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Date Posted: 18:33:50 08/09/08 Sat
Author: Prairie Dawg
Author Host/IP: 12.202.229.158
Subject: Re: Dawg - the "two wrongs" lesson...
In reply to: Ned 's message, "Dawg - the "two wrongs" lesson..." on 09:57:35 08/09/08 Sat


It is crystal clear that Japan had to be taken out of the war by any means necessary. Had the bomb not been used twice that most likely would have meant an invasion for which Okinawa was a dress rehearsal on a small scale-trying out your show in New Haven, so to speak.

It was to be called Operation Downfall and Operation Olympic. MacArthur's chief of staff estimated one million Allied troops would be killed or wounded by the end of 1946-that's a SIX.

Japan had over 12,000 combat aircraft ready in the home islands that were to be used primarily in suicide missions against Allied naval forces as we saw in Okinawa. One might also expect mass civilian deaths and suicides as the invasion progressed.

They simply were not ready to quit, Ned. Their emperor had to be bludgeoned to his senses. Do you think it would have been better to starve everyone in Japan to death?

Here's some light reading about what the invasion would have looked like.

http://www.waszak.com/japanww2.htm

Ned, it would have been the biggest bloodbath in the history of warfare, both for us and for the Japanese, with the possible exception of Hitler's ill fated Barbarossa project

Those bombs saved lives because they got Hirohito off his dead ass and doing what he would not have otherwise done.

Ned, that man was ready to watch all his people die one by one.

Those people who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki paid a terrible price for their leadership and their political system because they were guiltless, and their suffering was a gift to the rest of us because it got Japan out of the war, right then and right there, no jacking around, and that meant, parenthetically, that everyone else in Japan was going to have a chance to live.

There's no doubt that an invasion would have meant rooting out the Japanese soldiers in small numbers with flamethrowers, bunker to bunker and cellar to cellar. And there's no doubt that far more Japanese civilians would have been killed than died in the bombings.

The end of that war, coming as it did, meant that the homeland survived more or less intact, and rebuilding Japanese society could take place too. Can you imagine what Japan would have looked like if we had had to take it apart stone by stone, one village at a time? Can you imagine what Japan would look like today?

Your insistence on this revisionist view of history taxes my patience, Ned.

I too think never Again! but I recognize and acknowledge why it had to be done and that the outcome was far better than it would have been in a conventional invasion of the home islands. I choose to celebrate the lives that were saved because Japan's government had the life beaten out of it.

Now...maybe there's an old geezer or two over in China watching the Olympics on teevee tonight, but his mind's on Nanjing and what the Japanese did there to him and his family during the runup to the larger war. Such folks would probably be forgiven for thinking that as you sow, so shall you reap.

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