We’ve almost done the same thing with Vietnam. When I was in high school 17 years ago my US history textbook had 3/4 of a page and a picture of a bridge in Hue to cover the Vietnam War. I had to learn everything about it on my own and from my father and uncles.
Oh yeah, and Japan can eat a dick. They can have an apology when they pay reparations to our POWs that they used for slave labor. Wait, that’s not gonna happen thanks to Clinton. So Japan can fuck off. But I’m sure Barry will give them the apology they want.
allowing your countrymen to die when there’s something you can do to stop it right now is wrong. i’d kill a thousand foreign babies to keep one american baby from becoming fatherless. we didn’t start that war. the hundreds of thousands of American dead aren’t enough justification for you? like somebody else said, it’s just a shame we didn’t have more bombs.
Do you post just to start arguments? By many of the posts I have read you seem to stir the pot then argue your point from an untenable position. That said my take on warfare is the same with any conflict. Least amount of force needed to resolve the issue. In 1945, it was either a prolonged invasion costing many, many more American lives and even more Japanese military and civilian lives. Or drop a few well placed A Bombs on viable military targets which killed a small civilian populace. Imagine if the role was reversed, a foreign power invading our country. Everyone would fight tooth and nail to defend. Civilians would no longer be non-combatants, but viable opponents. Add in the fact that Japanese culture is taught no surrender and clings to that mentality. You have a good old fashioned “Sherman’s March” on you hands to try to win the conflict.
No Western nation has engaged in total war since WWII. Gen. Sherman said it best when he said “War is Hell”. The US always gets shit for the A Bomb on Japan. The truth is the firing bombing of Japanese cities killed more people than the A Bombs. The Allies fire bombed Germany. British Air Marshall Harris and Churchill had no regrets. People forget that the Japanese brought total war upon themselves by practicing the Bushido Warrior code. Look at US Marine casualties in Tarawa, Peleiu and Iwo Jima. A invasion of Japan would have resulted in nearly a million American and Japanese casualties. As our WWII combat vets continue to succumb to old age, revisionist historians and propagandists take their place. Through out history, Warfare has been a cruel and merciless human sport.
That isn’t accurate. Ask a random stranger on the street of Tokyo is they ever heard of, ‘Nan King’ and they will tell you no. Ask any stranger on the street of Berlin and ask them if they ever heard of Auschwitz and you’ll get a different answer.
Japan is in total denial. Germany is in total, ‘guilt all the kids’ mode.
Japan has never really done a good job as a society of acknowledging what they did in the early 20th century. Worse, lots of academics have sprung up here and in Japan that blame use of the atom bomb on racism and who go to great lengths to detail war crimes perpetrated, they claim, against the Japanese…while completely ignoring the behavior of Japanese occupation forces.
In the Phillipenes there are survivors who witnessed Japanese soldiers throwing small children into the air and catching them with a bayonet for giggles. The Japanese in WWII were some sick bastards. Their culture was seriously messed up, and their government was under the control of fanatic militarists bent on domination of the Pacific at a minimum. Attempts at historical revisionism are sickening.
We nuked the Japanese because at the time leaders were faced with the alternative of a wholesale invasion of the Japanese homeland. Given the massive casualties suffered taking chunks of dirt like Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the projected US casualties for such an invasion were staggering. When the Japanese have made you bleed the ground red to take every inch of land and when they’re literally flying planes into ships in suicide attacks it would be rather odd to assert that an invasion of their homeland would result in anything other than bloodshed on a horrific scale.
Compared to that, dropping a couple of nukes that makes them realize they will be utterly destroyed if they don’t knock off the stupid doesn’t seem like such a bad option.
…and even after a couple of nukes a bunch of fanatics tried to stage a coup to prevent surrender.
They don’t deserve an apology for being bombed. If they insist on one, we should politely point to the fact that we rebuilt their society and have protected them from foreign enemies since they finally had sense to surrender, and that perhaps they should just say “thank you” and shutup.
Japan got off relatively lightly for their War Crimes. Japan never apologized to China for its atrocities. I had a Japanese girl friend when I was stationed in Oki. She had no clue about Pearl Harbor etc.
Actually Japan has offered a number of official public apologies for bad acts against China. Every now and then…generally when trade negotiations are going on…the Chinese government opens up their box of indignance at Japanese war crimes and demands an apology and trade concessions.
International politics.
China has their own denial thing going on about their own history…only they just shoot people who bring up inconvenient facts about it. Mao killed more Chinese than the Japanese ever dreamed about killing.
Ask a German if they can get a copy of Mein Kampf.
A guy in my unit there ordered a copy, and he happened to live on the economy. He had to go to the Polizei station, and explain why he ordered that book. What they told him was people could only have it for educational purposes, and people could not have it just to have it.
Different than Japan, yes, but they don’t exactly want to talk about WW2 at all.
The Japs got exactly what they deserved, they brought it on and we gave it to them. When you crush their spirit utterly and completely is when they surrender and you win, no peace treaties, etc - total victory. Otherwise you get this 10+ years of endless warfare that we see today where it’s an agonizing war of attrition and the politicians make it a circus so that even the clearly superior side can’t win decisively.
They surrendered within 3 days once we hit them. Not in a million years and a million or more American boys’ lives would they have done so otherwise.
Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that. Communism has killed more people than the Nazi’s and Japanese ever dreamed of. Unfortunately theirs too many Leftist sympathizers who hide the truth.
Nope. Mao and Stalin both killed more than Hitler. Stalin did most of it directly, Mao operated mostly in indirect effects but there’s a body count just the same.
Individually your right. I just wanted to name Communists who killed in significant numbers, wether direct or indirect. My point is that communist killings exceeded that of the Nazis.