60 years ago today

[chonsigirl]

60 years ago today was the use of the first atomic weapon in a war, it leveled the city of Hiroshima. Was it worth it? Historians still debate this issue, military strategists discuss the advantages this held over a long-term assault on the island of Japan. Some thoughts on this topic?

There’s a slide show of MSNBC, pictures sometimes speak louder then words.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5114929/


Letter From Japan: A Monument to Rebirth

By Shashi Tharoor
Newsweek International

Aug. 8, 2005 issue - I didn't know quite what to expect when I stepped off the train at Hiroshima. Certainly not the spacious shopping arcade at the station, with its advertisments for cappuccinos and beer. Nor the sight, soon after my taxi turned a corner, of the Groovin' Disc Shop, selling new and used CDs. Maybe the profusion of blond heads towering above the Japanese throngs on the platform should have alerted me. History ensures that Hiroshima belongs not just to Japan but to the world.
Visiting the city this spring for the first time, 60 years after its atomic armageddon, I'd subliminally expected the solemnity one associates with memorials to death. But no. It was a brilliantly clear day, and I walked from the center of town, bustling with shops and hotels, through the Peace Memorial Park. It sits directly at ground zero, immaculately groomed as only Japanese gardeners seem to know how, with monuments scattered here and there to the 230,000 victims of the A-bomb. One ruined building—the Atomic Bomb Dome—stands as it did on Aug. 6, 1945, a stark reminder of that summer's day when clocks stopped at 8:15 a.m. and most of the city was obliterated. Otherwise, grass gleams and flowers bloom where scientists predicted nothing would grow for decades.
So life, once again, triumphs over death. The Hiroshima museum testifies to the magnitude of that victory. A huge photograph entirely covering one long wall shows the city minutes after the detonation. It is a tableau of leveled, smoldering ruin, save for a handful of steel-and-concrete skeletons. Large dioramas show the city before and after—homes, offices, the railway station, as they were, contrasted with their remains. A red ball hangs in the air at the epicenter of the explosion, directly over the city's heart.
The technology of death—Little Boy and its delivering angel, the Enola Gay—is dryly explained. I learned that, if the skies over Kokura had been clear, that city might have been immortalized instead. Extracts from U.S. military cables reveal that the absence of any Allied prisoner-of-war camps in Hiroshima sealed its fate.
Then there are the exhibits themselves. A photo of a schoolgirl with 80 percent of her body covered with burns. The preserved skin and nails of a schoolboy who died in agony, his flesh literally melting off his body. The charred lunchbox of another, its blackened remains still inside. The burned-out favorite tricycle of a 3-year-old killed while riding it. There are pictures of a woman's back, the pattern of the kimono she was wearing imprinted onto her skin by the bomb's radiation, as well as the shadow of a human being blasted onto the wall of a building.
All tragedy is ultimately personal. I asked the museum's director, Minoru Hataguchi, whether his own family had suffered. "My father was a railway employee, working at the station that morning," he said simply. "He died instantly." His mother? "She was pregnant with me the day the bomb hit."
I expressed relief that he looked so well, when so many babies were born with grotesque deformities and cancers. "I am well—so far," he said, grimly. But his face lightened when I gingerly asked about his mother. "She is 85," he told me. "And she hasn't been ill for a day since the bombing. But now, alas, her memory is going."
A metaphor, perhaps, for what I had seen in Hiroshima: survivors who have transcended the horror, and whose memories, at last, are going.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8770432/site/newsweek/

[Lon]

You bet it was worth it. It ended the war and saved thousands of Allied lives. An invasion by troops on the Japanese homeland would have resulted in needless deaths, as the Japanese fanatical element would not have surrendered. Civilian deaths as a result of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were of course unfortunate, but so were the thousands of deaths that occured from the Japanese indiscriminate bombing of Chinese cities in the late 30's. Such is war.

[Accountable]

Machiavellian. Never would've been done in Europe under similar circumstances, even if it were an island nation where other nations would not have been affected. Would've been done in Africa without a second thought.

[lady cop]

my dad was one of oppenheimers people. it ended the war. it had to be done. and don't forget the cruelty of the little yellow bastards. in fact, don't forget pearl harbor.

[Accountable]

My father was a marine in the belly of a ship in the Pacific when the war ended. I may very well exist because of that bomb.

I stand by my post.

[BTS]

"Then there are the exhibits themselves. A photo of a schoolgirl with 80 percent of her body covered with burns. The preserved skin and nails of a schoolboy who died in agony, his flesh literally melting off his body. The charred lunchbox of another, its blackened remains still inside. The burned-out favorite tricycle of a 3-year-old killed while riding it. There are pictures of a woman's back, the pattern of the kimono she was wearing imprinted onto her skin by the bomb's radiation, as well as the shadow of a human being blasted onto the wall of a building."

I'll let the pics speak for themselves:




Attack Map Here (right hand side of page): Shows how Japan sucker punched us while they STILL had diplomats in Washington DC.

In my opinion, I think the bombs dropped on Japan were justified and saved many lives...

[pbobryk]

Lets not forget about cruelty of Japs not only to POW but to civilian population of occupied teritorries. I think the you cant ask to justify the actions at this point it was necessity and it did end the war in the Pacific plus aftermath of Hiroshima was that the US has gained an ally in Japan.

[Accountable]

Originally Posted by pbobryk

Lets not forget about cruelty of Japs not only to POW but to civilian population of occupied teritorries. I think the you cant ask to justify the actions at this point it was necessity and it did end the war in the Pacific plus aftermath of Hiroshima was that the US has gained an ally in Japan.

Machiavellian, imo.

Wow, thanks for this thread chonsi.

Had I been in the decision making process with the intel Truman had, Id have dropped the bomb.

Imperial Japanese Soldiers were a unique group, pride at its basest sort, where "death before dishonor" reigned supreme certainly would have been the biggest factor in my decision.

This is what we did to Tokyo and they still would not surrender.

from a newspaper: The Japan Times, On March 10, 1945, more than 300 U.S. B-29 bombers dropped incendiary bombs on parts of the capital, particularly on populous residential areas in eastern Tokyo.

The attack killed more people immediately than two atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and is widely considered the most devastating air raid ever.

The official death toll was 83,000, but historians -- considering the destruction of records and the chaos following the attack -- generally agree that about 100,000 people died in that one night of fire.

The half-million M-69 incendiary cylinders dropped on Tokyo created a firestorm that raged through neighborhoods packed with wooden, tinderbox homes.

Superheated air rose into the sky, creating a killing wind that sucked victims into the flames and fed the twisting infernos. The turbulence was so strong that it terrified the B-29 crews.

Tokyo's rudimentary fire defenses immediately collapsed. With much of the fighting-age male population at the war fronts, women, children and the elderly struggled in vain to battle the flames or flee to safety.

Tokyo suffered more than 100 bombing raids during the war, destroying 60 percent of the metropolis, according to the Center of the Tokyo Raid and War Damages in Tokyo.

We could have done that again and again and again and it may not have phased them, we needed seomthign bigger, stronger and more devastating.

I'd have dropped it too, I would argue the mercy factor for the Japanese, but honestly I'd have done it to save an allied expeditionary force from taking the cities one by one.

Was it worth it? Yes, it saved both the destruction of Japan, because we would have fire bombed till there was nothing left before we ever tried to occupy it. And It saved american lives and kept us from sending in an expeditionary force to giht by hand.


This is one of the things that Id like to discuss with Truman, when Jives asked me which president in history would I like to bring to today and talk with on the question on the Ask Far thread, truman is the one Id bring forward in time and ask this very question.

I agree it had to be done.
But have we as humans learnt anything from it?
We are still killing each other in wars.