7th March 2004, 5:24 PM
Quote:ABF: What did you do, copy a textbook?? That may very well be the longest post in TC history!That was ~6 800x screens long. I know that Weltall and I have bested that in some of our political "duscussions"... :)
And ... well I'm currently reading a book about WWII and am taking a class about Japan 1860-now, so... oh and last fall I read about half of a lengthy book about the American occupation in Japan after WWII. Very good book...
And yes, as I said if their leaders had ordered them to fight to the death many people would have done so and personal reservations or certain defeat were beside the point. This is a good question that we cannot come up with a definitive answer to. It didn't happen, after all... :) But still the question -- how much would it have taken for Japan to surrender -- is a good one. Maybe we should wait a few months, I'm sure I'll know more by the end of this class I'm taking... :) But based on what I know now it is a tough one. As I said militarists were falling but still clung to some power until the A-Bomb gave the peace side enough strength to act... I don't know, it might have taken something on the magnitude of Hiroshima to give the peace side enough strength to act. But still... I think that maybe Hiroshima (as I said Nagasaki was a waste and served no purpose) could have been avoided. Yes, dropping one in some uninhabited (or close to it) area of Japan wouldn't be quite as big a statement, but it would be one once they figure out the destructive potential of the weapon... I do think that had we just waited the militarists would have held on to enough power to force us to attack Japan in an attack that would lead to mass casualties on both sides, but did we need to blow up a CITY? I think the answer is no. It might not have been quite as good a statement but it'd still be a great one and would have saved the world a lot of trouble... and if (when given enough time -- 3 days is NOT enough!) that didn't work, THEN consider using it on an inhabited city, now that they'd know the true power of the weapon (saying 'we have a weapon of unimaginable power' isn't very useful when no one has any conception of what this thing can do...) and still refused surrender. But I think that that might have destabilized the government enough. But we'll never know for sure of course.
Quote:What? We cut off supplies. Therefore, we in some way deserved to get attacked? Because of that we share the blame? That's absurd. They had choices, as you said. They could back down or lash out. They made the wrong choice, completely of their own volition. And they paid dearly for it.
No. We cut off supplies so we knew that an attack was virtual certainty. And we had signs -- the attack hardly came out of the blue. As I said we had cut their oil so they had a small window of a few months to act before their oil supply grew very low and some kind of decision was forced. And given that militarists were in control a peaceful solution and some kind of withdrawl was quite uniikely. So Roosevelt knew that this would likely lead to war... because they would not back down or see reason. Well for the majority of course. Some Japanese had really looked at the USA and seen that behind the apparent softness was a great nation and knew that Japan could never hope to win a long war, but the majority opinion was that of our weakness and Japanese 'moral superiority' that would lead them to victory against the soft Americans. And then of course Pearl Harbor... as I said it should not have been a surprise. We knew in the day or so prior that Japan would attack somewhere. The Phillipines were expecting assualt, and Guam... Pearl was far out and wasn't expecting anything, but still (basing this on said WWII book I read) there were things that should have shown it... a warning from Washington that attack was coming was blocked by poor reception and didn't get to Pearl Harbor until after the battle started, that radar station assumed that the Japanese planes were an expected flight from California and not an enemy force, other Japanese messages clearly marking Pearl Harbor were unread in the intercepted communications part of the decoding operation, etc...
And yes a surprise attack was not the way you shouid start a war but as I said Japan in recent history had done it multiple times before so it was hardly a tactic that we did not expect them to use.
Quote: Do you remember the massive German backlash there was in the First World War?
Yeah, they were all baby-killing Huns, right?
Quote:It also bears noting that much of America's action for a good deal of our involvement was against Japan. Until D-Day, there really wasn't a huge American presence against Germany. For most of the war Japan was our nemesis. When we were finally able to start throwing our weight around in Europe, Germany collapsed pretty quickly. They weren't the immediate threat to America that Japan was. Racism? Yeah, that had something to do with it. But the fact that Japan was much closer to home and for a while practically knocking on the door, coupled with their coward's attack against us while in peace talks doubtless made Americans far more pissed at the Japanese than we were with Hitler.
Hmm. I disagree. We did not focus on Japan ahead of Germany. Look at the invasions in North Africa in 1942 and Italy in 1943 before Normandy in 1944... actually for a while we were thinking HItler first, then the Japanese. We did change that and start island-hopping while acting in Europe as well, but still I would say that we focused more on Germany than Japan. Of course the fact that Germany had England and Russia also fighting them hard while only China and some British on the south and west edges were fighting Japan had an impact too, but we decided for a while to more slow Japan than put on a full assualt... I think that's why it took as long as it did. But I'd say that we were able to fight that two-front war pretty effectively, with plenty of emphasis on both fronts the whole time to be able to do more than just hold the line...