Obama apologizing for America again...smh

Turtleneck wrote:If the US was concerned about the Soviets looking like saviors, why did Roosevelt ask the Soviets to join the Pacific war at the Yalta Conference in early 1945?

Loose is right. The Allied firebombing of Dresden killed over 20,000 people, and it happened at a time when the Nazis had been pushed into a far weaker position with little hope of winning the war.

Turtleneck wrote:interesting read:

It didn’t take a military genius to see that, while it might be possible to fight a decisive battle against one great power invading from one direction, it would not be possible to fight off two great powers attacking from two different directions. The Soviet invasion invalidated the military’s decisive battle strategy, just as it invalidated the diplomatic strategy. At a single stroke, all of Japan’s options evaporated. The Soviet invasion was strategically decisive — it foreclosed both of Japan’s options — while the bombing of Hiroshima (which foreclosed neither) was not.

The Soviet declaration of war also changed the calculation of how much time was left for maneuver. Japanese intelligence was predicting that U.S. forces might not invade for months. Soviet forces, on the other hand, could be in Japan proper in as little as 10 days. The Soviet invasion made a decision on ending the war extremely time sensitive.

And Japan’s leaders had reached this conclusion some months earlier. In a meeting of the Supreme Council in June 1945, they said that Soviet entry into the war “would determine the fate of the Empire.” Army Deputy Chief of Staff Kawabe said, in that same meeting, “The absolute maintenance of peace in our relations with the Soviet Union is imperative for the continuation of the war.”

Japan’s leaders consistently displayed disinterest in the city bombing that was wrecking their cities. And while this may have been wrong when the bombing began in March of 1945, by the time Hiroshima was hit, they were certainly right to see city bombing as an unimportant sideshow, in terms of strategic impact. When Truman famously threatened to visit a “rain of ruin” on Japanese cities if Japan did not surrender, few people in the United States realized that there was very little left to destroy. By August 7, when Truman’s threat was made, only 10 cities larger than 100,000 people remained that had not already been bombed. Once Nagasaki was attacked on August 9, only nine cities were left. Four of those were on the northernmost island of Hokkaido, which was difficult to bomb because of the distance from Tinian Island where American planes were based. Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, had been removed from the target list by Secretary of War Henry Stimson because of its religious and symbolic importance. So despite the fearsome sound of Truman’s threat, after Nagasaki was bombed only four major cities remained which could readily have been hit with atomic weapons.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:

Turtleneck wrote:If the US was concerned about the Soviets looking like saviors, why did Roosevelt ask the Soviets to join the Pacific war at the Yalta Conference in early 1945?

Loose is right. The Allied firebombing of Dresden killed over 20,000 people, and it happened at a time when the Nazis had been pushed into a far weaker position with little hope of winning the war.

Truman, not Roosevelt.

Perhaps a change of heart? 6 months is a long time. Maybe seeing Russia being the one to end the war in Europe was what changed opinions. They might have thought at the time that they'd be taking Berlin. I think discounting that they dropped it three days before Russia was going to enter is a big mistake. They could have waited a month, a week, done it a month earlier... Anything. They didn't.

Turtleneck wrote:Has anybody considered the military industrial complex?

DWags wrote:

Turtleneck wrote:Has anybody considered the military industrial complex?

Go ahead, make jokes. They know what you've just done. I don't envy you at all right now. There is no secure place now.

Turtleneck wrote:

DWags wrote:

Go ahead, make jokes. They know what you've just done. I don't envy you at all right now. There is no secure place now.

My bunker is secure.

Turtleneck wrote:I hate Travis

Turtleneck wrote:.....no......

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:

Turtleneck wrote:.....no......

You right about yalta. My bad. These things happen.

Turtleneck wrote:

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:

You right about yalta. My bad. These things happen.

No they don't. Unacceptable. All previous points invalidated.

AnomanderRake wrote:The carpet bombing of Japanese cities killed a lot more people than the Nukes did, but I think you guys are all trying to simplify a complex decision. It wasn't just 1 factor that lead to the dropping of the bombs, but a combination of all of them obviously.

1) It ended the war prior to Russia getting involved, we get the credit and send a message to Russia regarding American power.
2) It allowed us to test said American power and how enemies/allies/US Citizens would react.
3) It crippled Japanese morale and forced them to surrender. Japan was holding out on a conditional surrender that Japan could keep their Empirical structure in place. The allies long before the bombs were dropped agreed to only accept unconditional surrender, which the US and its allies eventually conceded on anyway and allowed Japan's emperor to stay in place.
4) It prevented a drawn out ground war/invasion by US and Soviet forces that would have resulted in millions of casualties, at far greater expense.

Polls from today on how Americans view the dropping of the nukes are silly. How many Americans are really well versed in history enough to make an intelligent statement about the events of WWII that lead up to us dropping the bombs?

U.S. President Barack Obama will be visiting Hiroshima on Friday, the first sitting American president to do so since the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city 71 years ago. Hiroshima is flourishing today, but was destroyed by the United States’ use of the first atomic bomb deployed in war. In 1945, it was generally understood that the bombings of Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and Nagasaki on Aug. 9 had forced the Japanese surrender, ending a period of war for Japan that began in 1931 with the invasion of China. For most of the world, the end of World War II led to jubilation.
At the time, the casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were noted, but weren’t particularly striking. Somewhere between 50 million and 80 million people had died in the war in total and the entire world was numbed by the sheer magnitude of the human catastrophe. It was not surprising, therefore, that most people rejoiced at the end of the war, and saw the deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a small price to pay. Besides, even the lower casualty estimates were too big to grasp at the time.

LooseGoose wrote:Hiroshima and Nagasaki: A Moral Necessity

U.S. President Barack Obama will be visiting Hiroshima on Friday, the first sitting American president to do so since the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city 71 years ago. Hiroshima is flourishing today, but was destroyed by the United States’ use of the first atomic bomb deployed in war. In 1945, it was generally understood that the bombings of Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and Nagasaki on Aug. 9 had forced the Japanese surrender, ending a period of war for Japan that began in 1931 with the invasion of China. For most of the world, the end of World War II led to jubilation.
At the time, the casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were noted, but weren’t particularly striking. Somewhere between 50 million and 80 million people had died in the war in total and the entire world was numbed by the sheer magnitude of the human catastrophe. It was not surprising, therefore, that most people rejoiced at the end of the war, and saw the deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a small price to pay. Besides, even the lower casualty estimates were too big to grasp at the time.

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:

LooseGoose wrote:Hiroshima and Nagasaki: A Moral Necessity

In his introduction he acknowledges that critics think that it was more to intimidate the Soviets.... Then absolutely does not mention that point again.

He's wrong though. The whole article is basically just "lots of lives were saved, even the Chinese, see you forgot about the Chinese!" And yeah, lives probably were saved. Though Russian intervention may have accomplished that goal as well. And that's been my point, we couldn't afford to let them test that theory with the Cold War looming.

LooseGoose wrote:

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:

In his introduction he acknowledges that critics think that it was more to intimidate the Soviets.... Then absolutely does not mention that point again.

He's wrong though. The whole article is basically just "lots of lives were saved, even the Chinese, see you forgot about the Chinese!" And yeah, lives probably were saved. Though Russian intervention may have accomplished that goal as well. And that's been my point, we couldn't afford to let them test that theory with the Cold War looming.

I didn't endorse the article, just stumbled across it this morning on another site so linked it here.