6th March 2004, 4:57 PM
A Black Falcon Wrote:Now of course the Japanese thought they were superior to us as well and thought they had much better will and stuff and the soft Americans would lose because we are so weak and unwilling to fight, but when you talk about that remember that we were the same towards them. And I am sure that that affected Truman's decision. As I said, had they finished the A-Bomb before Germany fell and they thought they could keep the Soviets out of Eastern Germany by using it (because I suspect that in Japan the anti-Soviet effect was one of the prime reasons for using the bomb), would they have used it? I bet not. Germans are white.
Well, Japan was a different situation than Germany was, also. By the time it got to the point where the Soviets were a major concern to us was when the two fronts met. Basically, Germany was already in the vice, and Hitler's Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe and SS were all but neutered. Japan, on the other hand, was certainly not in a position to make a comeback victory, but they could have possibly sustained a war of attrition for years to come. They were beaten but not defeated the way Germany was. We needed not to just beat Japan, we needed to cut their balls off too, ensure that they would never be such a threat to us again. Assuming we just said, "Okay, we took back their empire, shoved them back to their four islands, let's call it a day", that would not have happened. Japan would have taken her lumps and possibly desire a rematch... after she developed her own atom bomb. Not desirable at all. The other alternative to the bombing was to produce a ground invasion, and there are very few people who believe that would have gone well. Some predicted as many as a million American casualties in such an enterprise. We might have defeated them in conventional invasion, we also might very well have failed, the only certain outcome would be terrible devastation that Europe knew all too well. The death totals for both sides would have likely been astronomical. So, the alternative to dissecting Japan limb by limb was to go straight for the balls. Thus, the A-bomb. It did exactly that. It snapped their will to resist like dry kindling over a knee. The result was a large amount of Japanese casualties, and there's nothing honorable about that, but to suggest it would have been better to undertake an invasion that would have certainly cost many times more, not only in numbers of casualties but sheer destruction, is fallacy.
I believe the bombs were dropped primarily to neuter the Japanese, with the added bonus of not only proving to the Soviets that we had the bomb, but to show them exactly what it was capable of, and what the consequences were. It was quite unfortunate that the commies were so close themselves, but in 1945 they were still several years behind, and it is quite likely that they were... not scared, so to speak, but cautious. They knew that until they got the bomb themselves, fucking with the United States was a pretty bad idea. Thus, we were able to take Japan and rebuild the nation, without the many problems that we had attempting to do the same thing in Germany. Japan was stable and self-sufficient within about ten years or so, it took Germany nearly four times as long, and it took the collapse of communist Russia, for that to happen. If we didn't scare the commies away from Japan, they would be a stagnant pit just as Germany is now.
YOU CANNOT HIDE FOREVER
WE STAND AT THE DOOR
WE STAND AT THE DOOR