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Date Posted: 00:03:26 08/14/08 Thu
Author: Prairie Dawg
Author Host/IP: 12.202.229.158
Subject: Ned...some light reading
In reply to: Rick 's message, "Re: Dawg - the "two wrongs" lesson..." on 23:03:02 08/11/08 Mon

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jg-g0TASLocXq4cMWCu_4tjjfSWAD92GT6N81

Recently released-20 pages or so of Tojo's diary, never before seen in public.

It seems that one Hideki Tojo kept a diary. Even when the handwriting was on the frackin' wall in letters of fire, do you think he was convinced?

Not on your life.

That is what we were dealing with, and that is WHY the bomb was dropped, because Hirohito, the ONE man who could have stopped the WAR that his country STARTED had to be convinced by demolishing his cities one by one, and his GOVERNMENT of criminals had to have the life beaten out of it so that the rest of the Japanese could have a chance at life,along with a million or more American boys.

It was a terrible thing to be compelled to do, and it's a depressing thing to think about, but it may well happen again. Japan forced our hand.

What were the alternative scenarios anyway?

That Japan would come to the table and see the error of its ways, beat their swords into plowshares and study war no more? That doesn't seem likely. The military, who were the government, were preparing an Okinawa style defense of the homeland in depth. 12,000 combat planes were readied for kamikaze missions. Several million regular army troops in the homeland, the best equipped divisions that Japan had left because they hadn't been beaten to death in the islands. Several million more irregulars armed with pikes and molotov cocktails. Rifles and ammo a plenty too.

What world leader would have taken a chance on that before they used what was at hand? Not a one. And why should they? At that point in history Japan had shown by its actions that they didn't respect the lives of other people. At that time had you put it in the form of a referendum to the people of China, Korea, Manchuria, the Phillipines and a thousand other places in the Pacific, it would have been unanimous: drop the frackin' thing and quit fooling around.

Another option was that Japanese diplomats were really searching for a way to bow out gracefully, so sorry, it was all a big misunderstanding...after the treachery leading up to Pearl, anyone who believed that would have been committed to an asylum. Their diplomatic corps simply was not trustworthy and could not deliver the goods anyway.

A third option was to drop the bomb on an unpopulated region as a sort of no-cost demonstration of what could happen. We'd already burned much of Tokyo to the ground with incendiaries and it hadn't made much of an impression on the Japanese military dictators. Why does anyone think that blowing up a remote island for the benefit of a few dozen observers would have made any more of an impression?

The last one, and the one I think you favor, was stand off, blockade and starve them out. How many do you think would have had to die to get the last man in Japan to the telephone, and how many years would you think it would have taken?

There's no doubt about it-an invasion would have been much bloodier, and the bomb was, oddly enough, the way out that ended up taking the fewest lives.

It also gave the Emperor a little spine for once in his sorry assed life, because it was the first, last and only time in his life he showed some gumption and told his government "Stop this shit. You're going to get us all killed."

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