60 years ago

cobra_commander

cobra_commander

Active member
"we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us."

-FDR, Dec 8, 1941

Hiroshima-1945-007.jpg


"Oh shit, attacking the USA was a fucking dumb idea" - Japan, 8:16am AUG 6th, 1945
 
The most definitive end to a war there has ever been. We should all be thankful this has never happened again.

"Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects of the atomic bombings killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000–80,000 in Nagasaki; roughly half of the deaths in each city occurred on the first day. During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness and malnutrition. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians"

-Wikipedia (sorry for using Wikipedia)
 
13474627:ndye said:
The most definitive end to a war there has ever been.
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Nah, the war was pretty much over already. Germany had already surrendered and the Allies had already won. There were only a few still fighting, Japan being one, and even they were already toast and were about to give in anyways. The bombs just expedited Japan's surrender by maybe a couple months, but they in no way ended the war.
 
Double post, no shame.

My advisor is holding a symposium next month with this as the topic. He's invited 5 nuclear scientists from Japan and five nuclear specialists (social issues, weapons experts) from the U.S. to discuss the legacy of the bombs in various fields from from different viewpoints. Should be real dope.
 
13474633:VinnieF said:
Nah, the war was pretty much over already. Germany had already surrendered and the Allies had already won. There were only a few still fighting, Japan being one, and even they were already toast and were about to give in anyways. The bombs just expedited Japan's surrender by maybe a couple months, but they in no way ended the war.
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I was just illuding to what you said, the bombs dropped, thousands of people died, and the war ended.

The war was indeed pretty much over, and you're right, the Japanese were essentially done. There are many different lines to be taken here though, Japanese honor is challenging to understand, especially older honor. Many believe it was necessary to drop these bombs because otherwise we actually may have had to invade Japan for them to surrender. This would have lead to untold casualties on both sides.

There is another story though, that neither the bombs, nor Japans retreat to the homeland caused them to surrender, but that it was the Soviet Union declaring war on Japan which finally ended it.

Another idea goes that they were going to surrender when they did, but we dropped the bombs because we wanted to straight flex for the Soviet Union in this pre cold war flexing grounds.

Its hard to tell and historians disagree about the true cause for the end of the war.

I didn't speak clearly, but I was trying to get at how big an event this was at the end of the war, and will always be remembered.
 
13474640:ndye said:
Many believe it was necessary to drop these bombs because otherwise we actually may have had to invade Japan for them to surrender. This would have lead to untold casualties on both sides. /QUOTE]

This is what I believe.

Based on the fighting on Okinawa, it became clear that we would have to fight for every inch of ground on Japan, and would have had to take all of it, fighting almost every single inhabitant - potentially killing most of them.

The bombings made it clear - we can, and will, kill every last person on Japan. We will do it from 20,000ft with relative omnipotence. You will die unable to fight back. Or you could surrender.

Our victory over Japan was as absolute as it could be. To this day there are more American military personnel in Japan than Japaneses military personnel. We re-wrote their constitution that still blocks them from having much of a military at all.
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13474640:ndye said:
There is another story though, that neither the bombs, nor Japans retreat to the homeland caused them to surrender, but that it was the Soviet Union declaring war on Japan which finally ended it.
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Most history books claim it was this.
 
13474640:ndye said:
Another idea goes that they were going to surrender when they did, but we dropped the bombs because we wanted to straight flex for the Soviet Union in this pre cold war flexing grounds.

Its hard to tell and historians disagree about the true cause for the end of the war.
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yeah, it's argued both ways, but from what ive read over the years, if that truly was the deciding factor, it only further shows how deluded the war faction in the japanese supreme council was (or, at least, how insane their priorities were)

russia had made super impressive gains but that was nothing unprecedented and the US was going strong despite taking big losses as they made their way to mainland japan, and while the USSR wouldn't have a formidable amphibious landing force for quite some time, the US did, not to mention the demonstrated power to almost literally vaporize entire cities with a couple planes

but it was less about the actual invasion by one, the other, or both, and more about the hope that USSR would help broker a peace deal that was anything better than unconditional surrender. this is nonsense in its own right though: 1) the US wasn't going to let USSR be involved any more than they had to let them-- they knew long before the end of the european war that the split of germany was going to be a huge pain in the dick and of course it proved itself to be for a long time afterward and 2) stalin wasn't going to help japan's situation at all, he wasn't interested in negotiating with them in the slightest, and would have been much more willing than the US to take huge losses to work his way through what was left of japan, kill the emperor, and set up a tough "communist" state.

just another pipe dream of the japanese war faction IMO
 
there was a japanese scientist who accurately predicted that the US had exactly 3 nuclear devices.

the japanese knew exactly how much energy the US could produce, and knew how much energy it took to produce fissionable material (by electric centrifuges). so they estimated the US had 3 devices. first one was the Trinity test, then Hiroshima, then Nagasaki.

insane how much spying was going on even on mainland america
 
13474739:momsspaghetti said:
there was a japanese scientist who accurately predicted that the US had exactly 3 nuclear devices.

the japanese knew exactly how much energy the US could produce, and knew how much energy it took to produce fissionable material (by electric centrifuges). so they estimated the US had 3 devices. first one was the Trinity test, then Hiroshima, then Nagasaki.

insane how much spying was going on even on mainland america
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That's pretty nuts. Do you have a source for this? Interested to read more about it.
 
13474781:Olimar said:
That's pretty nuts. Do you have a source for this? Interested to read more about it.
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i believe i read it in The Last Train from Hiroshima...basically a story of like 150 people who survived Hiroshima, and then hopped a train to Nagasaki and survived that blast as well.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Train-Hiroshima-Survivors/dp/1400165636

i didn't know that the author embellished so many details, so my original statement might not be true.
 
13474798:momsspaghetti said:
i believe i read it in The Last Train from Hiroshima...basically a story of like 150 people who survived Hiroshima, and then hopped a train to Nagasaki and survived that blast as well.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Train-Hiroshima-Survivors/dp/1400165636

i didn't know that the author embellished so many details, so my original statement might not be true.
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A quick google search says that there was an additional bomb that would have been dropped August 19th, had Japan not surrendered August 15th. Truman authorized the use of three bombs, and only two were dropped.
 
From a different perspective, I believe there is also a theory that the US used the bombs already knowing that Japan would be defeated. In that theory, their purpose was to flex US muscles at the USSR. It certainly set the stage for the Cold War...
 
13474879:ANDR01D said:
I heard it was the firebombing of Tokyo that really pushed them into surrendering. I'm probably remembering it wrong though.
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Got a little handsy with the quote button, I apologize.
 
13474633:VinnieF said:
Nah, the war was pretty much over already. Germany had already surrendered and the Allies had already won. There were only a few still fighting, Japan being one, and even they were already toast and were about to give in anyways. The bombs just expedited Japan's surrender by maybe a couple months, but they in no way ended the war.
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Why is this being downvoted? It's pretty accurate. In fact, Japan had tried to bring the conflict to an end a considerable amount of time before they were eventually bombed. Their offer of a complete surrender of everything (excluding the Emperor) was rejected and then counter-offered with almost exactly replicated terms after they had been obliterated by the american nukes. No one ever discusses the fact that Japan's attack on pearl harbour was retaliation itself to extensive fire bombings the country had endured from american forces.
 
13474916:las. said:
Why is this being downvoted? It's pretty accurate. In fact, Japan had tried to bring the conflict to an end a considerable amount of time before they were eventually bombed. Their offer of a complete surrender of everything (excluding the Emperor) was rejected and then counter-offered with almost exactly replicated terms after they had been obliterated by the american nukes. No one ever discusses the fact that Japan's attack on pearl harbour was retaliation itself to extensive fire bombings the country had endured from american forces.
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People downvote it because it goes against their own idea that the dropping of bombs pretty much ended the war.
 
13474916:las. said:
No one ever discusses the fact that Japan's attack on pearl harbour was retaliation itself to extensive fire bombings the country had endured from american forces.
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Are you serious?
 
And Iran can't seem to get over a few decades of American puppet government. Japan got nuked, twice, and their cool now. Wtf.
 
13474943:Casey said:
And Iran can't seem to get over a few decades of American puppet government. Japan got nuked, twice, and their cool now. Wtf.
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The government that was in power during the war was EXTREMELY DIFFERENT then the government that was in power after the war. Same with Germany.
 
13474976:las. said:
Very. The burning to death of 100,000 civilians isn't really something to joke about, I think
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We firebombed Tokyo before they bombed Pearl Harbor? I know I fucked up some arithmetic with the title of this thread, but I still know that Dec 7th 1941 comes before November 17th, 1944.

gawd your mother must find you to be an embarrassing cunt.
 
13474943:Casey said:
And Iran can't seem to get over a few decades of American puppet government. Japan got nuked, twice, and their cool now. Wtf.
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As murderous and callous as america was in dropping those bombs, Japan was in a conflict with them, and had performed various inhumane acts themselves. That's a bit different than having your democratically-elected prime minister overthrown on the grounds of greed and profit by essentially a US and UK backed monarch, leading to much of the country's people having infinitely worse off lives
 
13474916:las. said:
Why is this being downvoted?
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Because the US needs to justify one of the single worst things human beings have ever done by convincing themselves that without having done it WW2 would not have been won. They're actually taught in school that they were the ones who won WW2, when really it could not have been won without all three of the largest Allied powers working together. So since you can't argue a truthful post you want to be wrong it's easier to just downvote it.
 
13475020:VinnieF said:
Because the US needs to justify one of the single worst things human beings have ever done by convincing themselves that without having done it WW2 would not have been won. They're actually taught in school that they were the ones who won WW2, when really it could not have been won without all three of the largest Allied powers working together. So since you can't argue a truthful post you want to be wrong it's easier to just downvote it.
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Nowhere is it taught that the US was the sole winner of WWII.
 
13475044:JAHpow said:
Still not taught
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How many curriculums are there across the US? How many of those did you go through? I mean they don't all teach you the US won the war of 1812 either.
 
13475046:VinnieF said:
How many curriculums are there across the US? How many of those did you go through? I mean they don't all teach you the US won the war of 1812 either.
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I don't know just as much as you don't know.

But I do know that the curriculums that I've been through have never taught anything about the US being the winners. They teach it as a joint effort.

This is such a pointless exchange of posts.
 
13475052:JAHpow said:
I don't know just as much as you don't know.

But I do know that the curriculums that I've been through have never taught anything about the US being the winners. They teach it as a joint effort.

This is such a pointless exchange of posts.
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well I looked it up and found more than one historian talking about how it's commonly taught and believed that dropping the bombs is what won the war.

but yea, pretty pointless.
 
13475020:VinnieF said:
Because the US needs to justify one of the single worst things human beings have ever done by convincing themselves that without having done it WW2 would not have been won. They're actually taught in school that they were the ones who won WW2, when really it could not have been won without all three of the largest Allied powers working together. So since you can't argue a truthful post you want to be wrong it's easier to just downvote it.
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I mean, it would have been damn hard for Britain to ffight Germany by themselves. They wouldn't have been able to put forces on Normandy, so Germany would have been able to focus solely on the USSR. That would have changed the war drastically. Along with the massive US bombings on German factories that broke their ability to produce....it Definately would have been a much different war.
 
13474639:miroz said:
Double post, no shame.

My advisor is holding a symposium next month with this as the topic. He's invited 5 nuclear scientists from Japan and five nuclear specialists (social issues, weapons experts) from the U.S. to discuss the legacy of the bombs in various fields from from different viewpoints. Should be real dope.
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film it and post it on here or find me an article on it or something. I can't stand talking about any of the wars because there's only one side to it, hearing what both sides would actually give it some real depth.
 
13474857:miroz said:
From a different perspective, I believe there is also a theory that the US used the bombs already knowing that Japan would be defeated. In that theory, their purpose was to flex US muscles at the USSR. It certainly set the stage for the Cold War...
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That's actually super interesting. I had never thought of that.
 
13474916:las. said:
No one ever discusses the fact that Japan's attack on pearl harbour was retaliation itself to extensive fire bombings the country had endured from american forces.
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You have now lost all posting rights in this thread. Please leave and never come back here.

Signed,

Everyone who ever knew, knows, or will know anything about WWII.
 
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