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Old 03-19-2014, 04:24 PM
 
Location: On the Chesapeake
45,046 posts, read 60,097,876 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NJGOAT View Post
I would argue that this was never one of the intentions behind dropping the bomb. The decision started and ended with the desire to avoid having to invade Japan. Nuclear weapons did not have the stigma attached them that they currently do. They were simply viewed as "really big bombs" and no different in application then dropping thousands of regular bombs on a city.

Stalin knew more about the atomic bomb program throughout the war than Truman did. Stalin reacted with feigned surprise when he was told of the existence of the bombs at the Potsdam conference. The US knew that he knew about the bombs and their capabilities. No messages needed to be sent by dropping them on Japan. I have never personally read anything that amounted to more then specualtion about the intent being to intimidate Stalin; while there are reems of evidence that it was all about Japan and ending the war.
Nothing I've read, and I've done a lot, has ever been more than speculation that the US knew that Stalin knew about the bombs. Most, if not all, historians I've read have mentioned the warning shot idea. Of course, they also then pint out that Stalin already knew.

You and I are arguing over tangents, the main purpose as both you, I and most others have stated, was to knock Japan out of the war without resorting to a protracted and messy blockade and even messier invasion.
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Old 03-19-2014, 09:15 PM
 
1,392 posts, read 2,127,664 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Snowball7 View Post
I'll go a step further, and say that Imperial Japan should have backed off aggressive behavior in South East Asia entirely, backed off its militarism and rhetoric against both the Soviet Union and China, and minded its own damn business by embracing a neutral, defensive position.
They lived by the sword and died by the sword. Still, I don't agree with the a-bombs.
If they stopped at Manchuria just imagine how powerful they could have been letting the whole world fight WWII. All those funds wasted on useless foreign adventures could have instead been used to build infrastructure and build up the country's industrial base. IIRC, Japan's GDP was expected to exceed the UK's GDP in the 50s if they maintained their trajectory instead of going to war.
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Old 03-19-2014, 09:42 PM
 
77,920 posts, read 60,091,609 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Snowball7 View Post
I'll go a step further, and say that Imperial Japan should have backed off aggressive behavior in South East Asia entirely, backed off its militarism and rhetoric against both the Soviet Union and China, and minded its own damn business by embracing a neutral, defensive position.
They lived by the sword and died by the sword. Still, I don't agree with the a-bombs.
China was losing around 100k people a MONTH to the Japanese occupation and that doesn't include Malaysians, Koreans nor the continuing suicide attacks.

Even after 2 bombs it took them days to surrender, not knowing if more were on the way.

Not sure why you don't agree with the a-bombs because in light of that, your arguments cannot be humanitarian in nature.

So, why don't you agree or is this new information?
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Old 03-19-2014, 10:17 PM
 
1,392 posts, read 2,127,664 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mathguy View Post
China was losing around 100k people a MONTH to the Japanese occupation and that doesn't include Malaysians, Koreans nor the continuing suicide attacks.

Even after 2 bombs it took them days to surrender, not knowing if more were on the way.

Not sure why you don't agree with the a-bombs because in light of that, your arguments cannot be humanitarian in nature.

So, why don't you agree or is this new information?
Weren't Koreans subjects of the Empire? I mean back in 2006 South Korea absolved its war criminals and stated that they were victims of Japanese imperialism:

Korean war criminals cleared

Mike Breen on Korean war criminal commission
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Old 03-19-2014, 11:39 PM
 
1,057 posts, read 864,206 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NJGOAT View Post
If such a thing has been "well documented" then please provide a source. I googled the words "fdr wanted japan to attack" and the first 5 pages of results did not return a single academic or even remotely valid source. Most of them were from fringe sites and blogs with the occasional rant by a poster on Yahoo Answers.

As to your second paragraph, that is exactly what you implied in your first post that recieved kudos from "bumpus"...



Care to reconcile your statements so we know what you actually mean?

As to the final paragraph, I am no slave in the cult of FDR and can criticize and praise him an equal measure and have no problem with questioning him. However, indulging in old conspiracy theories is not questioning, it's dealing in conjecture.

Take Stimson's own diary JSTOR: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie

Or Admiral Richardson's repeated attempts (before he was sacked) to get Washington to move the fleet back to the west coast:

Quote:
"Going up against the chief of naval operations, Harold Stark; the secretary of
the navy, Frank Knox; and not to mention the president of the United States,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richardson repeatedly tried to convey to them the navy's
unpreparedness and vulnerability in the Pacific. Richardson's training,
expertise, and experience led him to believe that a Japanese attack on the U.S.
fleet was not only possible, it was inevitable. After Richardson repeatedly
criticized the executive decision to station the fleet in Hawaii, he was
relieved of his command. When the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, it
became painfully obvious that Admiral Richardson's fears were not only well
founded, but that he had been right all along. "
Pearl Harbor Countdown: Admiral James O. Richardson: Skipper Steely: 9781589805927: Amazon.com: Books

Have you heard of Robert Stinnett? He was WWII vet who published novels and other publications on the issue of Pearl Harbor using documents obtained via FOIA. Here is a link to an interview conducted with Stinnett about Pearl Harbor: Do Freedom of Information Act Files Prove FDR Had Foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor?: The Independent Institute


I remember having this debate in high school, so I'd assume that most historians are aware that this has been an ongoing debate for many years.

Also, please note that I am not interested in taking sides. I'm simply making you aware of the fact that this isn't simply a case of conspiracy theorists promoting their believes on their blogs. This debate has gone on since the 40's.
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Old 03-19-2014, 11:41 PM
 
1,057 posts, read 864,206 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NJGOAT View Post
...and that evidence is for a desire to intervene in Europe, not the Pacific.



They knew because they maneuvered Japan into that corner over repeated aggressive moves by Japan throughout the Pacific. The major sanctions were not put in place until Japan siezed French Indochina which was a major escalation of what until then had been a contained war between China and Japan in which the US only cared about maintaining its trading rights with China.



There are several known pieces of intelligence that called out the fact there would be an attack in the latter part of 1941. Some were even specific to Hawaii and the fleet. These are often pointed out by people who believe in the "FDR Peral Harbor conspiracy". What they fail to mention is that these individual pieces of intelligence were one amongst tens of thousands of pieces of intelligence the US was getting. Pearl Harbor became a case study for the young CIA in learning to separate "intelligence" from "noise".



The fleet was moved to Pearl to send a message to Japan to back down. This was "gunboat diplomacy" 101. No one actually believed that the Japanese were capable of or desired to sail their fleet halfway around the world to bomb the fleet. Even the Japanese HQ did not fully believe in the veracity of the plan and only agreed to "Yamamoto's sideshow" under pressure.

FDR wanted war with Germany, not Japan.



Some did argue it and some people still argue it today. Both were misguided.
Japan enabled him to make war with Germany.
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Old 03-19-2014, 11:44 PM
 
1,057 posts, read 864,206 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by blisterpeanuts View Post
There's a lot of evidence that FDR wanted to declare war on the Axis but preferred to wait for a provocation. There's evidence that he and his top military staff also knew Japan had been backed into a corner and was likely to react in a military manner.

However there's scant evidence that he actually had advance knowledge about the planned Pearl Harbor attack. The Americans hadn't yet broken current Japanese ciphers, and the Japanese were very careful to keep radio silence in the days leading up the event.

Obviously, the fleet was caught flat-footed and should not have all been at harbor. You could make a case that they had been anchored there as a lure and an appealing target that would in fact achieve Roosevelt's goal of gaining public support for a full war effort against two very dangerous foes in the Pacific and in Europe.

Some argued that it would be better to let the Germans exhaust themselves fighting the equally undesirable Russian Communists. Once the two titans were spent, the West could step in and clean the Nazis out of western Europe, and perhaps send enough arms to the Republic of China forces to repel the Japanese.

But, things didn't quite work out that way.
By the time we got involved in Europe, we were mainly focused on liberating as many countries as we could before the Soviets gobbled up anymore for themselves. The soviets were obviously capable of beating the Nazis on their own.
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Old 03-20-2014, 01:26 AM
 
278 posts, read 276,404 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by -thomass View Post
By the time we got involved in Europe, we were mainly focused on liberating as many countries as we could before the Soviets gobbled up anymore for themselves. The soviets were obviously capable of beating the Nazis on their own.
True
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Old 03-20-2014, 09:10 AM
 
9,981 posts, read 8,552,790 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mathguy View Post
Even after 2 bombs it took them days to surrender, not knowing if more were on the way.
wrong. Japan was already trying to surrender. The only condition they wanted was
to keep their Emperor. As much as my post deplored the over-reaching of Japanese
imperialism, the people of those cities did not deserve to be annihilated just to test
run a new weapon.
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Old 03-20-2014, 09:31 AM
 
6,643 posts, read 5,865,657 times
Reputation: 16929
Quote:
Originally Posted by Snowball7 View Post
wrong. Japan was already trying to surrender. The only condition they wanted was
to keep their Emperor. As much as my post deplored the over-reaching of Japanese
imperialism, the people of those cities did not deserve to be annihilated just to test
run a new weapon.
Yes, this is a modern, revisionist view of the atomic bombing of Japan. One could also argue, the people of Tokyo did not deserve to be annihilated by the fire bombing months earlier (which killed more people than did the nuclear bombs).

The mood of ordinary Americans at the time (based on my conversations with parents and others) was, get the b*st*rds already, let's end this. Thousands of Marines died literally on the first day of the invasion of Okinawa and it was widely believed that casualties would be proportionately severe when the main islands were invaded, i.e. tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Americans would have to give their lives.

Later, in the light of day, and with cool heads, we can look back and say, that was rash, we should have talked with them, we should have understood how sacred their emperor was, etc. But that's all 20-20 hindsight. They started it on their terms, and we ended it on our terms, period.

I'm truly sorry the nukes were used, and I feel they did not advance the war effort other than to possibly spur an unconditional surrender, which probably was in the pipeline anyway. But at the time, very few in the U.S. had any regrets. If you ask the average Chinese, they would undoubtedly tell you that the nukes were a tiny pin prick compared to the depredations visited on them by the Japanese over a 50 year period, during which time historians estimate variously something between 50 million and 100 million Chinese died from war, famine and dislocation.

Had the Japanese left China alone after the 1880s, quite possibly the Chinese would have had a fighting chance at establishing a lasting republic with nascent modern industry and commerce, and tens of millions of lives would have been spared. When regarded in the grand scheme of things, therefore, the nuclear and firebombing holocausts visited on Japan are somewhat less of a prominent issue and more the inevitable end result of Japanese militarism.
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