The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. 100,000 people, almost all civilians died in the blast or in the immediate aftermath; at least that many died from the effects of radiation sickness in the months and years afterward.
It is now an unquestioned conclusion that the dropping of the atomic bombs was necessary to end the war against Japan and thus supposedly "saved" more lives than it cost because an invasion of Japan would have been necessary. What is not known by most Americans is that high US military officers did not agree with this assessment. Here is Dwight Eisenhower's, Supreme Allied Commander, comments from his book Mandate for Change:
"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."
- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
Admiral William Sharpe, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, vigourously opposed the dropping of the bombs for the same reasons as Ike, as did Admiral Leahy, military Chief of Staff to President Truman. General Douglas McArthur, commander of the Army in the Pacific theater, claimed he was never even consulted and told others the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A list of relevant quotes by these men and others can be found at http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm.
My question is; why is this fact conspicuously absent from American History textbooks in the elementary and secondary school levels? Why do most Americans accept without question something that the top military officials AT THE TIME found dubious? What does it say about "history" as taught in the US?
CORRECTION: There was no "Joint Chiefs of Staff" until 1949; I am trying to find Admiral Sharpe's official title.
CORRECTION, CORRECTION: Oops! Admiral STARK had been Chief of Naval Operations (highest ranking naval officer and a member of the JCS NOW) earlier in the war, but the views that the use of the A-Bomb were unnecessary was expressed by the CNO in 1945 Admiral King. A list of quotes from high- ranking military officials at the time refuting Truman's claim that the use of the A-Bomb was a "military necessity" can be found at http://www.doug-long.com/ga1.htm.
Originally posted by no1marauder
...
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the ...[text shortened]... ender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."
my rec.
/mac
Originally posted by no1marauderI don't believe either A-bomb, certainly not the second one, was needed *solely* to end the war or save American lives. To me, and I'm not looking anything up here just going off the old noggin, the A-bombs were dropped as much for poilitical reasons as military reasons. Maybe more political than anything else.
The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. 100,000 people, almost all civilians died in the blast or in the immediate aftermath; at least that many died from the effects of radiation sickness in the months and years afterward.
...[text shortened]... tary necessity" can be found at http://www.doug-long.com/ga1.htm.
Truman showed Stalin and the rest of the world that we had atomic weapons, and more importantly, we were crazy enough to use'em. Since there was only one country, the one we were still at war with, where the bombs could be dropped Japan got hammered.
The second bomb was all political. That one probably shook the world even more than the first. "How many of these things do the Americans have?!" must have been a phrase heard often from many politicians and military leaders around the world.
I'm pretty sure Stalin had to change his shorts after that second one fell.
Originally posted by wib
I don't believe either A-bomb, certainly not the second one, was needed *solely* to end the war or save American lives. To me, and I'm not looking anything up here just going off the old noggin, the A-bombs were dropped as much for poilitica ...[text shortened]... ure Stalin had to change his shorts after that second one fell.
I totally agree with you. So my rec.
But I'm not completely sure that the second bomb was more "political" than the first.
It was a madness.
In Spanish:
"vamos a jugar a ver quién la tiene más grande".
Y jugaron con cosas que no tienen repuesto.
Killers.
Michael
Edit:
A bad translation to english would be:
"We are going to play to see who has it greater". (eufemism for d*ck)
And they played with things that don't have spare part.
Originally posted by NyxieI think that this war wouldve turned into a veitnom if we didnt use the a-bombs, although I saw no need for the second one, I think it was mostly to scare them and ask themselves, "what city is next?
I have never understood why the second was dropped.
Originally posted by flyUnityDon't you think it was a too much expensive demosntration of "power" to stop a war that was just stopped?
I think that this war wouldve turned into a veitnom if we didnt use the a-bombs, although I saw no need for the second one, I think it was mostly to scare them and ask themselves, "what city is next?
I repeat myself: killers.
Edit: expensive in terms of life
Originally posted by flyUnitydont you think they "got the picture" after the first one?
I think that this war wouldve turned into a veitnom if we didnt use the a-bombs, although I saw no need for the second one, I think it was mostly to scare them and ask themselves, "what city is next?
Originally posted by LittleBearLOL! Absolutely. That's an excellent translation. Here we'd call it "measuring their manhood".
I totally agree with you. So my rec.
But I'm not completely sure that the second bomb was more "political" than the first.
It was a madness.
In Spanish:
"vamos a jugar a ver quién la tiene más grande".
Y jugaron con cosas que no tienen repuesto.
Killers.
Michael
Edit:
A bad translation to english would be:
"We are going to pla ...[text shortened]... it greater". (eufemism for d*ck)
And they played with things that don't have spare part.
Bunch'a stoopeys.
Originally posted by no1marauderWhat does it say about "history" as taught in the US?
The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. 100,000 people, almost all civilians died in the blast or in the immediate aftermath; at least that many died from the effects of radiation sickness in the months and years afterward.
It is now an unquestioned conclusion that the dropping of the atomic bombs was necessary to end the war against Ja ...[text shortened]... use of the A-Bomb was a "military necessity" can be found at http://www.doug-long.com/ga1.htm.
Toe the line.
They could have dropped one offshore to demonstrate its power.
At the time, they had two devices, but more were on the way. The Hiroshima bomb could have been airburst over the coast and the Nagasaki one could have been held in reserve.
Of course, this is easy for me to say, I wasn't President at the time and I didn't have soldiers dying under my command while sitting on the means to stop it. Don't forget, firebombing whole cities was getting "routine" in that war; the civilian slaughter was already immense.
Morality is confused, but yes; it should be noted that the decision Truman took wasn't universally supported.
On that morning, one person was sitting on the stone steps of a bank, waiting for the doors to open at the moment the atomic bomb was detonated. The person died instantly, his or her body atomized. Where the stone steps were exposed to the heat flash they turned white. Where the person sat a shadow was left behind. Those stone steps with their almost photographic image became known as "the stone of a human shadow."
Even if one were somehow fortunate enough not to fall ill, those who experienced that living hell are condemned to live with fear carved deeply into their hearts. One such person is Koji Toyo'oka, the chief priest of a Buddhist temple in Hiroshima. Toyo'oka, who was a junior high school student when the bomb exploded, went out with his mother to look for his younger brother who had gone into town but faild to return home. When they found him, they could hardly recognize him. His face was swollen and the skin had peeled off. When they called out his name, he answered with a faint voice. He died the following day, but when they opened his mouth, they found maggots already breeding inside. The heat rays had destroyed even his internal organs, and the decay had then started. Basic human dignity was given a thrashing many times over.
One Hiroshima survivor described the death of her daughter from radiation sickness.
She had no burns and only minor external wounds. She was quite all right for a while. But on the 4th September, she suddenly became sick. She had spots all over her body. Her hair began to fall out. She vomited small clumps of blood many times. I felt this was a very strange and horrible disease. We were all afraid of it, and even the doctor didn't know what it was. After ten days of agony and torture, she died on September 14th.
Dr. Sasaki and his colleagues at the Red Cross Hospital watched the unprecedented disease unfold and at last evolved a theory about its nature. It had, they decided, three stages. The first stage had been all over before the doctors even knew they were dealing with a new sickness; it was the direct reaction to the bombardment of the body, at the moment when the bomb went off, by neutrons, beta particles, and gamma rays. The apparently uninjured people who had died so mysteriously in the first few hours or days had succumbed in this first stage. It killed ninety-five per cent of the people within a half-mile of the center, and many thousands who were farther away. The doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body cells– caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls. Many people who did not die right away came down with nausea, headache, diarrhea, malaise, and fever, which lasted several days. Doctors could not be certain whether some of these symptoms were the result of radiation or nervous shock. The second stage set in ten or fifteen days after the bombing. Its first symptom was falling hair. Diarrhea and fever, which in some cases went as high as 106, came next. Twenty-five to thirty days after the explosion, blood disorders appeared: gums bled, the white-blood-cell count dropped sharply, and petechiae [eruptions] appeared on the skin and mucous membranes. The drop in the number of white blood corpuscles reduced the patient's capacity to resist infection, so open wounds were unusually slow in healing and many of the sick developed sore throats and mouths. The two key symptoms, on which the doctors came to base their prognosis, were fever and the lowered white-corpuscle count. If fever remained steady and high, the patient's chances for survival were poor. The white count almost always dropped below four thousand; a patient whose count fell below one thousand had little hope of living. Toward the end of the second stage, if the patient survived, anemia, or a drop in the red blood count, also set in. The third stage was the reaction that came when the body struggled to compensate for its ills–when, for instance, the white count not only returned to normal but increased to much higher than normal levels. In this stage, many patients died of complications, such as infections in the chest cavity. Most burns healed with deep layers of pink, rubbery scar tissue, known as keloid tumors. The duration of the disease varied, depending on the patient's constitution and the amount of radiation he had received. Some victims recovered in a week; with others the disease dragged on for months.
As the symptoms revealed themselves, it became clear that many of them resembled the effects of overdoses of X-ray, and the doctors based their therapy on that likeness. They gave victims liver extract, blood transfusions, and vitamins, especially Bl. The shortage of supplies and instruments hampered them. Allied doctors who came in after the surrender found plasma and penicillin very effective. Since the blood disorders were, in the long run, the predominant factor in the disease, some of the Japanese doctors evolved a theory as to the seat of the delayed sickness. They thought that perhaps gamma rays, entering the body at the time of the explosion, made the phosphorus in the victims' bones radioactive, and that they in turn emitted beta particles, which, though they could not penetrate far through flesh, could enter the bone marrow, where blood is manufactured, and gradually tear it down. Whatever its source, the disease had some baffling quirks. Not all the patients exhibited all the main symptoms. People who suffered flash burns were protected, to a considerable extent, from radiation sickness. Those who had lain quietly for days or even hours after the bombing were much less liable to get sick than those who had been active. Gray hair seldom fell out. And, as if nature were protecting man against his own ingenuity, the reproductive processes were affected for a time; men became sterile, women had miscarriages, menstruation stopped.
Robert Oppenheimer : I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.