The scale of this bloodbath would have been mindboggling.

All I can say is it was merciful that the atomic bombs were dropped.

http://www.combinedfleet.com/Japan.htm

beaky wrote on Mar 14^th, 2007 at 2:55pm:



Those guys at that website are amazing.  They've enbarked on a project to research and record TROMS (tabularture record of movement) of every Japanese ship during the WWII years.  That is a staggering enterprise, and they've listed TROMs of hundereds of ships on that site, so far.

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Huh??????

Most of the books I have been buying about the Pacific War as of late have been from the perspective of "the other side".  The book I'm currently reading is Blossoms in the Wind the human legacy of the Kamikaze.  It's a book of interviews of Tokko pilots who survived the war.  

I've read the biography of Isoroku Yamamoto, the autobiography of Mitsuo Fuchida and Saburo Sakai, to name just a few of the titles from "the other side" that I've read.  I have a book on IJN Navy aces, as well as several titles that contain text as a result of interviews of many Japanese participants.

So, what are you talking about????

Killing thousands of civilians with two nukes is simply wrong, even if it was meant to spare the lives of the invading and defending soldiers.

War is a thing that should be fought out in the battlezones and not by eraicationg cities.

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H wrote on Mar 14^th, 2007 at 8:35pm:


Artillery barrages and bombs in preparation for a military operation are usually aimed at miltary targets and units.

Not at cities or other civilian installations.

So you're justifying killing civillians with the assumption that they *may* be future enemys?

And even if the enemy kills civilians, it doesn't mean that you're allowed to do so, too!




I wasn't talking about modern warfare in the first place, I was just slapping the bombings of japanies cites with the images and consequences of the bombings of european cities in the back of my head.

Bringing war to civilians was, is and will always be wrong. No matter how "good" the arguments may be.
Bombing the crap out of german, english, belgian, polish, spanish and japanese cities has achieved nothing. It has neither broken the morale of the civilian population nor has it driven the leaders into surrendering.

And I'm sure that even the japanese "government" would have admitted defeat if there had been a clean allied invasion.

dcunning30 wrote on Mar 15^th, 2007 at 10:45am:


There is no, absolutely no connection between the bomb war and the Holocaust, so it can't be seen as a "consequence".

I'd put the bomb war right into line with the Holocaust and other crimes to humanity.


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Don't shoot at civilians. Period.

If they have a gun pointing at you, you can shoot them.


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When the bombings were so effective, how come the german industry punched out more weapons, airplanes, tanks, etc...than ever out of their factories in the years 44/45?

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Still no argument to see the nuclear attacks as an act of "mercy".

dcunning30 wrote on Mar 15^th, 2007 at 12:15pm:


There's a difference between bombing a scelected target precisely and arriving with hundreds of aircraft to carpet bomb everything that somehow *had* to do with the target.

And if a B-17 bomb operator states that the bomb sight was so accurate that it could put the bombs into "a glass of picles", I'm pretty  sure there wasn't made any effort to actually *try* to use it to its full potential.


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Don't involve civilians in your military actions. Period.

It is realistic and can be put into action quite easily.

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Even if, it proves that the allied strikes against protuction facilities were virtually useless.

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Your "specific" article was about japanese suicide submarines and how they would have been used in case of an allied invasion. So far, so harmless.
But your "the bombs were mercyful" comment was unnecessary and - as I already pointed out - disgusting.

How were the two A-bombs "merciful"?
Good question.... if I may:

Most of the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki never knew what hit them (although yes, many suffered terribly). The same cannot be said for the much greater number of innocents who died in incendiary bombings of places like Tokyo, which was burned to the ground and rebuilt something like 5 times during the course of the war... (and yes, by 1945, LeMay was targeting civilian centers to break Japanese morale... we were taking a savage beating, with troops fighting and dying all over the world)... war is a stupid  act of savagery, and the world probably could have done without the decades of nuclear blackmail that followed (and all the "little" proxy  wars, like Korea and Vietnam, that resulted from that)... but compared to the attack plan shown in dcunning's post, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were like a peck on the cheek. I know it sounds crazy, but...

And had we squared off with the Japanese (whose fighting spirit and ingenuity are legendary to this day) on their home turf, we might have lost... it was by no means a done deal by that point. Fighting spirit wins wars, not  technology or even superior numbers (except, perhaps when it comes to nukes). I have met vets who were standing by to invade Japan in early 1945, and they were scared to death, and not very confident they could prevail.
They also weren't looking forward to squaring off against old folks  and children armed with kitchen knives and pitchforks.

Imagine you are Harry Truman in July 1945. In one hand, you have certain- and I mean certain- victory in the form of the A-bombs, with peace and stability closer at hand, less civilian casualties, and a strong warning to the burgeoning USSR... and in the other hand you have a desperate assault on the last country anyone in their right mind would want to back into a corner, after years of bloody, costly, horrible fighting.

What would you do? I think Truman was a compassionate man, and no mere politician... and I think he did the right thing. I also think it haunted him for the rest of his life.

Also: a more likely scenario than a rout would have been the above-described division of Japan (US/Soviet), a la Korea... or even direct conflict between the US and Russia...by destroying Japan's resolve utterly before the Russians could mount an attack, the US, in a way, secured an independent future for Japan, where after a long period of humiliation, it would regain its sovereignty and eventually nearly bankrupt the US in the realm of world trade.

Heretic,

since you appear to admit you didn't read the article, then why on earth are you calling me disgusting due to my comment which was based on the contents of the article.

It's like arguing that 1 + 1 doesn't equal 2, and you've never had a math class in your life!

This is moronic to the nth degree!

Please, just leave me alone.  This is stupid!

dcunning30 wrote on Mar 16^th, 2007 at 10:50am:


The nature of the comment was disgusting.

It would be like saying that Hitlers Holocaust was a good thing.

It's just wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong...!


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The internet is not the place to be alone.

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Is that what this is all about?  You're offended by my choice of words?  

Dang dude, don't be such a wuss!

And since you appear to not have read the article about which I was commenting, you don't even know the context of my comment, yet you've gotten all worked up over the comment.  That's just plain stupid.   

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War - Total War - is not a fair fight.

I believe that the nuclear bomb(s) would have been used even if the invasion had taken place.  The Allies in the PAcific placed a higher value of life that the Japanese.  Once the invasion had started, and taking into consideration the serious casualties - first from the suicide attacks in the run up to the invasion and then once the battle was joined on the ground, by the remaining forces fighting to the death (think Tarawa, IWo Jima, Okinawa multiplied many times) AND civilians either coerced by the military, or by their own fatalistic sense of duty to their Emperoir and State, then the decision to use the nuclear weapons would have been even easier to make - and then the repercussions would have started in the US - if you had the weapon to stop the war, why wasn't it used?  Yes, Truman would have been haunted one way or another - On the one hand, tomrented by unleashing the bomb when he did, and had he waited, by NOT having unleashed it earlier.

I agree that ideally, wars should be fought by certain rules of engagement.  COnsider Agincourt, with the English and French agreeing to certain conduct   Even there, the English, by massacring the captured French nobles as a second attack was coming in, "broke" the accepted conduct.  In the end, though, the umpires conceded victory to the English.

But history has a long list of battles, wars, campaigns, where civilians suffered unjustly - and no one had pity for the Japanese who showed a blatant disregard for the lives of the captured peoples - military and civilian

well, um, yeah, anyways thats a lot of boats....

H wrote on Mar 18^th, 2007 at 6:30am:


H, It may have happened elsewhere, but the specific incident I was alluding to happened in Saipan .

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=t&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GFRC_enUS20...

Some of the links include videos.

Sorry for ther long post.

According to my understanding, from a Japanese perspective, there were two seperated, yet converging concepts that would be cause for a set of bloodletting of the likes the world have never seen should the US invade Japan.  And the bloodletting would have been on all sides, there was none immune from such a catastrophe.

First, there was the political events post Meji Restoration and the cultural/religions events, which were also post Meji Restoration.

After Commodore Perry forced Japan open to trade, Japan recognized this for what it was, exploitation of Asians.  They saw the only way for Japan to not be used up like they saw other Asian nations, they had to develop a modern military, and do it quickly! This happened under Meji.  So they copied the western powers. And they did a very good job at it, the defeat of the Russian Baltic fleet at Tsushima, as evidense.

The new constitution and the modernization of Japan heavily emphasized the military as the arm of power for Japan, but the military was "supposedly" under civilian rule, and ultimately, the emperor.  This worked well as long as there was a strong emperor.  Meji was strong.  However, his successor, Hirohito's father was physically and mentally handicapped.  In the vacuum of a strong emperor, the militerists successfully made a power grab, and with generals being unfettered, they proceded to engage into michief, such as the invasion of Manchuria.  After Hirohito's father died, he ascended to power as the Showa emperor.  But Hirohito was an intellectual, preferring to g horseback riding and his scientific pursuits such his love for biology.  And based on Imperial Court Etiquette, each member played a predefined and rigid role, which means short of a strong emperor, Hirohito for the most part rubber stamped whatever he was told.  There are scholars who strongly disagree with this point, but I believe it to be so.

Now, for the militerists to secure total power, they re-instituted the culture surrounding the samurai.  Recall the movie "The Last Samurai", Meji dissolved the Japanese class system, which means the much revered and much feared samurai class was no more.  But the samurai was intrinsicly Japanese, and was a source of national pride. But the militerists essentally spun the samurai into something any Japanese can obtain.  So they embarked on a program of "national militerism" which means ordinary Japanese life now had military overtones.  Schoolchildren wore military uniforms to school, and play were military exercizes.  Every boy aspired to join the imperial army or navy.  Those institutions rose to the pinnacle of Japanese society.  A young man "arrived" when he won a slot at Eta Jima or Yokarin.  And they modified the samurai oath for their purposes we know as bushido.

Bushido fit perfectly into the Japanese culture of face.  As we have seen in "The Last Samurai", face was more important than life itself.  To the western mind, this is an alien concept, and too many westerners impose their thought processes in analyzing and trying to understand Japanese events, especially in WWII.  Being ignorant to or inwilling to accept these concepts doom the analyst to come up with flawed analysis.  Throughout the course of the war, there have been many instances of Japanese choosing honorable death to accepting defeat.  Tamon Yamaguchi chose to go down they the Hiyru at Midway rather than live to fight another day.  We know about the fruitless banzai charges, and if you've seen "Letters From Iwo Jima", it boggled the mind of the western viewers to see those Japanese soldiers commit suicide when their positions were overrun instead of retreating to fight the marines at another position.  But such an act was perfectly Japanese.

So, when the invasion of the Japanese Islands were imminent, Bushido had reached a feverish pitch.  Though young Japanese men were prepared to obey their orders and figt and die (which was expected by their leaders) to save their homes, they didn't want to die, but they were prepared to.  Onishi told kamakazi pilots that "they were already gods without earthly desires".  Bushido was in full effect, and nobody knew how or was willing to stop the moving train.  Japanese citizens, who have been regurlarily lied to since the first defeat at Midway were also told how the Americans would brutalize the women and children.  Face was more important than life, even for the women.

Conventionally, it was expected that much bombing would occur, then the invasion by marine divisions would come.  Hardships of that nature were expected.  That would change nothing.  Every Japanese were preparing for that.  At this time, Hirohito had long wanted to get out of the war, but he was bound by court etiquette so he was fairly powerless (in his own mind as history tells us) to stop the moving train.  And that train was heading for national suicide rather than Japan bear the unbearable.

When the atomic bombs dropped, those two events were enough to shake Hirohito to FINALLY act decisevely and ask his subjects to bear the unbearable and accept the unacceptable.  That is why I will always maintain the atomic bomb drops actually saved lives, both Japanese and American.  However, if someone disagrees, I'd like to hear their fact-based arguments.

...again, sorry for the lo

Also as another point.  Accepting defeat in WWII would be the first time Japan, as a nation would be defeated in a conflict.  Considering the concept of "all nations under one roof", and that the Japanese emperor was the descendent of the Japanese goddess Amaterasu, and the Japanese people were a superior race to others, it was unaccptable, yet, even impossible that the soft Americans could defeat Yamato Damashii, it was just the ultimate humiliation.  The militerist leaders, who got Japan into this whole mess in the first place, would prefer the face-saving final battle than to concede defeat.

I agree.  All you have to do is to study the various battles and the picture easily emerged that the Japanese were prepared to fight to the death.  And the closer to Japan the battle being fought, the more savage the fighting became.  Tokko tactics were first introduced as a deliberate method at the Phillipines, but was in ernest at Okanawa.

What I attempted to do was to explain what I believe were the reasons why the Japanese were prepared to fight to the death, especially on Japanese soil.  There are those who somehow conclude that the atomic bombs weren't necessary, and in fact unspeakably cruel in comparion to an invasion because the Japanese would just surrender.  I have not seen any facts bearing this idea out.  Given, there was a peace faction, which included Hirohito and Prince Konoe, but the peace faction had to remain secret.  Ponder that for a moment, the emperor of Japan had to keep his personal feelings of the war a secret!  That is a testament to the vice-grip the milterists had on the country!  And they were bent on national suicide.  To be blunt, the atomic bombs shocked Hirohito to the point that he suddenly grew a pair!

Another interesting thought is those military members who were percieved to be involved in a failure were given "opportunities" to atone for their failure.

Chuichi Nagumo was given the opportunity to atone for his failure at Midway by commanding the Saipan forces that even Combined Fleet HQ knew was, at best, a stalling operation.  They expected Naguno to meet his end at Saipan.

Soichi Sugita was one of the 6 escorts of Yamamoto's fatal flight that was jumped by American P38 Lightningts.  All of the escorts were given extremely dangerous missions to atone for their failure.  All died except Sugita.  He ultimately faught air battles over Japan against Navy Hellcats and Corsairs in the final months of the war.

A Tokko pilot seemed to not buy into the "gods without earthly desires" line, especially since he was married and his wife took the unusual step of moving into a hotel next to his base.  he kept coming back from his kamikaze missions with "mechanical failures".  He was successively sent on tokko missions without escort to assur ehe didn't return.  He kept coming back. He was subsequently ordered to do a check flight, upon which he crashed, no doubt from sabotage.

Also, Admiral Onishi, the father of the kamikaze operations, after the surrender announcement by Hirohito, painfully disembowed himself to atone for the men he sent to yakasuni shrine (a physical shrine next to the imperial palace where dead warriors go) prior to himself.  He languished for about 12 hours with his intestines hanging out and refused help.  After he died, all the newspapers celebrated Onishi as a war hero.  He stayed true to Bushido.  It's reasonable to conclude if Onishi refused to commit seppuku, he would have been shamed.

Felix/FFDS wrote on Mar 19^th, 2007 at 8:02pm:



That's what I read about too, but I wouldn't be suprised if it happened elsewhere.  Marpi Point on Saipan is where I've read about civilians committed suicide.  It also happened on Okanawa (sp) too.

Apex, thanks for that.

I suppose even a broken clock is correct twice a day.  I just hope I learn to keep my trap shut for all the other times I don't have a leg to stand on.

Felix/FFDS wrote on Mar 20^th, 2007 at 8:07pm:

War's have been going on since the beginning of recorded history, and the basic principle was always who ever had the best stuff wins (of course). so, things will keep advancing in order to protect ones country. I guess if you look at it, the history of the world is almost one big cold war (rome is a good example). Most wars are stupid. many americans on the homefront didn't feel sympathy for the japenese at the time because of pearl harbor, and a whole gaggle of other things, while many vetrans on the front lines had realized how pointless the war was. in the end we will probably blow each other to smitherines for some stupid reason. probably with nukes too. or, then again, maybe monkeys will come down from outer space and shoot us with there Mango-Rays.

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Felix/FFDS wrote on Mar 25^th, 2007 at 3:41pm:

Marmalade?

A Norwegian newspaper once printed that Lutefisk is the Norwegians' attempt at conquering the world. When they discovered that Viking raids didn't give world supremacy, they invented a meal so terrifying, so cruel, that they could scare people to become one's subordinates.