As is my custom on August 6-I try to honor the day that life changed forever in Japan, in an event that haunts them still today.
Today is the 6th of August. It was the day in 1945 when the Atomic Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima by the B-29 Enola Gay. In Japan, today is known as Genbaku no hi. That also began a 9 day period when Japan was literally and figuratively on the brink of the abyss. I wrote a detailed post about that time a couple of years ago. GI Korea has a pretty good history of the Atomic Bomb here.
Japan Probe has some pretty good coverage here.
They were game weren’t they? Willing to spill all the blood remaining of the peasants and little people. Afraided themselves when we demonstrated a desire to kill them all and manifested it with Enola Gay and Bocks Car.
I wonder if the people of Japan don’t wish that we’d saved a bomb and used it on Tokyo and removed their political class.
Agree with Curtis,
We did a pretty decent job of spanking Tokyo with incendiary raids, it just took longer that a single hit with a nuke. Did Japan ever apologize for Nan-king, or Bataan, or the hundreds of other massive acts of torture to the population of China and the Phillipines?
How about next year the commemoration starts out with “We were horrible examples of humanity during WWII, and deserved to get bombed into submission”……..
Uh, Stein, not to be picky, but surely you remember there were two nukes, not just one?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fat Man and Little Boy. Seems to me the only reason they quit was the threat that there were more to come.
From the outside looking in, it does seem that the Japanese consider themselves blameless victims. The Emperor’s speech certainly reads that way. Any insight about this, Skippy-San?
Was comparing the BDA of the incendiary raids on Tokyo, or Dresden, if you are a European theatre historian, with a massive aluminum cloud of B-29s, versus the BDA with a single nuke hit on either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
I would postulate that if the nukes weren’t ready in 1945, Curtis Lemay and his guys would have continued the air war, and killed just as many of the enemy (let’s not forget that’s what the Japanese were in 1945) with conventional weapons, it just would have taken longer. End result was the same, they attacked us, we fininshed them off, and my father didn’t have to hit a beach in Honshu Island.
Agree, that it seems that the Japanese love to play the “victim” but rarely, if ever, admit to their sins, which are huge.
While I love visiting Tokyo and admire the Japanese culture and history, even the most dedicated Japan-o-phile is forced to admit they acted like savages during the invasion of China. And while the Japanese and to a large extent, the USA has let go of the past, you can be sure China has not.
http://www.amazon.com/Rape-Nanking-Forgotten-Holocaust-World/dp/0140277447/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1281218545&sr=8-1
One of the odd things about Japanese culture is that they don’t view the war the same way we do. In fact they mostly have blotted it out of their collective memories-except when some film maker ressurrects it like in Yamato no Otokotachi. It may not be right-but the Hiroshima attack was something that happened them. What they did to others they believe they have more than repented for.
For example, I have told the S.O. probably a hundred times that Japan was lucky to have quit when she did-or the country would have been divided just like North and South Korea. That fact never registers with her-nor does the concept of the idea that the bombing in the end saved lives on both sides.
The real issue was that I think the Japanese knew from 1944 the war was lost, they just did not have anyway to force an end because the powers that ruled them could not see the way out was to surrender to the US. They had to be shocked into understand that we meant what we said-unconditional surrender, no keeping of any part of the Empire.
But McArthur got it right in preserving the governental structures after the war-and giving the Japanses a way to channel their energy into helping themselves. That’s why Japan was kind of back on its feet in less than a decade and Afghanistan will never be. The Japanese have the character to bounce back-the Afghans don’t.
http://www.samuelcockedey.com/
some great time lapse video of Tokyo
Would the Japanese in 1945 have used a nuke if they had developed it first? Glad that they are a prosperous society now, I drive a Nissan, and shoot my scuba pix with an Olympus camera but whenever they start the “pity us, you nuked us” routine, my permanent responce is, and shall all ways be, “tough shit, you more than deserved it”
I rest my case.
stein out
But you miss the point as far as the Japanese are concerned . What happened to China et al was not as important as w hat happens to the allies
About 140,000 Japanese civilians died in the Battle of Okinawa 3 months before the first bomb was dropped. Another 100,000 Japanese military died there, along with about 30,000 US troops. For just the island of Okinawa.
Can you imagine the fight that would have occured if the Allies would have invaded Kyushu? I imagine that the war leaders at the time probably did. They had estimated that it would take at least 1,000,0000 troops to fight their way through Japan. I guess it was still fresh in their minds on how the Germans invaded Russia, and the resulting long fight that they had there.
If they would have had powerpoint in 1945, I imagine they would have come up with these COA slides to make their decision: dropping the A-bomb hoping that it would bring the Japanese leadership to finally accept the terms that were on the table; invading Japan mainland and possibly running up more civilian casulaties (remember the Russians lost 12-14 million civilian casualties, and the Chinese lost around 10 million civilian casualties); or since no shipping was getting in to Japan due to the efforts of the USN, just slowly starve the Japanese people to the peace table (which would have been seen as far more horrible letting innocents starve, we can’t even do that with North Korea now.
The leaders at the time made the right decision at the time. Anything ot get the war over as fast as possible, and the use of the A-bomb was the weapon of choice to do it.
A good thing.
why if their enemy were japs they’d never ever stop at nuking just 2 cities. they’d have an agenda, a plan and do extermination.
ever at all wonder why china builds up a force capable of, say, exterminating japanese? If 5000 miles away from us they pissed us off enough to nuke them 65 years ago, can’t you just imagine how all their immediate neighbors feel? there’s some sort of reason we keep occupation forces there SIXTY FIVE YEARS after the war when we nuked them.
likewise germans. anybody can say we did not nuke them and then be invited to read a bit more on firestorms. hideous things. without mercy. Still occupying them too. Enough is enough.
65 fuckign years! I’m 49! I was born in Germany to the occupation force. To the best of my knowledge there is not one Thai, Korean, Chinese or Philippine citizen that trusts the Japanese. Not one! There is nobody in Europe who thinks Germans won’t lash out again.
But either you accept that they have changed or you don’t . The Japanese I know have no use for war or empire building.
Seems to me China is the 21st century version of Japan……,,,,,,,
Skippy, you may be right on some of the Japanese you may know, but I will say that if you have ever seen how the bosses of the Salary men treat their employees, or how they are so xenophobic of foreigners who want to come to Japan to work, I would say that it would be an easy slide for the public opinion to sway to a more miltaristic tone than you would think.
All it would take is for them to just shrug off the guilt trip that they have been on for so long.
I think it is something different. They are very racist it is true- but from their perspective, the bombings happened to them. What they did to others- they blot out. It happened to someone else , who are not wareware Nihonjin.
Well, from my perspective Pearl Harbor happened to us, the Bataan death march happened to us, What we did to them we blot out. Even Steven in my book. Again, Let them moan all they want, because of US science, engineering, and brass balls my dad didn’t have to wade ashore on the Japanese mainland.
yeah skippy,
they are very racist and blot out what they did to to other ‘races’.
progressed past atomic weapons now these days even as we continue to occupy those diseased islands of racist hatred surrounded now by every single solitary one of their neighboring countries all of whom would use thermonuclear weapons on japanese cities today in a heartbeat. nobody there I know of has forgotten or forgiven.