That's right, today begins the yearly ritual of cursing the United States for opening the nuclear Pandora's Box by dropping the "Little Boy" bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima 62 years ago today: August 6, 1945.
I have heard all the theories about why this bomb, and the one dropped on Nagasaki three days later, did not have to be deployed: Japan was going to surrender anyway; we just did it to scare the Russians; we did it because we were racist and we never would have done the same thing to Germany; blah, blah, blah.
The bottom line is that we dropped those two bombs, and just a few days later, Japan surrendered, possibly saving the lives of several hundred thousand American servicemen who had pretty much accepted their fate that they would be killed or seriously wounded in the invasion of Japan that was to take place in late 1945/early 1946.
If you think that Japan was out of the fight by then, think again. They still had several million men under arms who were stationed in China and Manchuria, and they had yet to see much action. Sure, they too would have eventually been defeated, but they would have taken many American and Commonwealth soldiers with them in the process.
A good example of the remaining tenacity of the Japanese can be seen in their casualty figures while fighting the Soviet Union in the closing days of the War. In just a couple weeks of fighting, the Japanese lost more than 80,000 dead. That was in Manchuria. Imagine how hard the Japanese would have fought to defend their home islands?
The ultimate question you have to ask is, if the Japanese had acquired the Bomb before we did, do you think they would have hesitated to use it against us?
Good Day to You, Sir
6 comments:
I subscribe to your historical facts here. All of what you wrote is true with one addition. The civilian populace was being trained/armed to resist to the death. It took the emperor to finally call a halt to the preparations for the allied invasion that the military establishment was making. These are with apologies "An Inconvient Truth."
"Inconvenient" typing too fast.
That's very true. Many more civilians were killed in the fighting on Okinawa than were Japanese soldiers. Many of these Okinawans had been led to believe that American soldiers and Marines were bloodthirsty monsters who would eat the little children.
Imagine the fight that the populace of Japan would have put up, let alone the millions of Japanese soldiers who were being held in reserve in anticipation of just such an invasion.
I was stationed on Okinawa from 1971-73, with a timeout to S/E Asia in 1972 (Da Nang). There are a bunch of monuments on the island to the civilians who resisted. Historians who ignore this fact are kidding themselves or even worse lying.
The Japanese didn't value life like we did, as evidenced by their kamikazes, their suicidal defenses of places like Iwo Jima, their beheadings-for-entertainment during the Bataan Death March, and their Mengele-like medical experimentation (which included vivisection). As you pointed out, they were preparing a fanatic defense of the home islands.
I see no reason for us to place a higher value on their lives than they placed on theirs or on ours. As Gene Hackman's character said in Crimson Tide (and I paraphrase here): "Nuke the bastards. Twice."
Darren,
We did, twice! lol
The military channel did a great special on all the defenses that the Japanese Empire had built to resist the coming invasion.
Very scary stuff indeed...
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