Hiroshima, on that day, there was no panic, only ghastly stillness, the quiet of death. People moved slowly along the roads like ghosts covered with dust and ash who fell dead as they walked. By the river people were bleeding from their faces or hands and died without weeping. People trapped under fallen houses called patiently, meekly, "Help, if I may ask." In Hiroshima on that day, half the doctors were killed. At the hospitals between three and ten thousand people came each day for help, and each day, 2,000 of them died. They were buried together, because there were too many to bury separately.
As readers know, I don't doubt for one second that the atomic attacks on Japan were necessary and saved lives. I'm not immune from the sentiments of peace activists, however, especially the Japanese who lived through the holocaust. That said, Amy Goodman interviewed the filmmakers, and as always, it's extremely fascinating to see once more how the United States is portrayed by the communist left as evil incarnate. See, "Film Suppressed: The US Government Hides Hiroshima Nagasaki Footage For Decades."
4 comments:
Estimates were of 1M US casualties in an attack on the Japanese mainland due to the fanaticism of opposition in the face of certain defeat.
Criticizing Truman for taking 15% the estimated war-ending US fatalities from the Japanese instead -who started it, frankly- is like criticizing US corporate leaders for putting the interests of their shareholders above those of outside Leftist pressure groups... same argument, really.
Typical lib stand, devised by those who haven't had to make difficult decisions in life... nor accept the lesser of two evils to get a bottom line result demanded of them.
If we had listened to these fools five years ago, Iraq would be an Al Qaida caliphate by now
Every few years the Left tries this well knowing that the numbers of people who would have died had the Allies had to conduct a land war for Japan would have been exponentially larger. Japan was NOT about to surrender and the experiences that the US and its allies faced with the Kamikaze attacks, soldiers dying to the last man and doing so to inflict tremendous causalities, civilians leaping to their deaths et al convinced Truman there was no way to end that war without losses on both sides that would have made those suffered in the two A bomb attacks look minuscule in comparison. Truman was by far more of a humanitarian than any on the Left who desire to make the US look like the enemy of mankind.
I think what they are trying to do is push this meme in the hopes that enough WWII veterans die off that they can re-write history. When the Left starts recognizing the death and destruction wrought by Communism, Socialism, Marxism et al then maybe we can talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Moral: Don't attack the United States unless you have a serious death wish.
Funny, a Marxist made this film, the advocate of an ideology that killed as many as 120 million people in the 20th century. Any moralizing from this hypocrite should be roundly ignored.
It is extremely fortunate that the ground invasion of Japan (first part, targeted at the Japanese home island of Kyushu, in the south, was called "Olympic) -- did not have to go forward. Mostly by analysis of radio traffic and US aerial recon patterns, Japanese intelligence had gotten pretty good at forecasting the timing and likely sites of US amphibious operations.
Japanese military intelligence had the landing beaches for Olympic correctly identified, and the timing of the landings more or less blocked out, and the Imperial Army had mobilized its last reserves and was waiting. They Japanese had abandoned their "let em get ashore and then slam em" strategy they used at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and were gonna meet the Army and Marines at the waters edge.
Despite that, and despite the sea and air Kamikazes the IJN and their army air force had waiting, the US would no doubt have gotten ashore, and prevailed. But the 100,000 projected casualty predictions were very likely on the low side.
Finally, in early 1945, the US Navy had added an extensive mining campaign, as well as close range naval surface and air raiding operations to the already devastating submarine campaigns. Additionally, the Army Air Force had moved from strategic bombing, directed at industry, towards attacks on transport nodes. All that ensured that commerical transportation -- most especially of food -- was about done in Japan by August. Had the war not ended when it did; had it even continued through the rest of 1945, millions of civilians in the big Japanese cities would have starved. Even after the surrender, 1945-46 were very hard in Japan -- and the occupation had to devote a significant amount of effort to food transportation.
The use of atomic weapons was in every way fortunate, not least politically for the Japanese, because it provided the Japanese government a plausible way to climb off its political limb and give up.
However, it is usually forgotten that the Japanese surrendered on terms. They were nowhere written down -- but the Japanese got to keep their Emperor. In contrast to what happened in Germany, the Japanese government was not dissolved, but used to run the occupation. A lot of people who perhaps should have wound up in front of war crimes tribunals were not prosecuted. In that sense, the fanatical Japanese resistance late war, as the US closed in on Japan, at Iwo Jima, Okinawa and in the Philippines -- bought the Japanese some political advantages.
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