone with the wind bullshit.

I don't know.. you think Col. Klink would have been wasted on the Eastern Front? should Gen. Burkhalter have sent him to Iraq?

RE VDH: The horrors of Hiroshima in context

VDH gets the some of the critical facts wrong, which is not good, considering that little barry will continue his world tour apologizing for the US, this time in Japan, where he will grovel and abase himself for the fact that other, better, people won the Pacific war.

if you don't understand the atomic bombings in their actual context you won't be able to deal with barry's hand wringing supporters in the press or on the internet.

one of the best primary sources is the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, undertaken in 1946 at the request of President Truman.



The Survey details how about 60 Japanese cities had already been burned out by nighttime massed B-29 attacks using incendiaries and high explosives. (High level daylight attempts at more precise bombing proved costly and ineffective, partly because of the then-unknown jet stream). the attacks on Nag. and Hir. were on the upper end of the level of destruction, but were within the range of what a 200 plane raid could accomplish with conventional bombs. VDH minimizes this, "Over the next three months, American attacks leveled huge swaths of urban Japan. U.S. planes dropped about 60 million leaflets on Japanese cities, telling citizens to evacuate and to call upon their leaders to cease the war", but bombing civilian areas is a serious moral issue and should be addressed directly because it was the conventional bombing that brought Japan to its knees.

The conclusion:



My further analysis:

1. neither of the planned invasions would have been necessary so the projected casualties among the Allies and Japanese should not be figured into the necessity of the bombings, (except as a moral justification, the use of the bombs).

2. the nuclear attacks ended the war about two months before Japan would have surrendered without them. During those two months:

-- Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been firebombed, with, say, about 80% of the casualty rates actually suffered.

-- the war in China would have continued, during this war, China was losing about 200,000 killed per months. the math is simple.

-- another five or six Japanese cities would have been raided, with increasingly higher levels of destruction as defenses degraded and the number of planes increased.

-- Allied POWs would still be murdered by the Japanese.


So when little barry does embarrass himself, at least we can put his shame in context.

that is the basis of the convenient myth that the Japanese government was ready to surrender in August of '45.

the Allies wouldn't have accepted that offer under the Potsdam Agreement.

the Foreign Office initiative didn't have the approval of military cabal running the Japanese government which wouldn't have accepted the terms.

here's why:

in '45, the atomic bombs were just another weapon in the arsenal. they were on the upper end of destruction, but Japan was already being subjected to raids that killed more and destroyed more. then the war in the pacific ended.

and the cold war began. Now, atomic weapons were magnitudes more powerful than those used in '45. there was a for good reasons or bad, a legitimate fear among the population that a-bombs could come raining down any minute. if you grew up in this time you remember the Cuber Missile Crisis and civil defense. for about 40 years only the effective, but still insane, idea of mutually assured destruction kept the peace.

most people don't think of the Hiroshima and Nagasaka bombings as the culmination of four months of intensive firebomb raids on Japanese cities, they think of cold war megabombs, MIRVS, plutonium bombs, hydrogen bombs, tsar bombs, Dr Strangelove, dirty bombs, bombs that kill people and leave structures intact.

you have to understand that these were everyday, average citizens, scared for their lives who thought Hiroshima and saw the apocalypse. you know, morons.

you must have remembered incorrectly.

"The southern Kyushu landings were to take place on 1 November 1945 ... ." --
Reports of General MacArthur -- THE CAMPAIGNS OF MACARTHUR IN THE PACIFIC -- VOLUME I -- PREPARED BY HIS GENERAL STAFF -- CHAPTER XIII "DOWNFALL" THE PLAN FOR THE INVASION OF JAPAN - Evolution of "Downfall"

I believe a late season typhoon would have delayed the Nov. 1 date, and the war would have ended by then.

there's a cure for your stupidity, and its not relying on your senile uncle's memory.

just kidding, you're invincibly stupid.

RE Z-man on women in combat:

as for combat, Harriet Tubman is a better man than Z.

the months-long area bombing of civilians that culminated with the nuke attacks is a serious moral issue and was seen as such during the bombings. revenge is not a moral justification.

Japanese war planners dispersed manufacturing as much as possible throughout civilian areas to preserve its ability to continue the fight. Allied bombing of those areas was morally justified because it served the greater goal of ending the war as quickly and with as few total casualties as possible. even then, each raid had a specific military target, and I believe the Hiroshima target was an army headquarters.

if revenge were actually the goal of the bombings, then dialing them back and allowing the Japanese to suffer longer would have resulted in many more Japanese deaths. along with American, British, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and Chinese deaths.

you're a Christian, right?

I bet you people don't usually read this part of Psalm 137 (vs 7-9, Orange Catholic Bible):

Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem;
who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed;
happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

the purpose of area bombing civilians was to end the war as quickly as possible by the least destructive means possible.

that sounds grotesque, but the war itself was unusually so.

the death of the Japanese child was an unintended consequence of the area bombing. See above, the Allied mission planners inevitably designated bombing points -- factories, military establishments. this was probably a salve to the conscience of some of the planners and air crew, I don't think it was necessary. the purpose of the bombing was to end the war by destroying Japan's ability to make war, not to end the war by killing children.

this is called the Principle of double effect. it explains how actions that are harmful to some can still be moral permissible. note that this is not a "lesser of two evils" argument. the idea is Christian, it was stated by Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica. [Ten, note well, there is no graphic novel version of this.]

of course, some will advocate bashing the brains of Japanese children into a red smear because they not pale skinned white demons from the North. but not me.

of course the baby in a pram didn't deserve to be nuked or firebombed. the death of the kid was an unintended consequence of the otherwise morally justifiable bombings. this is not because killing the child was a lesser of two evils, but because the raids were morally justifiable and the death of the child was not their purpose.

moral blame rests entirely on those who put the baby in harm's way: the navy and army warlords, the emperor, the civilian government ministers who intentionally put war manufacture into civilian areas. not nearly enough of these war criminals were called to account at war's end.

perhaps if you possessed the steely reserve of northern european Jew lawyers you'd see this more clearly.

I understand the anger. Mom, until the day she died, hated the Japanese, because they tried to kill my father (wartime service, USN) and did kill her brother (Philippines, '42, USA). Dad would never think of buying a Japanese car. Or a German one, for that matter.

neither one of them ever expressed any desire to toss Chinese Japanese babies back and forth on bayonets, like some here want to do, possibly even now.

given that apparently everyone on this board is pro-bomb (including me) with one possible neutral, that's a pretty immature point of view you've got.

explain again why you're yucking it up over the deaths of Japanese children. they deserved it why??

try English next time.

Thanks for the warning, but this is the internet, so for me it doesn't matter how infectious you are.

that said, I'm sure penicillin would cure you.

I have too many guns for home. That's why I have an office gun, a back of the pickup gun, and a concealed carry gun.