On the anniversary of Hiroshima - was it really necessary to A-bomb Japan? (Asians, invaded)

[Tricky D]

Originally Posted by daffysentry

Folks, the Japanese Empire was set on world domination.

And Western corporations aren't bend on world domination?
To the Japs it was either to conquer or be conquered, because they saw how the West (with their Opium war) treated the Chinese.

[bobmulk]

The question really is this: How many of you were around when we bombed Hiroshima and how many of you have all the facts and intelligence regarding Hiroshima?

I can answer that--NONE OF YOU.

[Steve Bagu]

I beg to differ. Every time I go to the VA hospital, I see men wearing caps showing their WW11 service. Even a couple of license plates "POW" in the parking lot. Ask them if they remember the bombing of Hiroshima and what they experienced during their wartime service. There are many stories out there, and many will never be written or published. Some part of History is getting lost every day or being pushed to the side. I'm one of those people and I try to relate some of my experience to those who will listen while I'm still around. We are passing on at over 1000 a day. Steve ( WW11..Korea)

[odanny]

Originally Posted by daffysentry

I am amazed at how this subject endures. I had this same conversation with my OIC just under 20 years ago, and within the last year I heard it was the subject of a college essay.

Folks, the Japanese Empire was set on world domination. If they were not to have it, they were set up for national suicide----to take as many into the abyss with them as possible. Not only did they have the Kamikaze, but as they were setting up their civilian population to fight the invading Americans with bamboo spears, they would state to their women "if you don't kill at least one American, you do not deserve to die."

If actions like these do not show you the mind set of these people, look at the fact that it did take a second atomic bomb falling for them to finally say 'Enough---we surrender'!

That's all I have to say about that.

Daffy

That is history as it is written. However, while much of the Japanese will to resist was not yet broken, in no way would have waiting another three months and trying to negotiate a peaceful end (unconditionally) would have set back anything, and quite honestly, there was no other reason to drop the bomb in August than to show the Soviets what destruction the U.S. was capable of, setting off a new arms race.

If the Soviets had of likewise dropped an atomic bomb on Berlin, how would history judge its actions?

I think there are many who think this action could have prevented, at least the attempt be made, but its clear today that the dropping of both atomic bombs was a done deal, and was used only partially to force a surrender of remaining Japanese reserves.

No one questions the deaths that would have resulted, and were prevented, from not having a land invasion take place. The question is whether it could have happened without atomic weapons being used.

The photograph of a Japanese boy standing at attention with a child strapped to his back lay on the kitchen table.
Tyge O'Donnell, then a college student, stared at the photo, suggesting to his father, Joe, that the infant hanging out of the makeshift baby carrier "looked sound asleep."




No, son, he's not sleeping," O'Donnell recalls his father saying. "The little boy is dead"


O'Donnell, now a 37-year-old bellman at Caesars Palace, had grown up knowing his father primarily as a photographer for the White House and Marine Corps, but it wasn't until that moment in 1989 when he found out how closely his dad had chronicled the devastation wrought by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"I came into the house from my summer job at a hobby shop and there were these photos on the kitchen table," Tyge O'Donnell said. "I had no idea he had seen all that."
Also on the table were pictures of the newly orphaned and badly burned wandering in the rubble. But O'Donnell said it was the photo of the brothers that awakened a memory so powerful in his dad, he seemed to see the image play out before him.
"He told me that the boy dropped his brother off at a crematory and watched him burn," O'Donnell said. "The boy bit his lip so hard it bled. My dad said he wanted to comfort the boy, but he was afraid if he did they would both break down."
Hiroshima was bombed 62 years ago today on Aug. 6, 1945. Three days later, Nagasaki was the target. More than 250,000 died in the two World War II American missions that all but obliterated two of Japan's major cities.

To commemorate the anniversaries, Tyge O'Donnell has just finished preparing a Web site, MySpace.com - The Phoenix Venture - 38 - Male - Las Vegas, Nevada - www.myspace.com/thephoenixventure, dedicated to his father's work. More than 40 of his father's photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be seen. On Thursday O'Donnell stood in his condominium near the Strip and put the finishing touches on the Web site.

"My father wanted me to make sure that I continued to share his photographs so we can do everything possible to stop nuclear war from occurring in the future."
Joe O'Donnell, 85 and in a rehabilitation hospital in Nashville, Tenn., can no longer talk about his experiences.
"He had a stroke and it is very hard for him to communicate," his wife, Kimiko, said in a telephone call from her Tennessee home.
The elder O'Donnell was a White House photographer during the administrations of presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.

After the war's end in 1945, the military had dispatched him to the Japanese island of Kyushu to photograph the landing of American occupation forces. But within three weeks of the bombings, he was sent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where he would spend the next six months taking pictures of the devastation.

At first he used a Jeep to get around. But he ended up trading cigarettes for a horse because it would take him places the Jeep wouldn't go.
He sent one set of photos back to Washington, D.C., but always kept copies for his personal collection.

After returning to the states, he kept the negatives of his personal pictures in trunks in the attic. He gave instructions to his family never to touch the trunks, and that's where they stayed for 45 years.
"He told me the reason he didn't get the photos out is that he wanted to forget what he saw," Tyge O'Donnell said.
For a while he did forget.

But in 1989, Joe O'Donnell, suffering from depression not only from the memories but from recurring health problems, went on a religious retreat at the Sisters of Loretto Motherhouse in Kentucky.
"My dad said he often wondered why he had been spared when so many others were killed," Tyge O'Donnell said. "On the retreat he saw this sculpture of a man created in honor of the victims of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He decided that this meant he was spared to use his experiences to prevent nuclear war."

He came home to Nashville and pulled the negatives and photos out of the attic, deciding that he would put a traveling photo exhibit and book together. He had a purpose, but at a cost.
Working on the project actually caused his depression to deepen, his ex-wife, Ellen, said recently.

Tyge and a neighbor helped with captions for pictures for both an exhibit and the book. Joe O'Donnell decided not to use the most gruesome pictures, including faces ripped off and charring burns.
A survivor of the Nagasaki blast sat on the steps of a building turned into a hospital. The man said he wore heavy clothes to protect his badly burned flesh from the sun. Holding his only possession, a piece of rope, the man said doctors used mercurochrome and cucumber slices to treat his burns.
Tyge recalled how his father described his trip to Nagasaki, where maggots were everywhere, and where children were so hungry they ate apples full of flies.

"My dad said the smell of the dead was so bad that he almost didn't want to breathe," Tyge O'Donnell said.
Joe O'Donnell published his first book in Japan in 1995 for the 50th anniversary of the bombings. Titled "Japan 1945, Images From the Trunk," it was widely read in Japan, where news media often made him the subject of stories.

In the Far East for the anniversary, the elder O'Donnell told the Japanese that he wanted to express his "sorrow and regret for the pain and suffering caused by the cruel and unnecessary atomic bombing of your cities. I believe it was wrong, morally wrong, just as wrong as the Holocaust. ... We owe it to those that died, to keep their memory alive."
His statement, which called for no more Hiroshimas or Pearl Harbors, was widely circulated throughout Japan.
"Some Americans, of course, have said they don't like positions like my father's and they have said so," Tyge O'Donnell said.
In 2005, the Vanderbilt University Press published O'Donnell's "Japan 1945: A U.S. Marine's Photographs from Ground Zero." It was based largely on the same photo collection.
Also that year, Joe O'Donnell wrote an article for American Heritage magazine explaining what happened after his experience in Japan: "Years later, many years later, the nightmares began: the voices of the children, the endless stretches of rubble and bone, the stench. Over and over again. The voices were always pitiful, always begging. Yet they were accusing, too."
Though both O'Donnells believe the war would have ended quickly without the use of the A-bomb, Gen. Paul Tibbets, the Enola Gay pilot who flew the mission over Hiroshima, characterizes that viewpoint as "revisionist history."
"We saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives by using those bombs," Tibbets said in an interview with the Review-Journal in 2005. "An invasion of Japan would have been incredibly costly for everybody."

Tyge O'Donnell said, though, his father wants people, especially schoolchildren, to learn from the photographs and the Web site.

"The fight my dad wants to fight is the fight for real peace. And you don't get that by killing people."

ReviewJournal.com - News - DAD'S IMAGES OF DEATH

[Tricky D]

Originally Posted by bobmulk

The question really is this: How many of you were around when we bombed Hiroshima and how many of you have all the facts and intelligence regarding Hiroshima?

I can answer that--NONE OF YOU.

And your point is that we can't learn from history because we weren't there?

Besidez, if I had been there, in 1 of the 2 nuked cities, I would most likely have been killed by the blast or radiation.

[CMDallas]

yes it was, the Japanese had knowledge of our 'secret weapon'. The bombs weren't consecutive either, so its not like they didn't have time to give up after the 1st one.
What is sad is that people neglect the Holocaust of the east.
20 Million people in China died at the hands of Japanese, 17 Million of those being civilians. They treated all of the other countries like dirt. The Japanese then were taught that they were a superior race. An Imperialistic, Murderous, racist society it became. To this day many Japanese still have bitter opinions of Brazilians, Chinese, Filipinos, and Koreans. And Now look, they have the 2nd largest economy in the world...

IT quite possible could've saved MORE lives then it killed. IF we hadn't used the bombs, the way could've lasted to the point where BOTH sides had lose more then double the amount lost in both cities.

Japan itself is not a very useful piece of land. IT doesn't have oil, Minerals...its useless so the Japanese have made their nich by technology. Back then there wasn't demand for technology.
They wanted China, which is why they invaded China, and The Philippines...and Indonesia... and Vietnam...and Thailand...and Korea (which they actually owned then anyways)...and Malaysia...and Singapore...and Laos...and Cambodia...and Taiwan (which was previously owned by them too)and Burma too I believe.
My family has PERSONAL experience with the Japanese, and I will say that they wern't exactly kind.

[Full-Blooded American]

We should have A-bombed ourselves, so our tax dollars could be spent building our own industries and then waging economic war on Asia.

[mr bolo]

the Japanese are lucky the USA didnt follow through and drop a few more and totally wipe them off the face of the earth for their war crimes, they should have also executed the emperor of japan. They pretty much got what they deserved.

[Huckleberry3911948]

now? of course not. then yes. it was a matter of months b4 who A bombed who.
out of context history makes no sense at all. kind of like a bad guy trying to kill a cop on video, when the cop shoots they all look like uncessary shootings.amazing.

[nva79]

i am a grandson of a us soldier who fought in the pacific, and if we had invaded, he would have had a good chance of dying, and i would not be here today. if we had invaded, many countless us soldiers would have died, not to mention many more japanese casualaties.