The Ruiner
Well-Known Member
We can't go back in time, hindsight is always 20/20.
Who Is Really Evil?
- Thread starter DrFever
- Start date
londonfog
Well-Known Member
my problem with this is where it was dropped ..I mean innocent women , children, the old and young where killed on those horrible days ...The U.S. was in violation of internationally accepted principles of war with respect to the killing of innocent populations ( non military )..The bombing of non-combatant populations violated international and humanitarian laws...so how can we really argue if its ever used against us when we occupied/and occupy others...I love my country and have fought and will fight for her, but the truth must be said if I'm to believe in what I fight for...yes it may have ended the war quicker, but we may have been wrong in the way we did it..
Charlie Ventura
Active Member
I always find it telling that those who protest the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan didn't live the experience of America and our allies actually engaging in a REAL war. As one walked down the street in any hometown, one could see little gold-fringed flags hanging in the windows of homes indicating that those who lived there had a son or daughter in the military. Some had gold stars on those little flags indicating that those living in the home had lost loved ones in the war; one star for each member lost. Americans lived in a country that was totally dedicated to winning the war. Certain foods and other goods were rationed. You couldn't buy meat, butter, gas, or tires without ration coupons. Most other goods were in short supply as well. Throughout the war, Japanese submarines were spotted off the coast of California and the Eastern seaboard as well. This was not like our modern Neocon wars in the Middle East; we actually had a very real chance of being attacked right here by a very strong, dedicated military force. The Japanese government was NOT going to give up. The Japanese citizenry were just as dedicated to winning as we were. The war HAD to be stopped and dropping those two bombs on Japan finally did the trick. If you want to see the wages of WWII, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
Johnnyorganic
Well-Known Member
LF, your analysis leaves out Tokyo, Dresden, Berlin, and London. Those are just the most notable.
WWII was total war. The Allies gave as good as they got. Both sides firebombed the shit out of enemy civilian population centers.
The theory being that if the people lost the will to support the war, it would end faster.
The atom bomb was simply an extension of what was already happening.
Johnnyorganic
Well-Known Member
I should add that the concept of Total War was not a new concept by WWII.
U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman employed it quite effectively, 80 years prior, against the Confederacy in his March to the Sea.
U.S. General William Tecumseh Sherman employed it quite effectively, 80 years prior, against the Confederacy in his March to the Sea.
DrFever
New Member
that the atomic bomb was unnecessary to end World War II for the following reasons:
1. The Japanese government wanted to surrender; its leaders, military as well as civilian, rationally understood that the war was lost. But they had a determined attachment (irrational?) to the emperor. Japan would have surrendered, very possibly as early as June 1945, had its ruling establishment received guarantees of the emperor's personal safety and continuance on the throne. This should have been the first step in an American surrender strategy.
2. Any remaining Japanese reluctance to quit the war would have been quickly overcome by the second step, entry of the Soviet Union in August 1945.
3. American failure to accept and implement this "two-step logic" for an expeditious end to World War II was largely a result of the emerging Cold War and especially American concern over Soviet ambitions in Eastern Europe and northeast Asia.
4. The American public would have accepted some modification of the unconditional surrender policy in order to avoid prolongation of the war. The Washington Post and Time magazine advocated its abandonment; so did some United States senators. Many military leaders and diplomats-British as well as Americanconcurred.
5. President Harry S. Truman seemed inclined to give assurances on the emperor, then pulled back. He did so out of concern with Soviet behavior and with increasingly firm knowledge that the United States would soon have atomic weapons available. Coming to believe that the bomb would be decisive and anxious to keep the Soviet Union out of Manchuria, he dropped modification of unconditional surrender; moreover, he sought to prevent a Soviet declaration of war against Japan by encouraging China not to yield to Soviet demands beyond those granted at Yalta. In so doing, he acted primarily at the urging of James F. Byrnes, the archvillain in the plot.
6. Truman also refused to move on Japanese peace feelers, apparently in the belief that it was necessary to prevent a Japanese surrender before the bomb could be demonstrated to the world, and especially to the Soviet Union. The result was the needless destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and many allied casualties that need not have happened.
7. In subsequent years, the American decision makers of 1945 devoted considerable energy to the construction of a misleading "myth" that attempted to vindicate the use of the bomb by denying Japanese efforts at peace and by asserting grossly inflated estimates of American casualties that would have been sustained in an invasion of Japan.
For a "revisionist" work, this is very traditional history. Alperovitz stresses the doings of Great White Men engaged in a diplomatic chess game. He conveys no sense of the actions and passions of World War II. The battle of Okinawa dominated the first nine weeks of Truman's presidency and eventually accounted for one-quarter of all American casualties in the Pacific War; it is mentioned in passing without a hint of the way in which it intensified expectations of fanatical Japanese resistance. One never gets a sense that a war was still raging in much of East Asia and the Pacific, producing substantial casualties each day it continued.
At times written in the tone of an expose, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb is a lawyer's brief, repetitively citing evidence that supports its position, ignoring anything that does not. For example, its generalizations about public opinion make no mention of a Gallup poll on the future of the Japanese emperor, conducted June 1-5, 1945; 70 percent of the respondents favored either execution, trial, life imprisonment, or exile; 7 percent were willing to keep him on his throne as a figurehead
1. The Japanese government wanted to surrender; its leaders, military as well as civilian, rationally understood that the war was lost. But they had a determined attachment (irrational?) to the emperor. Japan would have surrendered, very possibly as early as June 1945, had its ruling establishment received guarantees of the emperor's personal safety and continuance on the throne. This should have been the first step in an American surrender strategy.
2. Any remaining Japanese reluctance to quit the war would have been quickly overcome by the second step, entry of the Soviet Union in August 1945.
3. American failure to accept and implement this "two-step logic" for an expeditious end to World War II was largely a result of the emerging Cold War and especially American concern over Soviet ambitions in Eastern Europe and northeast Asia.
4. The American public would have accepted some modification of the unconditional surrender policy in order to avoid prolongation of the war. The Washington Post and Time magazine advocated its abandonment; so did some United States senators. Many military leaders and diplomats-British as well as Americanconcurred.
5. President Harry S. Truman seemed inclined to give assurances on the emperor, then pulled back. He did so out of concern with Soviet behavior and with increasingly firm knowledge that the United States would soon have atomic weapons available. Coming to believe that the bomb would be decisive and anxious to keep the Soviet Union out of Manchuria, he dropped modification of unconditional surrender; moreover, he sought to prevent a Soviet declaration of war against Japan by encouraging China not to yield to Soviet demands beyond those granted at Yalta. In so doing, he acted primarily at the urging of James F. Byrnes, the archvillain in the plot.
6. Truman also refused to move on Japanese peace feelers, apparently in the belief that it was necessary to prevent a Japanese surrender before the bomb could be demonstrated to the world, and especially to the Soviet Union. The result was the needless destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and many allied casualties that need not have happened.
7. In subsequent years, the American decision makers of 1945 devoted considerable energy to the construction of a misleading "myth" that attempted to vindicate the use of the bomb by denying Japanese efforts at peace and by asserting grossly inflated estimates of American casualties that would have been sustained in an invasion of Japan.
For a "revisionist" work, this is very traditional history. Alperovitz stresses the doings of Great White Men engaged in a diplomatic chess game. He conveys no sense of the actions and passions of World War II. The battle of Okinawa dominated the first nine weeks of Truman's presidency and eventually accounted for one-quarter of all American casualties in the Pacific War; it is mentioned in passing without a hint of the way in which it intensified expectations of fanatical Japanese resistance. One never gets a sense that a war was still raging in much of East Asia and the Pacific, producing substantial casualties each day it continued.
At times written in the tone of an expose, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb is a lawyer's brief, repetitively citing evidence that supports its position, ignoring anything that does not. For example, its generalizations about public opinion make no mention of a Gallup poll on the future of the Japanese emperor, conducted June 1-5, 1945; 70 percent of the respondents favored either execution, trial, life imprisonment, or exile; 7 percent were willing to keep him on his throne as a figurehead
Johnnyorganic
Well-Known Member
The military leaders held out hopes of being able to negotiate a surrender up until the Soviets declared war on Japan. Your follow-up cut and paste neglects to mention that the military leaders only agreed to surrender when the Emperor himself appeared before them and said, "It's over."
From the days immediately following the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, unconditional surrender was the only acceptable end of the war as far as Americans were concerned.
Towards the end of the War, the U.S. was dealing from a position of strength, not weakness. A negotiated surrender from a position of strength would have been a sign of weakness to the Soviets. There was absolutely no good reason to negotiate with Imperial Japan.
Revisionist historians wishing to demonize the U.S. really should remember that Imperial Japan brought this on itself.
After it was all over the Japanese people became our allies. And now we enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship .
From the days immediately following the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, unconditional surrender was the only acceptable end of the war as far as Americans were concerned.
Towards the end of the War, the U.S. was dealing from a position of strength, not weakness. A negotiated surrender from a position of strength would have been a sign of weakness to the Soviets. There was absolutely no good reason to negotiate with Imperial Japan.
Revisionist historians wishing to demonize the U.S. really should remember that Imperial Japan brought this on itself.
After it was all over the Japanese people became our allies. And now we enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship .
DrFever
New Member
Bottom line USA did it for one reason to show a force of power not only did they not want Russia to enter the war or gain more land
kinda ironic when during the war all 3 leaders were already divideing the land up
was usa worried about casualties hell if you really come down to it USA stood by watching Germany destroy there alies France , russia and england yet usa would not land 1 troop on the ground for support could it of bin it was election year ???
I always wondered what if germany started on usa instead of them attackin russia wonder you think russia or england would of stood by watching there alies get a beating ???
in reality only after Russia and england had germany on the run did usa land a troop to help.
If japan never attacked pearl harbour usa would of never entered the war
kinda ironic when during the war all 3 leaders were already divideing the land up
was usa worried about casualties hell if you really come down to it USA stood by watching Germany destroy there alies France , russia and england yet usa would not land 1 troop on the ground for support could it of bin it was election year ???
I always wondered what if germany started on usa instead of them attackin russia wonder you think russia or england would of stood by watching there alies get a beating ???
in reality only after Russia and england had germany on the run did usa land a troop to help.
If japan never attacked pearl harbour usa would of never entered the war
DrFever
New Member
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Q: Why did the USA intervene in what became World War II?[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]A.: Because if we didn’t, we’d now all speak German or Japanese.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Q. Who benefited the most from the defeat of Germany and Japan in WWII?[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]A. The USA.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]This, with variations, has been the standard Q&A about the history of and the events surrounding our entry into that war and usually ends further discussion. But the standard answers, on closer examination, are just plain wrong.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Why?[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The first question first, since it takes a bit of detailed explanation.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The German General Staff, which had codenamed contingency invasion/occupation plans for dozens of nations (even one for the never-tried conquest of Switzerland called "Operation Christmas") had none for the USA. Neither did the Japanese High Command. Neither nation’s economy was ever fully mobilized for total war to the extent the USA’s and Great Britain’s had been. An invasion of North America would have required a major and early commitment by Berlin and Tokyo of financial, human and material resources to two forms of warfare, the first being large, long-range strategic bomber, transport and fighter escort aircraft, something neither Germany nor Japan had done. Both nations had superb short and medium range fighter/interceptors and medium bombers, but no bombers like the four-engine US B-17 or, later, the British Lancaster.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The second major and early commitment would have to have been to a sizable "blue water" naval "long-range power projection" force. Germany (unlike Japan) didn’t have this and did not seriously plan on acquiring it---something requiring numerous aircraft carriers, auxiliary and amphibious ships, carrier-based combat and reconnaissance aircraft, plus a sizable force of marines. There were minor proposals made early in the war to build an aircraft carrier to be christened "Frederick the Great" along with two large cruisers, all of which "land animal" Hitler soon nixed.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The German submarine threat, although still quite dire in W.W. II (thanks in great part to FDR’s long and controversial delay in ordering the Navy to conduct aggressive antisubmarine warfare operations off the U.S. East Coast), was not nearly as potent as it was in W.W. I. This was in large part due to defensive seagoing escort and convoy tactics developed in 1917-18 and improved submarine detection techniques, like active sonar, created in the interwar years. Submarines alone could not effectively project broad-based, large-scale offensive naval power great distances (something demonstrated brilliantly by Admirals Nimitz, Mitscher and Halsey and the aircraft carrier-based "task force" concept in the Pacific war against Japan).[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The goal of the German U-boat campaign remained much the same as that in W.W.I, chiefly defensive "commerce raiding;" attempts to cut off the flow of needed supplies to Great Britain and, this time, to the USSR as well. Its surface navy, consisting mainly of smaller sized "pocket" battleships as well as cruisers and some destroyers and patrol boats, operated in much the same commerce raider fashion – voyaging about individually attacking and sinking tankers and freighters in the North and South Atlantic.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Germany’s navy had not fought a major set-piece surface battle since Jutland in 1916, in which it was tactically victorious against but strategically defeated by the British. The Royal Navy forced the scuttling of one of the war's earliest effective German surface commerce raiders, the pocket battleship "Graf Spee," off the Uruguayan coast at the end of 1939. The German Navy was thrashed by the British in the smaller 1940 naval battle at Narvik, Norway, the former losing several destroyers and patrol craft in that engagement. By the time the battleship "Bismarck" was sent to the bottom by two British warships, the HMS Rodney and King George, in May 1941, the German surface fleet threat was all but eliminated. [/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]This was the illustrious naval record of a nation supposedly planning to and capable of invading and conquering the USA?[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Hitler failed to subdue Great Britain in 1940 (in good part due to the moral strength of the Brits, a great deal of US aid, and because conquering Britain was not part of the Fuehrer’s eastern living space plan), so he would have had little chance of succeeding against the much more distant, much larger, more populous, and better-armed USA. Even Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (the chief planner of the Pearl Harbor attack) spoke warningly of "a rifle behind every blade of grass" when discussions of invading the USA came up.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]A successful invasion of North America by both Nazi Germany and Japan would have also required a high degree of interservice and binational coordination and cooperation, something that even in the best of forces and times is difficult to achieve and maintain. The Germans and Japanese, despite appearances, were notorious for the utter lack of that, and given their respective highly xenophobic beliefs in their own complete racial superiority to any other group, there would have been little basis for any significant long-term cooperation between them. Both Hitler and Tojo would have also needed reliable and broad-based intelligence gathering and interpretation assets, and a sizable "fifth-column" of active native sympathizers here, something neither had in sufficient quality or quantity. German military intelligence, the Abwehr, was already long compromised by British spies – its longtime director, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was an active British sympathizer since the 1930s, while Japan’s military and diplomatic ciphers were quickly and easily broken.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Both nations’ forces featured the glaring absence of sophisticated and secure large-scale supply support and sizable long-range air, sea, and ground transport capable of logistically sustaining a long offensive war which was vital to any attacking force operating over long distances in hostile territory. This major weakness of the Wehrmacht was first confirmed on the Eastern Front in the fall of 1941 and by Japan early on in its war of attrition in China and later in the Pacific campaigns against the Americans. Authors Meirion and Sue Harries disclosed in their 1992 book "Soldiers of The Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army" that for each US GI there was an average of four tons of material produced, for the Japanese counterpart, an average of two pounds.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Furthermore, Germany (given the Fuehrer’s erratic nature, disdain for the daily tasks of governing and administration, and fixation on short-term solutions for every problem) never pursued an advanced weapons project (assault rifles, cruise and ballistic missiles, jet warplanes, atomic bombs) for any sufficient length of time to make a real difference in combat. The German "Atomic Association" was a quite pale and poorly funded and staffed version of our Manhattan Project (due in large part to the previous "brain drain" of numerous talented physicists out of Germany and into the USA and Great Britain throughout the 1930s), and even that was directed more toward development of a workable nuclear reactor for submarine propulsion, not an atomic bomb. Japanese advanced weapons research was practically nonexistent. Japan, whose government and military was long riddled with fierce, often-bloody factional political intrigue, was at first glance better prepared to mount an invasion of the USA given its large long-range carrier-based navy. However, Tokyo would have been badly hampered in such an attempt by its key strategic focus on a quickly completed regional land/island war and its unwillingness or inability to exploit large-scale submarine warfare.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Like Germany in the East, resource-poor Japan, via its "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," was only interested in securing and consolidating economic and territorial gains in a certain area of its own region (the Asian mainland and the far Western Pacific islands), a politico-economic relationship that Premier Tojo Hideki pointedly referred to as similar to that of the USA’s in regard to Latin America. There was the lack of sufficient training, resources, and tactics to wage a long, decisive, large-scale continental ground war that an invasion of North America would have required---a lack reflected in Japan’s costly and ultimately fatal 1937-45 stalemate in China. There was also Japan’s stunning and bloody defeat by the Red Army’s large combined force of tanks, motorized infantry, and long-range artillery at the pivotal but little-known Battle of Nomonhan (on the Soviet-Manchurian border) in the summer of 1939. This battle exposed several glaring, never-to-be-resolved weaknesses in the quality of Japanese artillery, ground transport, tactics, and logistics and eventually led to a Soviet-Japanese nonaggression pact that lasted until the final days of the war.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Even Japan’s raid on Pearl Harbor ended up more a fatally botched propaganda stunt than a decisive strategic blow to mortally wound the US Pacific Fleet and keep the USA from presumably getting in the way of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It just got Japan in a war with an angry United States that many in Tokyo knew couldn’t be won; Admiral Yamamoto predicting at the time Japan would exhaust its existing petroleum and fuel reserves by 1944. For instance, despite the terrible images of death and destruction, many of the ships sunk at their piers in the attack on Oahu were raised and refitted. Most piers, drydocks, repair facilities, fuel bunkers and supply depots were untouched or only slightly damaged by Japanese bombs.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]And lastly, both Germany and Japan were notorious for consistently and severely underestimating their adversaries and for quickly alienating and then oppressing the vast majorities of the native populations of any country they invaded, even ones that may have been initially sympathetic to the invaders.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Worst of all, much of the above was already well known by the Roosevelt administration before Pearl Harbor.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Neither Germany nor Japan planned for or could have launched a successful invasion and occupation of the USA. It's that simple. Even the legions of King George III nearly 200 years before, quite benign in contrast to those of Berlin and Tokyo, were eventually worn down and booted out of what soon became the USA.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]But, again, why did we really intervene in what became World War II and who benefited the most from the defeat of Germany and Japan?[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]By 1937-38, FDR's New Deal welfare state was an expensive, widely unpopular and abject failure and was in serious danger of being all but thoroughly dismantled by a hostile public and Supreme Court (which FDR openly and foolishly tried to "pack" at the time, alienating many of his staunchest supporters) and an increasingly combative Congress, many of its bitterest critics being among Roosevelt's own ruling Democrats. So Franklin tried another form of domestic socialism, a "warfare state" inaugurated under the auspices of a pricey pork-barrel caper called "Lend-Lease," and he and his successors had hit the jackpot for decades to come. Germany and Japan were the perfect and convenient excuses for both FDR and Stalin to flex their muscles on a global scale in a way that Marx and Lenin would have envied (and, as Winston Churchill desired, to keep both of those nations from emerging as major world players in their own right). [/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The conduct of the war all but guaranteed that. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, as expected, quickly flattened a strong and influential US noninterventionist movement that the Roosevelt administration (which probably knew of Tokyo's plans well in advance and did everything it could, legally and illegally, to provoke Tokyo into that "sneak attack") was already viciously and unfairly trying to destroy, smear and discredit. Our enemy was then presumably Japan, a nation to whom we had long sold large subsidized amounts of our iron ore, scrap metal, and petroleum, all under the provisions of a 1911 trade treaty that FDR had personally and suddenly abrogated two years before. [/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]While our GIs fought fiercely and died en masse in the Philippines and on Guam and Wake Island in the face of the invading Japanese, FDR blatantly wrote them off and pursued a "Europe First" policy. A key feature of this policy included the immediate transfer of huge amounts of financial and material aid to the recently-former German ally, Stalin’s USSR, a nation whose leaders, like those of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, openly cared little for the supposed "democratic spirit" of the Atlantic Charter, and to which FDR (with the traitorous Alger Hiss in tow) made an all but open invitation at Yalta in February 1945 for it to occupy Eastern Europe.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Despite FDR’s "Europe First," no US troops set foot in the subjugated portions of the continent in any strategically significant numbers until Operation Overlord in June 1944, by which time the Soviets were midway through their massive broad-front push westward toward conquest of most of Eastern Europe and a sizable portion of eastern Germany. The latter was literally handed to the Soviets while our GIs were ordered to pull back and let the Red Army grab Berlin and the surrounding areas, actions which publicly infuriated Gen. George S. Patton and others. The notorious "Operation Keelhaul," which forcibly sent millions of by then fiercely anti-Communist Soviet POWs back to certain death in the USSR, was next put into play.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]In July 1945, at Potsdam, FDR/Churchill successors Harry Truman and Clement Attlee respectively certified Stalin’s hold on Eastern Europe as originally proposed at Yalta. They also permitted him to break his 1941 nonaggression pact with Tokyo and sweep into Manchuria, northern Korea, and Sakhalin Island in the final days of the war against an all-but-beaten Japan. This final act ensured Moscow an easily obtained, major role in the carving up of the Far East into various spheres of influence. Japan’s eventual self-defeat in China (predicted by then-President Herbert Hoover in 1931 as part of his refusal to ask Congress for US troops to aid the Chinese against Japanese encroachment) and its collapse in the western Pacific opened up a large power vacuum in Asia. In less than five years, this vacuum was quickly filled in large part by Stalin’s brutal trio of Asian Communist proteges – Mao Tse-tung, Kim Il-Sung, and Ho Chi Minh – all with the prior blessings of FDR and his Red-riddled "brain trust."[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The winner of W.W. II, tragically, was in reality not the Allies but instead the theory and practice of the large-scale coercive collectivist state, be it in the form of Communism or the large-scale welfare/warfare states of various types and the consequent rise of a violent, unstable, impoverished Third World addicted to the benefits of the same as cavalierly dispensed by the meddlesome mandarins of the First World. True, since 1945 we’ve been speaking a different language, and it’s not German, Japanese, or even Russian or Chinese. Rather, it’s the language of socialism couched in perpetual, petulant demands for ever-more forced, taxpayer-supported "fairness and social justice" on a global scale (commonly called "humanitarian intervention") at the heavy expense of true peace, prosperity, and individual liberty. And the price, as usual in the imposition and maintenance of socialism, was and still is the untold millions of dead, impoverished, miserable, and imprisoned[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]A.: Because if we didn’t, we’d now all speak German or Japanese.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Q. Who benefited the most from the defeat of Germany and Japan in WWII?[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]A. The USA.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]This, with variations, has been the standard Q&A about the history of and the events surrounding our entry into that war and usually ends further discussion. But the standard answers, on closer examination, are just plain wrong.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Why?[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The first question first, since it takes a bit of detailed explanation.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The German General Staff, which had codenamed contingency invasion/occupation plans for dozens of nations (even one for the never-tried conquest of Switzerland called "Operation Christmas") had none for the USA. Neither did the Japanese High Command. Neither nation’s economy was ever fully mobilized for total war to the extent the USA’s and Great Britain’s had been. An invasion of North America would have required a major and early commitment by Berlin and Tokyo of financial, human and material resources to two forms of warfare, the first being large, long-range strategic bomber, transport and fighter escort aircraft, something neither Germany nor Japan had done. Both nations had superb short and medium range fighter/interceptors and medium bombers, but no bombers like the four-engine US B-17 or, later, the British Lancaster.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The second major and early commitment would have to have been to a sizable "blue water" naval "long-range power projection" force. Germany (unlike Japan) didn’t have this and did not seriously plan on acquiring it---something requiring numerous aircraft carriers, auxiliary and amphibious ships, carrier-based combat and reconnaissance aircraft, plus a sizable force of marines. There were minor proposals made early in the war to build an aircraft carrier to be christened "Frederick the Great" along with two large cruisers, all of which "land animal" Hitler soon nixed.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The German submarine threat, although still quite dire in W.W. II (thanks in great part to FDR’s long and controversial delay in ordering the Navy to conduct aggressive antisubmarine warfare operations off the U.S. East Coast), was not nearly as potent as it was in W.W. I. This was in large part due to defensive seagoing escort and convoy tactics developed in 1917-18 and improved submarine detection techniques, like active sonar, created in the interwar years. Submarines alone could not effectively project broad-based, large-scale offensive naval power great distances (something demonstrated brilliantly by Admirals Nimitz, Mitscher and Halsey and the aircraft carrier-based "task force" concept in the Pacific war against Japan).[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The goal of the German U-boat campaign remained much the same as that in W.W.I, chiefly defensive "commerce raiding;" attempts to cut off the flow of needed supplies to Great Britain and, this time, to the USSR as well. Its surface navy, consisting mainly of smaller sized "pocket" battleships as well as cruisers and some destroyers and patrol boats, operated in much the same commerce raider fashion – voyaging about individually attacking and sinking tankers and freighters in the North and South Atlantic.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Germany’s navy had not fought a major set-piece surface battle since Jutland in 1916, in which it was tactically victorious against but strategically defeated by the British. The Royal Navy forced the scuttling of one of the war's earliest effective German surface commerce raiders, the pocket battleship "Graf Spee," off the Uruguayan coast at the end of 1939. The German Navy was thrashed by the British in the smaller 1940 naval battle at Narvik, Norway, the former losing several destroyers and patrol craft in that engagement. By the time the battleship "Bismarck" was sent to the bottom by two British warships, the HMS Rodney and King George, in May 1941, the German surface fleet threat was all but eliminated. [/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]This was the illustrious naval record of a nation supposedly planning to and capable of invading and conquering the USA?[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Hitler failed to subdue Great Britain in 1940 (in good part due to the moral strength of the Brits, a great deal of US aid, and because conquering Britain was not part of the Fuehrer’s eastern living space plan), so he would have had little chance of succeeding against the much more distant, much larger, more populous, and better-armed USA. Even Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (the chief planner of the Pearl Harbor attack) spoke warningly of "a rifle behind every blade of grass" when discussions of invading the USA came up.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]A successful invasion of North America by both Nazi Germany and Japan would have also required a high degree of interservice and binational coordination and cooperation, something that even in the best of forces and times is difficult to achieve and maintain. The Germans and Japanese, despite appearances, were notorious for the utter lack of that, and given their respective highly xenophobic beliefs in their own complete racial superiority to any other group, there would have been little basis for any significant long-term cooperation between them. Both Hitler and Tojo would have also needed reliable and broad-based intelligence gathering and interpretation assets, and a sizable "fifth-column" of active native sympathizers here, something neither had in sufficient quality or quantity. German military intelligence, the Abwehr, was already long compromised by British spies – its longtime director, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was an active British sympathizer since the 1930s, while Japan’s military and diplomatic ciphers were quickly and easily broken.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Both nations’ forces featured the glaring absence of sophisticated and secure large-scale supply support and sizable long-range air, sea, and ground transport capable of logistically sustaining a long offensive war which was vital to any attacking force operating over long distances in hostile territory. This major weakness of the Wehrmacht was first confirmed on the Eastern Front in the fall of 1941 and by Japan early on in its war of attrition in China and later in the Pacific campaigns against the Americans. Authors Meirion and Sue Harries disclosed in their 1992 book "Soldiers of The Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army" that for each US GI there was an average of four tons of material produced, for the Japanese counterpart, an average of two pounds.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Furthermore, Germany (given the Fuehrer’s erratic nature, disdain for the daily tasks of governing and administration, and fixation on short-term solutions for every problem) never pursued an advanced weapons project (assault rifles, cruise and ballistic missiles, jet warplanes, atomic bombs) for any sufficient length of time to make a real difference in combat. The German "Atomic Association" was a quite pale and poorly funded and staffed version of our Manhattan Project (due in large part to the previous "brain drain" of numerous talented physicists out of Germany and into the USA and Great Britain throughout the 1930s), and even that was directed more toward development of a workable nuclear reactor for submarine propulsion, not an atomic bomb. Japanese advanced weapons research was practically nonexistent. Japan, whose government and military was long riddled with fierce, often-bloody factional political intrigue, was at first glance better prepared to mount an invasion of the USA given its large long-range carrier-based navy. However, Tokyo would have been badly hampered in such an attempt by its key strategic focus on a quickly completed regional land/island war and its unwillingness or inability to exploit large-scale submarine warfare.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Like Germany in the East, resource-poor Japan, via its "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," was only interested in securing and consolidating economic and territorial gains in a certain area of its own region (the Asian mainland and the far Western Pacific islands), a politico-economic relationship that Premier Tojo Hideki pointedly referred to as similar to that of the USA’s in regard to Latin America. There was the lack of sufficient training, resources, and tactics to wage a long, decisive, large-scale continental ground war that an invasion of North America would have required---a lack reflected in Japan’s costly and ultimately fatal 1937-45 stalemate in China. There was also Japan’s stunning and bloody defeat by the Red Army’s large combined force of tanks, motorized infantry, and long-range artillery at the pivotal but little-known Battle of Nomonhan (on the Soviet-Manchurian border) in the summer of 1939. This battle exposed several glaring, never-to-be-resolved weaknesses in the quality of Japanese artillery, ground transport, tactics, and logistics and eventually led to a Soviet-Japanese nonaggression pact that lasted until the final days of the war.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Even Japan’s raid on Pearl Harbor ended up more a fatally botched propaganda stunt than a decisive strategic blow to mortally wound the US Pacific Fleet and keep the USA from presumably getting in the way of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. It just got Japan in a war with an angry United States that many in Tokyo knew couldn’t be won; Admiral Yamamoto predicting at the time Japan would exhaust its existing petroleum and fuel reserves by 1944. For instance, despite the terrible images of death and destruction, many of the ships sunk at their piers in the attack on Oahu were raised and refitted. Most piers, drydocks, repair facilities, fuel bunkers and supply depots were untouched or only slightly damaged by Japanese bombs.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]And lastly, both Germany and Japan were notorious for consistently and severely underestimating their adversaries and for quickly alienating and then oppressing the vast majorities of the native populations of any country they invaded, even ones that may have been initially sympathetic to the invaders.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Worst of all, much of the above was already well known by the Roosevelt administration before Pearl Harbor.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Neither Germany nor Japan planned for or could have launched a successful invasion and occupation of the USA. It's that simple. Even the legions of King George III nearly 200 years before, quite benign in contrast to those of Berlin and Tokyo, were eventually worn down and booted out of what soon became the USA.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]But, again, why did we really intervene in what became World War II and who benefited the most from the defeat of Germany and Japan?[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]By 1937-38, FDR's New Deal welfare state was an expensive, widely unpopular and abject failure and was in serious danger of being all but thoroughly dismantled by a hostile public and Supreme Court (which FDR openly and foolishly tried to "pack" at the time, alienating many of his staunchest supporters) and an increasingly combative Congress, many of its bitterest critics being among Roosevelt's own ruling Democrats. So Franklin tried another form of domestic socialism, a "warfare state" inaugurated under the auspices of a pricey pork-barrel caper called "Lend-Lease," and he and his successors had hit the jackpot for decades to come. Germany and Japan were the perfect and convenient excuses for both FDR and Stalin to flex their muscles on a global scale in a way that Marx and Lenin would have envied (and, as Winston Churchill desired, to keep both of those nations from emerging as major world players in their own right). [/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The conduct of the war all but guaranteed that. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, as expected, quickly flattened a strong and influential US noninterventionist movement that the Roosevelt administration (which probably knew of Tokyo's plans well in advance and did everything it could, legally and illegally, to provoke Tokyo into that "sneak attack") was already viciously and unfairly trying to destroy, smear and discredit. Our enemy was then presumably Japan, a nation to whom we had long sold large subsidized amounts of our iron ore, scrap metal, and petroleum, all under the provisions of a 1911 trade treaty that FDR had personally and suddenly abrogated two years before. [/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]While our GIs fought fiercely and died en masse in the Philippines and on Guam and Wake Island in the face of the invading Japanese, FDR blatantly wrote them off and pursued a "Europe First" policy. A key feature of this policy included the immediate transfer of huge amounts of financial and material aid to the recently-former German ally, Stalin’s USSR, a nation whose leaders, like those of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, openly cared little for the supposed "democratic spirit" of the Atlantic Charter, and to which FDR (with the traitorous Alger Hiss in tow) made an all but open invitation at Yalta in February 1945 for it to occupy Eastern Europe.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]Despite FDR’s "Europe First," no US troops set foot in the subjugated portions of the continent in any strategically significant numbers until Operation Overlord in June 1944, by which time the Soviets were midway through their massive broad-front push westward toward conquest of most of Eastern Europe and a sizable portion of eastern Germany. The latter was literally handed to the Soviets while our GIs were ordered to pull back and let the Red Army grab Berlin and the surrounding areas, actions which publicly infuriated Gen. George S. Patton and others. The notorious "Operation Keelhaul," which forcibly sent millions of by then fiercely anti-Communist Soviet POWs back to certain death in the USSR, was next put into play.[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]In July 1945, at Potsdam, FDR/Churchill successors Harry Truman and Clement Attlee respectively certified Stalin’s hold on Eastern Europe as originally proposed at Yalta. They also permitted him to break his 1941 nonaggression pact with Tokyo and sweep into Manchuria, northern Korea, and Sakhalin Island in the final days of the war against an all-but-beaten Japan. This final act ensured Moscow an easily obtained, major role in the carving up of the Far East into various spheres of influence. Japan’s eventual self-defeat in China (predicted by then-President Herbert Hoover in 1931 as part of his refusal to ask Congress for US troops to aid the Chinese against Japanese encroachment) and its collapse in the western Pacific opened up a large power vacuum in Asia. In less than five years, this vacuum was quickly filled in large part by Stalin’s brutal trio of Asian Communist proteges – Mao Tse-tung, Kim Il-Sung, and Ho Chi Minh – all with the prior blessings of FDR and his Red-riddled "brain trust."[/FONT]
[FONT=Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif]The winner of W.W. II, tragically, was in reality not the Allies but instead the theory and practice of the large-scale coercive collectivist state, be it in the form of Communism or the large-scale welfare/warfare states of various types and the consequent rise of a violent, unstable, impoverished Third World addicted to the benefits of the same as cavalierly dispensed by the meddlesome mandarins of the First World. True, since 1945 we’ve been speaking a different language, and it’s not German, Japanese, or even Russian or Chinese. Rather, it’s the language of socialism couched in perpetual, petulant demands for ever-more forced, taxpayer-supported "fairness and social justice" on a global scale (commonly called "humanitarian intervention") at the heavy expense of true peace, prosperity, and individual liberty. And the price, as usual in the imposition and maintenance of socialism, was and still is the untold millions of dead, impoverished, miserable, and imprisoned[/FONT]
Johnnyorganic
Well-Known Member
Bottom line: The U.S. developed the bomb because the Germans were the first to split the atom. But they used the weapon to end the war.
I put those who dismiss potential losses resulting from an invasion of the Japanese mainland in the same category as I put Holocaust deniers.
There is no secret that prior to Pearl Harbor, FDR promised the American people time and again he would keep them out of the war in Europe. Even as he was aiding the British and allowing the U.S. Navy to act quite aggressively in the Atlantic. FDR wanted the U.S. in the war, but he could not let the American people know that. And yes, it was an election year. But the Japanese would have attacked regardless who was elected President.
Hitler would have been wise to let the U.S. deal with the Japanese rather than declare war on the U.S. Had this happened, FDR would have no choice but to go after Japan and leave Germany alone.
Had Japan not attacked, the U.S. would have entered the war eventually. Either Hitler would finally get tired of American assistance to the allies and declare war on the U.S.; or the U.S. would enter on its own.
Jogro
Well-Known Member
Here is an excellent bit of perspective on this by Bill Whittle. Its 16 minutes long, but WELL worth watching the entire thing.
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=56&load=1808
In a nutshell, even the Japanese military said after the war that the US was correct to drop the bomb because although the devastation was horrible, it still probably ended up saving lives on BOTH sides, compared to the alternative ground invasion of mainland Japan.
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=56&load=1808
In a nutshell, even the Japanese military said after the war that the US was correct to drop the bomb because although the devastation was horrible, it still probably ended up saving lives on BOTH sides, compared to the alternative ground invasion of mainland Japan.
lifegoesonbrah
Well-Known Member
Front yard gardeners are the true evil villains.
Johnnyorganic
Well-Known Member
No need to apologize.
As it only serves to highlight my supreme ownage of DrFever, and his worthless Cut&Pastes.
desert dude
Well-Known Member
Dropping the bombs happened almost 60 years ago. It saved many thousands of lives. Get over it.
cannofbliss
Well-Known Member
there is no such thing as "evil" only what religions have "promulgated" as being such only exists in your minds because of religion's very existence...
what really happens, when people do harmful things to each other... is just bad stupid primitive monkey behaviour... that people just havent evolved out of yet...
what really happens, when people do harmful things to each other... is just bad stupid primitive monkey behaviour... that people just havent evolved out of yet...
kelly4
Well-Known Member
Exactly.
They started the war.
We gave them plenty of chances to surrender.
They still didn't surrender after the first mushroom cloud.
Why should we care about their people more than they do?
Being as they were the agressors, I would rather see dead Japanese civilians than dead American soldiers.
kelly4
Well-Known Member
The civilian death count in WWII was over 40,000,000.
Of that, under 400,000 of those were Japanese. Less than 1%!
I think we took it pretty easy on Japan, IMO.
ThatGuy113
Well-Known Member
It blows my mind (no pun intended) trying to think of the faux history of if we didn't drop the bomb and go right into the Cold War era so quickly. I think it was the right thing to do but thinking about how a Russia/US allied action in the pacific would look and what kind of affect it would have on the eventual Cold War confrontation if any is a great way to put things into perspective.
Truman found out about the bomb on the Boat over to the Potsdam conference and once he arrived he mentioned in Stalin's ear that his Soviet troops would no longer be needed in the pacific (They were about to be deployed to aid the allies). Stalin of course showed no reaction dumbfounding Truman. Little did Truman know Stalin had known about the bomb for a lot longer then Truman had.
but anyways..... What if the Russians used it first? where? and with what repercussions in WWII?
The land war would of just been draining and never ending the Japanese were vowing to fight till the last one Japanese soldier was dead. It was the beginning of the transition into fighting strong ideologies and not total government in our international conflicts.
Interesting to think about though.