Little Boy dropped 64 years ago, today.
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have made up my mind. Some in the japanese command wanted to surrender. However IMO from what I have read, there was not an chance that was going to happen. That does not mean they might not of. As none of us no 100%.
The Americans expected upto 1million of there soldiers to die in the invasion of Japan and even more Japanese casualties.
As I said the biggest reason for this was the propaganda of what the Americans would to prisoners.
In all honesty if a huge war happened I'd rather go like that than in a Japanese POW or German Concentration camp.
The Japanese were brutal themselves. Their history at that time was not one of peace or displayed great beliefs in human rights of anyone.
A job needed doing, an incredibly dirty one but it was done. A sad loss of civilian life but if the Japanese had the capabilities at the time there is no doubt in my mind that they would have bombed us north to south as soon as they could.
Is it any different to any of the carpet bombings or dam busting or any other attacks both sides did in the ww2.
Thats a pretty quick way to go really
Sickening would be torturing people to death, or letting them starve or die of sickness
A terrible event that will always haunt the history of man IMO. Shocking use of science to exterminate thousands of people. I understand the reasons why, but the end result is beyond words however you look at it. I would not have wanted to be the man who made that decision.
We must remember it so that it never happens again.
We must remember it so that it never happens again.
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Aaaah saw this on a tv guide, thanks Acidhell, which watch this. I do like threads like this.
Horton 229 was a Fighter/Bomber. Would have been more of a fighter first and a bomber second.
The Horton 18 though would have been able to drop the Germans atomic bomb on East Coast America from airfields in Germany. If they had held onto France then the range would have been even further.
Yeah the 229 was the fighter, was the 18 the 6 engined transport/bomber?. The hortons are one sexy plane.
The Japanese were prepared to sacrifice everything. Victory or an honourable death. There was no middle ground. The government were keen to militarise the civilian population. Without the bombs Japan would've never stepped down. Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved more lives, on both sides, than they took.
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It gave us 60 years of peace, I really do doubt we'd have avoided further major wars without the bomb.
Did the bomb actually need to be used? Probably. It may sound extreme, but having a real example of what the bomb does probably prevented a lot of stupid politicians thinking they could get away with it.
Did the bomb actually need to be used? Probably. It may sound extreme, but having a real example of what the bomb does probably prevented a lot of stupid politicians thinking they could get away with it.
Millions? You do realise that Britain had less than 400,000 military deaths in the whole of the second world war, and America had around 410,000? As mentione countless times the Japanese were pretty close to surrender anyway, they were already in talks about it (which included during the first and second bomb, when there is some evidence that Truman refused a surrender). Official surrender dates are a bit skewed anyway, as they are always a few days after the original surrender date (due to official duty and organisation of surrender terms etc).
The "Millions" number was in my opinion a publicity attack to put a nuclear test in a better light. There is no way that death toll would have been able occur. Remember that Japan has no natural resources of it's own (which was one of the reasons it attacked America in the first place, America had instituted an oil embago on Japan) and had pretty much run out of resources to build anything at this time. The Germans were pretty mch as fanatical as the Japanese, yet the death toll was less than 100,000. 1,000,000 dead simply would have not happened. Even if there were heavy casualties the American and British navies could very easily have just sat back, surrounded the Japanese with ships and starved them out (just look how easy that almost was when the Germans tried that to us).
And again we need to remember that the Generals and leaders of Japan were very lose to surrender. They were not stupid, just like the Generals in Hitlers military...
The Germans were no where near as fanatical as the Japanese.
The Japanese would rather die than be taken prisoner. As was shown on the few out lying islands the Americans captured.
The American Plans estimated up to 1million American deaths and many more Japanese.
They did not surrender after numerous citys where carpet bombed. They had a lot of supplies that where shipped to the cost. It really isn't anything like you are suggesting.
And for you saying there are civilians you really should watch this documentary.
School boys taught in sword fighting and school girls trained in sharpened bamboo spears. The Japanese expected a bloodbath.
The Japanese would rather die than be taken prisoner. As was shown on the few out lying islands the Americans captured.
The American Plans estimated up to 1million American deaths and many more Japanese.
They did not surrender after numerous citys where carpet bombed. They had a lot of supplies that where shipped to the cost. It really isn't anything like you are suggesting.
And for you saying there are civilians you really should watch this documentary.
School boys taught in sword fighting and school girls trained in sharpened bamboo spears. The Japanese expected a bloodbath.
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That would have been such a great plane. Lucky the Germans didn't get a wing of either or both. It really would have turned the war. As far as I know we didn't have anything close to that. 600mph. We would have been slaughtered.
They weren't quite as fanatical, but there wasn't much in it, especially the SS..
Neither did the Germans surrender after their cities were carpet bombed. You can't take everything seperately and say "well they didn't do this when this happened", and "they didn't do that when that happened", you need to bunch it together, and see what the repercusions of all the things together. When you do that you realise that the Japanese had very little left to fight with, and were considering surrender after being almost destroyed already...
I assume you mean "coast"? In that case yes they did have supplies, but not many, especially if a proper invasion occured. Yes it really was like I am making out. Japan was on it's last legs, and most of the people had no will left to fight in a war that was certainly not going to be won.
I said nothing about civilians
. However I know a lot were fanatical, a lot like other civilians in other countries. As for you mentioning the children, have you never heard of the Hitler Youth? Huge numbers of young germans were militised even before the war started then when the German army was on it's last legs and Germany was being invaded a huge number were drafted (as young as 12 years old) to defend Germany.Wikipedia said:
The Germans expected a bloodbath, it never happened, as civilians, as well as they are trained are not going to be able to hold out against well armed, experienced soldiers with air support.
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I'm not sure about the reasoning it gave us many more years of peace. Yes there was a cold war between two nations; but they certainly fought a lot of proxy wars didn't they?
