Every time think of it, I recall a song from a particular musical that seems to fit.
Everybody sing:
They had it coming!
They had it coming!
They only had themselves to blame!
If you'da been there,
If you'da seen it...
I betcha you would have done the same!
Hey Murphy;
ReplyDeleteYeah they had it coming...Pearl Harbor. If Truman had accepted anything less,. there would have been hell to pay. Many people knew that the Japanese under an armistice would have started up again in 20 years....the lessons from Germany in WWI to WWII vividly explained that. And also the Japanese were preparing to fight the invaders with bamboo spears, we would have had to eradicate the Japanese as a nation and as a culture to get them to quit. Iwa Jima and Okinawa showed this, and we had forcast about 1000,000 casualties from the allies, not counting the Japanese civilians. Dropping the bomb was necessary.
Good point!
ReplyDeleteAnd Bataan, and Nanking, and....
ReplyDeleteThey didn't get the message when their cities were firebombed into ashes.
ReplyDeleteCurtis Lemay did a good job with the firebombing, in fact I believe there were more casualties from that than being nuked. But some people on any side of anything will not listen or look at facts. This is a problem every year about this time at the Smithsonian where the vigilance over the Enola Gay is increased because of the demonstrated propensity of some people to willfully not understand. Try doing the Highlights tour on August 6 to a group with Japanese nationals in it...awkward does not begin to cover it.
ReplyDeleteAs the son of a veteran of the European campaign who was training for the invasion of the Japanese home islands when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked, I am grateful that Truman agreed to drop the bombs. First and foremost, the war ended, nothing else mattered.
ReplyDeleteI lived in Hiroshima for 2 years and they do the same. My father in law was a Marine and Tarawa survivor. Had the bomb not been dropped my wife, and hence our son and grandsons might not exist.
ReplyDeleteMy dad and a few of my uncles were in the Pacific pipeline for the invasion. Another uncle would have been drafted in late `46. And remember they came very close to starting to draft women in `44 in order to shift the stateside troops into combat roles.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention that northern Japan would have ended up in Soviet hands.....
The firebombing raids didn't convince the Japanese to give up. Being nuked did.
Hooray for Harry S. Truman!
Well, Truman used Henry Fonda's philosophy. "People scare better when they are dying." (From Once Upon a Time In The West.)
ReplyDeleteLemay didn't scare them enough cause he used so many bombers to cause the destruction at night. But then they saw just one bomber, in the daylight, could duplicate what 400 at night could do. It was just to much.
Shaking my head on this one...
ReplyDeleteFor them to claim victimhood after Pearl Harbor and their barberous conduct during the war is a crock of you know what. Truman made the right decision.