Lest we forget - Hiroshima & Nagasaki

[MuresanForMVP]

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"They attacked us first"

And this justifies killing hundreds of thousands of children?

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Yes but it shortened the war. And a bluff wouldn't have worked. And neither would only 1 bomb. And they attacked us first. Feel free to insert your own rationalization for why it was ok to fry thousands of helpless children alive in their hometown.

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It was a TOTAL WAR. Do you know what that means?

[Phil153]

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So the Vietnamese would have been justified in dropping a bomb on my children because of war crimes committed by American servicemen in their country?

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Yes.

But only if they were collateral damage, and not deliberately targeted. As was the case in Japan - the ground zero of one of the bombs was the Mitsubishi arms factory and the infrastructure that supported it. You know, the building that made bullets to go into Americans.

[andyfox]

His post shows he knows exactly what that means.

[andyfox]

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two of the only cities left, the others having already been destroyed by conventional firebombing. We knew massive amounts of civilians would be killed. LeMay's stated ambition was to kill as many people as possible. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not looked on as military targets, but rather in the same way as all the torched Japanese cities: part of the Douhetian strategy of bombing the enemy into submission by terrorizing the civilian population. The civilian deaths were not collateral damage--they were the reason for the bombs.

[MrMon]

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two of the only cities left, the others having already been destroyed by conventional firebombing. We knew massive amounts of civilians would be killed. LeMay's stated ambition was to kill as many people as possible. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not looked on as military targets, but rather in the same way as all the torched Japanese cities: part of the Douhetian strategy of bombing the enemy into submission by terrorizing the civilian population. The civilian deaths were not collateral damage--they were the reason for the bombs.

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While it's true that the cities, and thus civilians, were targeted, there's also another explanation I've heard that in a way, makes them a little more legitimate targets. Apparently, the Japanese war industry was very decentralized, with a lot of the work being done in small shops or even at home. This piecework was then brough to the central factories for collection or aggregation into something larger. If this is true, does that then make each of the small factories, which lie in the middle of civilian areas, legitimate targets? It's a troubling question, and I do know Lemay agonized over the idea of firebombing the cities. It may also be why, as someone claimed earlier, there was a prewar plan to firebomb the cities, it was the only way to wipe out the decentralized war industry.

[govman6767]

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"They attacked us first"

And this justifies killing hundreds of thousands of children?

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Yes.

If Japan was able to somehow make the United States surrender then there would be nothing to stop them from raping our women and children and playing catch with them with their bayonets.

Just like China

In the end you have to make a choice for yourself or them and the very basis of human instinct is ME.

Like I said they could have surrendered after the first one.

I respect all your ideas a peace and love.

I respect the fact that if mosdef was put in an arena with a woman and both were given swords and told to fight to the death or they both died, he would let the woman win.

I dont' like violence but I do like ME

[VarlosZ]

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It's a troubling question, and I do know Lemay agonized over the idea of firebombing the cities.

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Cite? I'm hardly a LeMay scholar, but I've never read anything about the man that suggests he ever aganozied (or even particularly cared) about the killing of the enemy's civilians.

[Copernicus]

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It's a troubling question, and I do know Lemay agonized over the idea of firebombing the cities.

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Cite? I'm hardly a LeMay scholar, but I've never read anything about the man that suggests he ever aganozied (or even particularly cared) about the killing of the enemy's civilians.

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He may indeed not have cared about killing enemy civilians, but my recollection is that he OPPOSED the nuclear option. Not out of humanitarian concerns but because he believed the war was won without them.

[BCPVP]

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"They attacked us first"

And this justifies killing hundreds of thousands of children?

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Yes but it shortened the war. And a bluff wouldn't have worked. And neither would only 1 bomb. And they attacked us first. Feel free to insert your own rationalization for why it was ok to fry thousands of helpless children alive in their hometown.

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It was a TOTAL WAR. Do you know what that means?

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Thanks, Abe!

[MrMon]

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It's a troubling question, and I do know Lemay agonized over the idea of firebombing the cities.

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Cite? I'm hardly a LeMay scholar, but I've never read anything about the man that suggests he ever aganozied (or even particularly cared) about the killing of the enemy's civilians.

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I'm pretty sure my source is a back issue of MHQ, which usually pulls articles from larger sources. Since I can't track that down at the moment, Wiki will have to do, where it has this telling quote, which also confirms some of what I said earlier about decentralized production.

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LeMay was quite aware of both the brutality of his actions and the Japanese opinion of him — he once remarked that had the U.S. lost the war, he fully expected to be tried for war crimes, especially in view of Japanese executions of uniformed American flight crews during the 1942 Doolittle raid. However, he argued that it was his duty to carry out the attacks in order to end the war as quickly as possible, sparing further loss of life.

Presidents Roosevelt and Truman justified these tactics by referring to an estimate that one million American troops would be killed if Japan had to be invaded. Additionally, the Japanese had intentionally decentralized 90% of their war-related production into small subcontractor workshops in civilian districts, making remaining Japanese war industry largely immune to conventional precision bombing with high-explosives.


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On LeMay's Wiki pages, there's also an interesting sidebar that has a picture of a leaflet dropped before the fire raids. The accompanying caption reads:

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A "LeMay Bombing Leaflet" from the war, which warned Japanese civilians that "Unfortunately, bombs have no eyes. So, in accordance with America's humanitarian policies, the American Air Force, which does not wish to injure innocent people, now gives you warning to evacuate the cities named and save your lives."

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The article also goes into a bit of the reasoning why the switch to firebombing, but I'll let you just go there and read it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay

Probably the reason you've never heard any of this is the rep LeMay got later on in the Cold War as a bit of a nutcase. That's unfair, and a bit political, his record was really quite remarkable, becoming the youngest 4-star general since U.S. Grant (he was only 44).

If I pull up the MHQ info, I'll post it.