Movatterモバイル変換

Nagasaki was one of the “targets” chosen as it was the center of Catholicism in Japan…

One of the greatest war crimes of WWII was the bombing of Dresden to rubble by the USAF and the RAF.

I’m afraid that what is and is not considered a “war crime” is decided by the winners of the war and not the losers. Nor is it to be decided by some future historian. No doubt if Germany/Japan had won the war many of the allies would have been tried as war criminals. LeMay and Eisenhower would have been hung as well as many others. But history didn’t turn out that way. Calling what happened at Dresden a war crime has as much semantic content as referring to someone as a married bachelor.

I, for one, am quite happy the atomic bombs were used on Japan. My father was part of the U.S.A.A.F. under LeMay that was bombing the Japs to hell and if the atomic bombs had not been dropped and the war continued my father may have been killed which would mean I would never have existed. A rather personal reason, to be sure, but from my point of view quite a good one.

Another reason to support the atomic bombing of Japan is the fact that the Japanese military of that time were probably some of the most brutal, sadistic and cruel humans on the planet. They routinely gang raped women as well as engaged in mass beheadings and throwing babies in the air and catching them on bayonets. If this weren’t enough they were supremely fanatical in support of the war. It took something as shocking as the atomic bomb to make them realize the war was lost. If the allies had had to invade Japan it was estimated the causality rates would be in excess of 1 million men. The atomic bombing of Japan saved more lives that it took, and while that may be little consolation to the casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was the one thing that stopped the war dead in its tracks and handed victory to the allies.

I once had a somewhat heated conversation about 20 years ago with a Japanese I knew who insisted that the atomic bombs used on Japan constituted a war crime. My suspicion was that he lost family in the atomic bombings, though he never admitted it, so I wasn’t expecting him to be entirely rational. As he continued to insist that America was guilty of a war crime I suggested to him that perhaps we could conjure up the ghosts of the rape of Nanking or the Bataan death march and have them decide the matter. He completely ignored my comment so in exasperation I told him that perhaps the lesson to learn from the atomic bombings of Japan is that innocent women and children frequently end up paying the ultimate price for the military ambitions of old men.

Sulu

ONLY 100,000! Well then I guess I don’t have to be concerned about it.

Here are some more mistakes:

• “in 1853…at Shimoda harbor”? The Masonic bullyboy arrived at Edo Bay in 1853 and Shimoda in 1854 during a return trip. You are correct, however, that the uninvited appearance in 1853 set up Japan for disaster.

• The bomber at Nagasaki on “August 8th 1945” wasBockscar, not “Box Car”.

• The Secretary of War was Stimson, not some interloper named “Stinson”.

• George Marshall, not “George Marshel”.

• The Hiroshima bomb was a named Little Boy, not “Thin Man“, the name of a proposed plutonium gun-type device. The design for the latter was abandoned due to various problems.

TheUSAAF, not the USAF, was involved in bombings of civilians during the war. The USAF was established as its own branch of the military not until a few years later, though of course it’s a direct successor of the USAAF. Also, there is some room for doubt that the bombing of Dresden, though ghastly and not at all motivated by the alleged reasons for fighting Germany, killed no more than 100,000, which would be 1/2 as many claimed by Germany in March 1945.

Agreed. One of the greatest war crimes of WWII was the bombing of Dresden to rubble by the USAF and the RAF. The war was all but over, the city was filled with refugees and it did not have any strategic value whatsoever. In fact, where I studied history, in neutral Ireland, there was a map of Dresden with all of the potential military targets, overlain with a shaded zone indicating what parts of the city had been destroyed, and not*one* military target was in the shaded area. The bombing led to 250,000 civilians suffering the most excruciating death imaginable – by being burned alive. It was an act of pure sadism, yet it had been repeated over and over again both in Germany and in Japan. In Tokyo over 100,000 civilians were incinerated by USAF bombings; apparently the stench of burning flesh was so strong that the US pilots themselves had to put on their oxygen masks.
None of those responsible ever had to answer any embarrassing questions, and many are still revered as war heroes today – Churchill being the most obvious example.

As per link, Japan has been called a Hermit Kingdom. The August 9th date was in the title but one line was incorrect using August 8th. The 1900 date should read 1905, I put it there as a marker and forgot. As per established custom, I will flog myself 100 times.https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/txoyvw/japan_was_a_hermit_kingdom_until_1853_but_was_a/

“Oh wait. No need to do that . Putin is succeeding quite well in Ukraine with conventional weapons.”

Ha ha ha. You should stop depending on Sputnik for your war news. Russia is losing bigly! Here’s some REAL news for you.
———-
‘No one’s left’ Russian officer tells of mass troop desertions with morale in tatters
A CAPTURED Russian officer described how men from his battalion had “run away” and that there was “no one left” to fight.
Tue, Aug 9, 2022
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1652389/russia-news-putin-army-mass-desertions-morale-kherson-ukraine-war-update

Putin hammered as relentless HIMARS barrage leaves 100 troops dead– Russia ‘cannot resist’
RUSSIA “cannot resist” in the face of a ferocious onslaught by Ukrainian forces armed with HIMARS rockets, the exiled mayor of the southern city of Melitopol has claimed.
Mon, Aug 8, 2022
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1652253/putin-news-russia-news-himars-vladimir-putin-ukraine-war-melitopol

I would prefer a “nuclear-free” israel.
No one, even israel is going to f#ck with Iran, as long as the perception is that they possess nukes themselves.
Israel’s nukes are already “in place” in major American and European population centers. No delivery systems are needed.
Look for the jews to nukeLos Angeles, Atlanta, or Chicago if their “demands” aren’t met.Jew York City is “off-limits” as it is the capital of the American component of world jewry’s criminal enterprise. Of course, (((they))) could perpetrate a “real” “holocaust™” unlike their phony twentieth-century “holocaust™”…
European targets will beParis, Brussels or Rome, Rome being the prime target as the visceral hatred of Roman Catholicism knows no bounds, despite their sabotage of the Roman Catholic Church with their influence at the jew and Protestant influenced “Vatican II Ecumenical Council”.
The jew-run blackmail situation that exists among the world’s leaders, movers and shakers needs to be exposed and shut down once and for all.
One way to defuse and shut down the jewish sexual blackmail operation would be for those politicians, movers and shakers who participated in Epstein’s “fantasy island” to “come clean” and admit their transgressions to their various country’s populations.
Admit to wrongdoing, promise never to do it again and name the blackmailers.
This one action would be enough to collapse the whole jewish-run criminal cabal and have the jew criminals scurrying like rats to israel.
One can only hope…

If the purposeful killing of civilians is a war crime then the war against Germany was one big war crime because we even had it in writing that our purpose was to genocide Germans. Read the Morgenthau Plan and who singed it.

I found the political reasons interesting as most historians say it was to prevent maybe 1,000,000 allied deaths if they had to invade the homeland. I know that the original target was Kokura but cloud cover saved the city from annihilation.

But destroying the political centers would counterbalance the negative effects of destroying the population centers, which the political centers are trying to do anyway.

The South African writer Laurens van der Post was a prisoner of the Japs during the war. He was overjoyed when he heard about the atomic bombs; he’d expected to remain a captive for at least another year.
Later, it annoyed him when people spoke about the civilian casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as he insisted that the Allied PoWs were likewise civilians – before they’d been called up – and The Bomb had saved*their* lives.
Interesting take.

Naturally, in war these nukes would skip Alaska and be enough to destroy every large city in the world, but we are far away from being able to destroy the world 100 times over, or even once.

Sounds good to me. Just blow up all the big cities and spare the rest.

also:

“Hermit Kingdom” was Korea, not Japan.

date of Russo-Jap War was 1904-05, not 1900.

etc. And

the Kwangtung Army surrendered to Russia in 1945 because most of its best troops had long since been bled off to fight the Americans in the Pacific War.

and the best argument for the use of nuclear weapons to end WW2….is that, otherwise, they would have long since been used to begin WW3.

There may valid points made in this piece, but to have the dates and locations wrong is inexcusable.
Hiroshima was August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki was August 9, 1945.

establish that the civilians were the target.

US had been targeting civilians all along, deliberately using hideous incendiary weapons against German and Japanese civilians. Supposedly to lower morale or whatnot. It was already a longstanding pattern.

Japanese troops surrendered so quickly to Soviet troops, when they had previously fought fanatically against U.S. troops

Word got out that US troops weren’t taking Japanese prisoners but were murdering and torturing them when they got ahold of them so there wasn’t much choice.

U.S. arsenal, each with enough destructive power to destroy approximately 100 square miles each. This adds up to 300,000 square miles of destruction.[7]

That’s just the US arsenal. Throw in the retaliatory nukes of Russia and China and there’d be even more. Taking out the population centers of the developed world may not destroy planet earth but it would certainly be a rather bad thing to have happen, not something to be taken lightly.

Or better yet, Putin nukes KEEEEV out of existence and rids the world of that little vermin Zelensky. Oh wait. No need to do that . Putin is succeeding quite well in Ukraine with conventional weapons.

I agree with the author that the seeds of World War Two (or America’s involvement in the Pacific theater of it) were sown in the mid 19th century. All wars, as history shows, are about national interest, or power. Tragically, the status of the civilian is premised on the needs of power being served. What today’s nuclear states have not learned from history is: every empire eventually gets the war it is trying to avoid.
https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/

If all the nukes in the world aren’t enough to pulverize this world, then what the hey, let’s give some to Ukraine and allow them to use them against Russia.