Obliterate -never-before-published photographs Hiroshima- Graphic warning.

The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives contains ten
never-before-published photographs illustrating the immediate aftermath of
the Hiroshima bombing.

These photographs, taken by an unknown Japanese photographer, were found in 1945
among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside Hiroshima by U.S. serviceman Robert L. Capp,
who was attached to the occupation forces. Unlike most photos of the Hiroshima bombing,
these dramatically convey the human as well as material destruction unleashed by the atomic bomb.

Mr. Capp donated them to the Hoover Archives in 1998 with the provision that they
not be reproduced until 2008. Three of these photographs are reproduced in Atomic
Tragedy with the permission of the Capp family






More photos: http://faculty.ucmerced.edu/smalloy/atomic_tragedy/photos.html

To use the Bomb.

obliterate a nation of 70 million people: may all militant politicos and military-types do likewise. :D

doesn't obliterate another nation of 7 million, there won't be any problem.

I don't see why the U.S. would want to volunteer and sully itself by engaging in such a crime.

Also there is no logic in Zionism post Trinity. In nature genetic isolation leads to evolution or extinction. In a way the forced diaspora of the Jews may have prevented them joining the other extinct civilizations of the Mid-East.



The Carthaginians, the Assyrians, the Philistines, Babylonians, etc. All gone. Nothing lasts forever.

unfortunately, by 1945 the atomic bombs did not represent a new threshold in civilian deaths. I think everyone was simply numb to the deaths by then - with tens of millions dead world wide I could certainly see the desire to simply end it as soon as possible.

They remind me of the after tsunami photos, but our gvt did this.

Hmmmmm..........?

The pictures are difficult to see, but need to be seen.

.... and got killed there.

"That's why not many bodies show up in pictures because everyone instantly incinerates." Fools, ignorant, both. Many many many died and piles of bodies were made.

and vaporized. They were the lucky ones.

Those a bit farther away suffered flash burns, some fatal, some not.

Many of those who thought they'd escaped unharmed developed radiation sickness with a few days.

If I ruled the world, every leader of every nuke-owning nation would be required to tour the museums at Hiroshima and Nagasaki before assuming office and given a stern warning that yes, you could do this to your enemies, but they could also do it back to you.

John Hersey's book, that is.

:cry:

accounts of the bombing/aftermath. I was in summer camp when the news came that Japan had been struck by the most destructive bomb ever developed. We were filled with awe and foreboding that such a weapon had ever been developed.

I don't remember why I searched for it, but I did and was very affected.

haunting

I wonder how many folks who think it's okey-dokey to bomb the crap out of other countries have been exposed to anything like it?

Outside of Ground Zero, there are varying degrees of damage. And then once the initial blast has exploded, there is a firestorm in its aftermath.

And due to the weirdness of radiation - a person's injuries also depend on what they are wearing - you might end up seriously burned if you wear black or dark clothing, or less seriously burned if you wear white.

Then if the initial blast, and secondary firestorm don't get the victim, the survivor probably will succumb to radiation sickness. Over the next few weeks.

After that, the survivors are still at risk for cancer.

BTW the massive amounts of radioactive particles circling our globe are at least five times greater now than they were the day before the first nuclear explosion!!

was that people lived or died just a few feet apart. I was once in Japan for one of the anniversaries of the Hiroshima bombing, and there was a TV program that investigated the stories of people who had survived close to Ground Zero.

The most striking case was of some bank employees who were having an early morning meeting when the bomb fell. Their fate depended on where they were sitting in relation to the windows of the conference room.

Experiences there in Japan. Connected with the anniversary.

Maybe as an OP?? ANd if there isn't time for you to do it now, at some later date??

because the Americans wanted to see the effects of the bombs on an untouched city. They thought that if they dropped the bomb on a city like Tokyo, which had already been extensively bombed, they wouldn't be able to tell which damage came from what. Another factor that led to the designation of Hiroshima was its geography. It's located on a river delta, an almost flat city surrounded by mountains. The bombing of Hiroshima was a very cynical science experiment, in addition to being a military move.

Nagasaki was the victim of weather conditions. The original target was a city on the other side of Kyushu, called Kokura. (Some years ago, it was consolidated with two other cities and renamed "Kita-Kyushu.")

Anyway, the bomber pilots first headed for Kokura, but it was so clouded over that they couldn't see anything, so they headed for Nagasaki, which had the bad luck to be enjoying beautiful, cloudless weather.

But a small break in the weather allowed them to drop (and missed by 2 miles).

Which in wartime is a valid military target. You're not suppose to deliberately bomb residential centers, but in the 1940's there was only so much you could do. There were clouds, smokescreens, darkness, flak, and defending fighters, and the limits to the mechanical sighting systems used to drop the. :shrug: We do much better now. We're actually putting JDAM and Paveway guidence heads on 250-pound bombs now, not the 1,000 and 2,000 pounders they usually were on, specifially to launch precision attacks on hard-to-hit targets.

The destruction there was no worse than the firebombings of, say, Dresden or Tokyo, although the radioactive aftereffects were of course much, much more serious and long-lasting than a similar chemical explosive would have done.

With the advent of strategic bombing, it stopped being army against army and became nation against nation. Before then, it was virtually impossible to attack anything more than 10 miles or so behind the front lines, and that was only by long-range artillery.

But by World War Two, you could attack an entire country even if you occupied only a little of it. US and British bombers pounded the hell out of Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe for over two years before a single allied soldier landed to fight the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS.

Highly recommended on all counts as it doesn't take the typical ignore/trivialize approach to addressing the 26,000 active nukes in our world. Many prefer to think of this potential, unthinkable horror as a decades old threat that is no longer a legitimate concern for our species, when in reality, the threat is greater now due to greater global instability {that the U.S. in part creates, abandons long standing treaties, insane saber rattling and the like}. Typically American perception: the prevailing perceptions are bass-ackward from actuality.

http://www.originalchildbomb.com/

The danger increased dramatically when the new world order (free market corporatist government) was pushed on Russia. It was during the transition to a neoconservative corporatist that Russia's nuke stockpile became a means of survival for starving workers at the nuke plants and storage facilities. Clinton tried to help protect those stockpiles by working with Russia to destroy and monitor them, but bush came in and stopped that process.

PBS had a program last fall where they traced the DNA of every human back to some some guy in Asia, we're all family.


Thanks for the thread, Ichingcarpenter.

ever attacked Israel. Think about that for 30 seconds.

for me to understand the ramifications of such talk.

... if the U.S. and allies had to invade Japan then millions of Japanese would
have died along w/ @ least million American G.I.s ... good chance my Dad would
have been one of them. Also all the P.O.W.s in Japan would have been executed
if we invaded .... right after the bomb dropped the guards who had tortured our
men had a real "change of heart" ..... Although the 2nd bomb on Nagasaki
was very wrong.

I can't blame them for feeling the way they do (or did, since most of them have died) about the Bomb.

He told me after the bomb dropped one man who had beat him
all the time was "real nice" to him.

The bomb was awful and brutal but it did save many many lives ....
By that time in the war we had B-29s and total control of the air
over Japan .... if we had invaded the "fire bombings" of Tokyo and
Dresden would have happened all over Japan.

Japan had been making surrender overtures for months before we dropped the bomb. They wanted only one condition, to keep Hirohito as the Emperor. The US kept stating that it had to be unconditional surrender, and when the Japanese didn't back off the Hirohito issue, we bombed them. When Japan surrendered, we let them have one concession, keeping Hirohito on as Emperor.

If we had accepted Japan's initial surrender offer, your Dad wouldn't have had to invade Japan, and the bomb wouldn't have killed hundreds of thousands of people. Instead, the US just had to use this new toy it had, see how big a bang it made, show the Soviets that we were the biggest bad ass on the world stage.

amongst all the vids of skaters and cat spankers we find these gems. Thanks.

but it would have been used some where down the line. The Soviets certainly would have figured out that we had it. They still would have developed it themselves, and the bomb might have been tried out against another nuclear power with the power to retaliate. In which case, even more would have been killed.

The Japanese were already trying to surrender, and per the documentation available to historians, the bomb was dropped mostly as an implied threat to the USSR.

http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/atomic.htm

If you read "Truman" by David McCullough you don't come to that conclusion. If you also watch this recent BBC documentary: http://youtube.com/watch?v=LIOqL86jfg4 it becomes clear.

any of the people who knew what they were talking about did

Yet Zynx is correct. It's merely a theory at this point.

For example, in Joesph Persico's "Roosevelt's Secret War", the author too attests (through documents, intercepts, etc.) that the "flexing our muscles to the Soviet Union" was merely an unintended (though advantageous) by-product of the two bombs.

I'd hardly state that conventional wisdom has been "debunked".

He wasn't a psychopath like Bush, he was a good, principled man with terrible choices he had to make.

and he'd already lost two brothers in law and many of the young men he grew up with in his community.

If you recall from Ken Burns recent documentary about WWII, most of the US troops who had been prepared to invade Japan were the "walking wounded" - troops who had already been through horrific battles in the South Pacific, wounded, patched up and sent back into combat.

The US didn't start the war, but they had to finish it with the least amount of damage to our own troops as possible.

He was one of the POWs in Bataan and later in the mines.
Unfortuately, he felt Nagasaki was necessary also.

:shrug:

determined to fight even in the interior until the last soldier was killed.

The U.S. had experience with that Japanese strategy from Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Philippines and other Pacific battles.

Are you sure you weren't trying to argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were somehow justified because of the rape of Nanjing? It sure sounds like it.

Because I'll bet there's some Japanese nationalist somewhere who thinks the Rape of Nanjing was justified because of some past atrocity committed by somebody from Nanjing.

not a matter of opinion.

versions of events leading up to Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb.

Hindsight can be dangerous when writing history and coupled to selective interpretation of facts.

The real question is precisely what facts were presented to Truman that led him to order the atomic bombs be used.

Truman correctly wanted to avoid more casualties if we were forced to invade Japan. To do that, he used the only two atomic bombs the U.S. possessed, not knowing whether either would work.

From a personal standpoint, Truman's decision meant my father and uncles would not face death in an invasion of Japan and if the war continued for five years, I also would not be called upon to fight in Japan.

Have a good day. :hi:

Do you have children? How would you feel if your children's bodies were in those pictures?

IMO "yes".

And how in the world can I answer your question? Neither you nor I know what information Truman had. Furthermore, there's no correct answer to the question, "was he right?"-- that's a judgment call.

I'm asking you questions the answers to which you should know. Have kids? How'd you feel if those were their bodies in that picture? (Would you feel like that was just retribution for their country's actions in, say, Iraq?)

were just children?

From Wikipedia:

Other kinds of civilian casualties may involve the targeting of civilian populations for military purposes, such as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed over 100,000 civilians. The legality of such action was at the time governed by international law found in the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare of 1907, which state "the attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited".<1> Also relevant, were the Hague Draft Rules of Air Warfare of 1922–1923, which state "air bombardment is legitimate only when is directed against a military objective". <2><3> The Rome Statute defines "intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population" to be illegal, but only came into effect on July 1, 2002 and has not been ratified by every country.<4>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties

U.S. casualties.

That's what Americans wanted and we were happy when the war was finally over thanks to Truman's leadership.

You may not like it but that's the way it was.

Truman sent the Potsdam Declaration to Emperor Showa on 26 July 1945.

The Emperor rejected the Declaration and under Truman's orders the first bomb was dropped on 6 August 1945.

The Emperor did nothing and Truman ordered the second bomb be dropped on 9 Aug 1945.

After the second bomb, the Emperor finally decided to surrender but even then a group attempted a coup with the goal of fighting until the end.

Why would you bargain with the lives of their subjects in the first place?

groups sometimes try to assassinate a nation's leader, e.g. Hitler, hoping a new leader will surrender.

On the other hand, a group may attempt a coup to make the leader a puppet while they continue a war, e.g. the attempt on Japan's emperor just before the atomic bomb was dropped so the emperor would not surrender.

Look up the Life Magazines from the early thirties. The Japanese indiscriminately bombed sections of Singapore, Shanghai and other Chinese cities. They killed and raped and murdered. They tortured their way across the Pacific, and left few nations unscarred. Including the areas of Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam. The Phillipines. Guam. Okinawa.

A good movie to watch in terms of what the Japanese did to the Chinese is to see "The Last Emperor." The Japanese felt that they were a superior race to the Chinese, whom they treated like dogs.

They were the enemy and it was war.

People who now say that we shouldn't have dropped the bomb forget the psychological effect created by the the Japanese attacks, especially on Pearl Harbor.

I confess that I WISH we hadn't dropped the bomb. But to leave out the fact that this nation attacked us and that many people in the USA feared our having to invade Japan is to ignore the psychological component. A component that affected Truman as much as anyone else.

My father was stationed in England awaiting orders to go to the Pacific theatre of war. In early August after the bomb fell on Hiroshima, he heard radio reports, and for the first time since Fall of 1944, he knew that he had survived WWII.

A feeling he did not have in March or April or May of 1945. Those months, he felt that though he survived the war in Europe, he was going to get "the bullet with his name on it" in the invasion of Japan.

The Japanese leadership had many opportunites to say "Uncle, we give up!" in July of 1945. They could have surrendered immediately after our Blitz on their city of Tokyo. But they chose to postpone the inevitable, in part out of deference to their Emperor. Not a wise choice. Those Japanese leaders share equally in the blame for what happened.

By destroying it by force of arms. By taking their territory until you fight your way up to the very leaders of the enemy government and capture them.

And all that implies.

Vast armies, navies, and air forces shooting and dropping vast quantities of munitions. Racing to develop new and better weapons, then deploying them as effectively as possible.

You win when you grind the other guy into surrender.

It's not a pretty process. All the wars we've fought in my lifetime, and my parent's lifetime, have been non-critical to the survival of America. Losing was embarassing and painful, but not fatal.

World War Two was a critical war, only the third in our nation's history. And it was a hell of a grind.

From what I have observed, once a nation involves itself in war, unjust violence will occur to those who are among the most innocent.

The Japanese were strapping children into Kamikaze planes. War is hell.

We gave the Japanese chances to surrender, but they did not relent. http://youtube.com/watch?v=LIOqL86jfg4

In fact, even AFTER the bomb was dropped, the Japanese High Command still insisted on one of their officials going to Hiroshima to see exactly what the scene there indicated.

It was only after those official(s) reported back that a new type of invincible weapon had been used at Hiroshima that the High Command became motivated to surrender.

I do agree that Nagasaki was unnecessary. But The Japanese High Command bears a great deal of responsibility in not surrendering BEFORE the initial bomb at Hiroshima.

Truman was told everything the intelligence agencies had.

"Intelligence showed Japan was defeated, and ready to surrender."

Eight months earlier, intelligence showed the precise same thing concerning Germany. The intelligence was wrong (illustrated by the Dec. offensive-- the largest German offensive in the West top date) and the intelligence community humbled, which is why many things from Jan. '45 till the end of the war were given a higher threat rating than hindsight dictates. For example, the National Redoubt, while almost nothing but fiction, was perceived by SHAEF asa very real threat.

Warfare that does not discriminate between military and civilian targets.

Those who survived took a few days or weeks to die as then-unknown radiation poisoning caused their skin and muscle tissue to simply slough off.

Shoulda put that genie back in the bottle while we had the chance.

Anyone know why Capp specified 2008?

To release the photos? I'm curious if the japanese photographer survived
or will ever be known?

What incrediblly powerful, horrifying pictures. I can't even imagine what it was like to face that.


Thanks for posting, so important to remember and to see the reality. The Hoover Institute should send an enlarged, framed copy to the White House for permanent placement in the Oval Office.

of other wars need to be impressed upon the American psyche.Deeply. Deeply enough to overwhelm all the Hollywood 'hero wins the blonde' image bullshit that gets shoved down our throats from the moment we exit the vaginal canal at birth and somehow makes flag lapel pins and the patriotism of a candidates maternal grandmother's preacher a campaign issue.

rarely if ever jams or runs out of ammo as he mows endless numbers of the enemy down while running through a swamp like a track course without ever getting killed him self.

We need not be ashamed of it. Compared to the alternative of German and Japanese hegemony, I'm willing to cut us some slack.

We didn't start WWI, WWII, Vietnam or Korean wars. Other nations, societies and cultures prone to beginning wars need to learn the same lessons.

We were good , the Japanese and Germans were evil !

We were good , the Japanese and Germans were evil !

We were good , the Japanese and Germans were evil !

la la la la ...

Were we all good? Absolutely not, but on balance I think it is safe to say the world is much better off for the fact we won. Germany alone is responsible for 50 million deaths in Europe. Japan is responsible for 20 million in China and many more in the rest of Asia from 1937-1945. All of our violence was aimed at stopping this rampage.

a deliberate policy of racial extermination and slave labor can be described as nothing else but evil.

The American Navy lost more ships to suicide bombers while invading Okinawa. The Japanese High Command refused to surrender. To invade the Japanese home islands it was estimated that it would cost three million American lives. Yes, a lot of people were killed, but how many more would have died if we were force to invade? War is a terrible thing, I pray the next President realizes that before he starts "An Unjust and Immoral War".

"The end of dropping the bomb seems, from the evidence, to have been not winning the war, which was already assured, not saving lives, for it was highly probable no American invasion would be necessary, but the aggrandisement of American national power at the moment and in the postwar period... For the idea that any means - mass murder, the misuse of science, the corruption of professionalism - are acceptable to achieve the end of national power, the ultimate example of our time is Hiroshima."

-Howard Zinn

I'd post a bunch of links to the truth about this garbage American mythology but this is one occasion where I'd rather simply suggest you use the fucking Google.

As long as we make up bullshit lies to obscure the crimes of our past we will just repeat the same crimes over and over again.

Obliterate my ass.

from Iraq.

we in a way are paying for this illegal occupation with the deterioration of our own country, and still we do nothing to dislodge these idiots who are sitting in the WH.

Nothing I've read from first hand sources says what Howard Zinn implies.

That is false. The Japanese Emperor had been trying to surrender for months. Admiral William Leahy, Chief of Staff to FDR and Truman, knew it and tried to get Truman to stop, but he was shut up and the bombs were dropped anyway.

rather than those who like to demonize Truman you would understand this.

and incredibly ignorant as well as counter-productive.

Truman was a good, humane man who had to lead in difficult times. He was a veteran of WWI and knew the brutality and waste of war, so his decision wasn't made lightly. I doubt Roosevelt would have done differently.

Thanks for the reminder of "Truman". I may re-read it this summer.

He later handwaved a vague "2 million" figure, but was either talking about all possible casualities on both sides, or was lying intentionally for propaganda reasons.

The estimates did vary widely. Admiral Nimitz estimated 1,000 caualties a day. The death toll on all sides would have been horrific. Easily into the millions.

When your nation has been at war for 3+ years, and you've lost hundreds of thousands of troops, and then you've witnessed Japanese resistance on Okinawa and Iwo Jima -- and you're multiplying those losses times God knows what for an invasion of Honshu, the bomb looked like a really good option. Had we possessed the bomb 6 months earlier, we'd have used it on Germany; as it was, we did a pretty damn fine job on Dresden -- the main difference being that we turned most of the bodies to charcoal.

This novel is no relation to Ozzy Osborn's CD or the Michael Douglas film. However there is a 1989 Japanese film called Kuroi Ame based on Ibuse's novel.

Ibuse based it on interviews and diaries of survivors. It is exceedingly well-written, grim, and moving. I read it in translation around 1970, as part of my senior thesis in Japanese History at University of Hawaii, and it is still in print. One of the scariest things in it -- knowing what we knew by then about the effects of radiation -- was that people from all over the countryside came into the city after the bombing to do rescue work, thus exposing themselves to the deadly environment.

As for the photographs that are just now coming to light -- this is a good thing. Based on what has been said here at DU in the past year, there's a whole generation of Americans who have never seen such photos before because of our propensity for historical amnesia.

I assure you -- I saw such photos by my early teens. They were out there, and they were not some kind of state secret. I don't know if Life magazine published some in the 1950s or if they were part of John Hersey's book and my parents brought it home from the library, but I saw photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the people who survived the blast. And read the descriptions.

Furthermore, fiction authors like Philip K. Dick used images of nuclear holocaust in their books -- which I also read while growing up.

Why the owner of these photos wanted to delay publication until this year I do not know. I only know that now is as good a time as any to have another generation be exposed to the truth. We have insane men in the White House who talk casually about "a new generation of tactical nukes" and "bunker busters" as though this makes some kind of sense. I don't question their sanity lightly -- but I have suspected Dick Cheney of being a madman ever since he and Rumsfeld floated that bunker buster idea back in (when was it) 2002.

Hekate

The Attack on Pearl Harbor4 of 12 Billows of Black Smoke
The USS West Virginia and the USS Tennessee burn. "A huge waterspout splashed over the side of the ship and then tumbled down like an exhausted geyser," remembers Japanese commander Matsumura Midori, who fired one of the torpedoes that hit the West Virginia. "What a magnificent sight."

I have not seen anyone post that the bombing of Pearl Harbor was "alright". Everyone knows Japan launched a pre-emptive strike against us. Wiped out much of our navy and killed many. Show me one instance of anyone denying this or saying it was acceptable. Just one.

Now let us compare these atrocities....

Pearl Harbor; military target, a very strategic hit. Who died? Plenty of Americans were killed and I'd wager there were few civilians among them. It was a horrible thing to be sure.

Japan and the dropping of the bombs; not military targets. We didn't wipe out their air force or navy with these bombs. Who died? Civilians. Hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians. Men, women and children. A massive slaughter. We leveled homes, schools, shops, banks and the like.

Using your logic we owe Israel at least a couple of bunker busters in a city or two for that Liberty incident.

Julie--who marvels at the mental gymnastics of some

At the time, by the standards of that war, attacking civilian population centers was the way war was done. It isn't right, but it can be explained in the context of the time.

Pearl Harbor cannot be compared to the dropping of the bombs. Other than the fact that both were surprise attacks I see no similarities. To count them as comparable is disingenuous to say the least.

Julie

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 100,000 deaths including children, as best anyone can figure.

Let's be clear here, with the same technology Japan would have done exactly the same thing.

which is plenty bad enough, but not even close to ONE million.

The claim of 20 million is widely cited in many sources. If you want, you can take a simple look at wikipedia which indicates 3,220,000 military and 17,530,000 civilian casualties for the Chinese.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_Sino-Japanese_War

Maybe it's timing, but I doubt it.

That one's from the wikipedia article.

Studies after the war showed that the British strategy of bombing and sabotaging bridges, rail lines and roads (which made it impossible for Germany to move armies and war materials around) were much more effective than bombing cities. Similar studies showed that cutting off shipping lanes in the pacific (making it impossible for Japan to get rubber) limited their ability to fight the war.

However, there's so much more money for the military industrial complex building huge air forces, and making expensive bombs to drop on population centers, so those lessons were ignored.

Incidentally, civilian casualties in Dresden were 25k-40k, right? And I think most reasonable people accept that it was an atrocity and achieved nothing. However, Nagasaki and Hiroshima suffered much greater civilian casualties, and people are still arguing that it was a good thing.

because the area bombing concept was most stridently forwarded by the head of RAF Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris. The USAAF preferred strikes against more specific targets.

The original project was designed for use against Berlin specifically. Japan happened to still be standing. What bullshit. You should be ashamed of yourself.

responsible? Nope. Not ashamed. Not in the least.

It just amazes me that the millions of deaths that Japan was responsible for that they like to play the victim.

For all the deaths the bush administration is responsible for, yet the people of USA will play the victim if/when repercussions happen to civilians here?

But I don't think she'd give a shit.

would you want to be on this side of the equation? Also keep in mind that we're talking about civilians vs. military: what is the acceptable ratio of potential military lives lost, to instantaneous civilian lives lost, to justify nuking civilians? It's probably worth factoring in those who didn't die instantly, and those who were physically and mentally maimed, for the rest of their lives.

I don't have any answers; I just can't dismiss this with the same hand-waving mathematics that apologists do.

I don't care whos father would have died if they didn't. (The whole premise that the only other alternative was an invasion is BS)

The moment you decide to do what was done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki - your moral superiority vanishes and you loose the reason you should win.
Doing it twice was beyond cruel and evil. Seeing what the first did - the second one can only be explained by either pure numbness in terms of humanity - or it being an utterly calculated and evil demonstration.

At the moment it was done, Japan posed no significant threat to anyone. At most it could escape occupation and all out surrender. And even that seems unlikely given the blokade possibility.

The Dresden bombings are also a chapter in history that should not be forgotten, nor explained away or excused. It was pure untempered revenge.

strategically and tactically correct.

Since there are many points of view, all must fall silent to the times we are speaking of. Facts are facts, and regardless of how horrific the situation had become, there was little choice in the matter if one wants to be realistic in the time of the events.

All things prior to the decision had shown the Japanese to be tenacious and essentially bent on suicide as opposed to surrender. Not many at the beginning of hostilities knew the japanese psyche at the time. (Even today, some of the "old ways" persevere, as there are classes to teach the Japanese to smile, something they were not known for). All that there was to go by, was seeing what they had done, and were doing in the times we are talking about.

Nanking, The Bataan Death March, slave labor, brutal military jurisdictions where life was considered nothing. Then there were the Island Battles, where extremely few survivors were taken prisoner, most of those far beyond the means to fight any longer. Kamikazes; the drilling of virtually everyone on the Home Islands to fight to the death, beginning on the shores and taking the battles inland, all with the knowledge that could not possibly win the war. The major cities of Japan had been firebombed into oblivion, some of the firestorms whipped up 600 mph winds that swept people into fire tornadoes of several thousand degrees.

Overtures were made to the Soviets in trying to work out a deal, but the Soviets stalled, as they had plans as well. Truman did not take this decision lightly, nor did Marshall or anyone else, (with the probable exception of USAAF Gen Curtis LeMay).

After the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Japanese leadership decided to press the war to it's inevitable conclusion, willing to sacrifice the population in order to "save face" and live up to a code we find it difficult to understand. Tojo made the incredible statement that "the US could not possibly have 2 of these things." Denial and Group-think are powerful, and after Nagasaki, the Emperor himself had to step in take matters into his own hands. Some believed he did not have the authority to do this, and there was a short lived coup to keep the recording off the air about the surrender.

In essence, a small group were willing to have millions die on both sides so they would not have to go through the humiliation of surrender. Say what we will in 20/20 hindsight, at the time, there was little else that could be called a viable option.

FWIW...Stalin already knew about the Trinity test, and there was work going on at a fever pitch to get German scientists for both the American and the Soviet governments, (we found out that the Germans were pretty far off from getting a bomb, but who wants to take the chance at the time?).

One last item, the fire bombing of Tokyo killed more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Very little of Tokyo was left, but the will to fight was as strong as ever. If that had happened here in the US, we'd fight it out as well, in some ways, humanity simply binds together under crisis, the British did during the Blitz, the Germans did in Berlin and Dresden, and the Japanese did after it's major cities had been burned to ash.

Ironically, the Japanese have been adamant about keeping nuclear weapons away from it's shores, and have been proponents for peaceful resolution of situations for many a year. The dropping of the bombs saved millions, paved the way for a new Japan, and helped stabilize a part of Asia.

However, another bomb should never be dropped, nor the threat of nuclear war should ever be proposed. Defense is one thing, but for anyone to threaten to unleash a nuclear holocaust is evil incarnate, regardless of who they are or their motives. HRC was speaking of retaliation, but here are some people out there that would have no qualms about tossing a nuke into the fray...they should see these pictures and listen to some of the first hand reports that survive. If they still brayed about such things, their nations should rise up from within and remove them from power, for the leaders will not suffer, but the citizens most certainly will.

perspectives as possible.

I find it incredible that MacArthur thought the idea was horrid, not because of the devastation, but because of the fact the invasion of Japan was now a moot issue. On the other hand...Curtis LeMay thought this was the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel, and was willing to use it on the Soviets, the Chinese and in SE Asia...he was a nuclear nutcase, (he also believed that wars could be won by airpower alone, another absurd idea...people dig in, as wars have shown us time and again, and continue the fight. Far better...avoid war as best one can).

The citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were warned as well. Days ahead of the bombings, radio broadcasts and dropped leaflets warned the people of an impending disaster; at the least, they should have realized they were targeted for the same firebombing as the other major cities of Japan had seen. Point is, the warnings were there, the signs of impending destruction were there, the war was lost for the Japanese...and a few at the top rungs of power let tens of thousands die, and would have allowed millions more to die, for their own stubborness...(reminds me of bush and his cabal).

It has been said, that of all the people w/Truman the day the news of the successful attack, only Marshall was not cheering, nor smiling, and some say, they thought they saw a slight tear in his eye. Marshall was one of the most brilliant leaders this nation had ever seen, and he knew that the genie could never be be placed back in the bottle. He knew that the bomb, and the subsequent "advances" imperiled the world, and as Sec of State, did everything he could to keep a nuclear Armageddon from occuring...starting w/the Marshall Plan, a brilliant maneuver both humanitarian and strategic.

The indiscriminate killing of civilians including women and children, elderly and ill with nuclear weapons is too easy and the result is a lazafare attitude to war. "Turn them to glass" we say now. "Collateral Damage" total obliteration, point and click.

Had the U.S. suffered a long grueling war with great sacrifice and suffering by all we would of probably thought more about starting any other wars.

children had been going on since 1936 in Asia, and 1939 in Europe.

The fire-bombings of Dresden, Berlin and Tokyo were far more costly in lives and even more horrendous.

Look up the fire-bombing of Dresden, which was pushed for by Churchill...it was an act of terrorism. Dresden had virtually no militay importance, hundreds of thousands had gone there because they felt it would not be bombed precisely because it was not a military target. The firestorm that generated 600 mph winds sucked people into fire tornadoes, incinerating them almost instantly. The same thing happened to Tokyo, with only the Imperial Palace left unscathed.

You can most certainly stand on your position...but the 2 bombs dropped on Japan, ended the war w/far less #'s than if an invasion and bombing would have been the order of the day.

I'm not saying dropping nukes was a wonderful thing...but in the scope of things, they actually saved more lives than they took.

His generals wanted him to, too.



Thank you for the information on the Robert L. Capp collection. I never would have known.

Here's an eyewitness you father and his friends may have known:



The photographs at the Hoover Institution Archives fill in the story. Thank you.

The museum is very sobering. There's this weird disconnect between the melted porcelain rice bowls and roof tiles in the museum and the bustling modern city outside the museum. I saw more children in HIroshima than anywhere else in Japan.

I don't care how people try spinning this.

to be in the perspective of the times in which they occured. To do otherwise really doesn't help in understanding the decision. I have spent a long time pondering the whole situation, it is not an easy subject to tackle.

As cold and calculating the process is...a chance to end a war w/100,000 casualties vs, several million and carrying on the war for at least another year minimum...the decision to drop the bomb was valid.

In the scheme of things...if the invasion of Japan would have gone on schedule...many of us here today would not exist, and millions of Japanese would not exist either. The carnage would have been far greater than it was.

Wiping out that many civilians is down right immoral and a bit disturbing.

massive loss of civilian life.

Looking at what the Japanese had done during their "reign of terror" gave the impression, if not the fact, that they were, at the time brutal in their occupations. Millions of Chinese were slaughtered, mostly civilians, under the Japanese; millions of Japanese died during the war, many of them civilians. Look at the fire-bombing of Tokyo...civilians died in a far higher # than at Hiroshima...and yet, the "official" line was to "continue to the death".

Whether you are convinced or not is irrelevant to the time, it happened because after great deliberation, it was deemed as the best option at that time.

How many more civilians would have died if conventional bombing of the cities and countryside continued? Millions...add to the potential Japanese deaths the # of Allied troops and the numbers cannot even begin to balance.

Children died in Moscow, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, London, Rome, Stalingrad, Nanking, Manila the world was littered with the bodies of the innocent. The relative few that died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which brought the murder to a close is no more nor less horrific than the others. It is the method that makes most agahst...not the #'s.

War sucks...we should have evolved far beyond it...but it appears to be enmeshed in our very fiber.

By giving examples of others of its time. I know war sucks, it doesn't make me accept it, and it doesn't make the act any less immoral to me. Sorry...

unfortunately, that is a fact.

based on facts of the time. And we will just have to agree to disagree.

to be in the perspective of the times in which they occured. To do otherwise really doesn't help in understanding the decision. I have spent a long time pondering the whole situation, it is not an easy subject to tackle.

As cold and calculating the process is...a chance to end a war w/100,000 casualties vs, several million and carrying on the war for at least another year minimum...the decision to drop the bomb was valid.

In the scheme of things...if the invasion of Japan would have gone on schedule...many of us here today would not exist, and millions of Japanese would not exist either. The carnage would have been far greater than it was.

Neither can the people who made the decision to create and drop that bomb.

Humans cannot predict the future of something as chaotic as war.

What was done was done. The victors determine what crimes were committed and who are to heroes.

Had Japan won the war despite the bombs being dropped no doubt, our leaders would of been convicted and hanged for crimes against humanity.

War is hell. The best way to end a war is to never start one. Something mankind simply cannot understand.

Everytime I think of what we did it really bothers me. And when our current leadership touts military intervention as a foreign policy tool it makes me feel that we have learned nothing from the deaths of countless millions in the wars we have fought and waged.

It is a moral dilemma, one that has no answer other than to reject war and violence flat out, else we leave behind more gruesome documentation for other generations to discover and debate over.

real appreciation of how important was Truman's decision and how wonderful it was to know your loved ones were not going to face death.

You can spin all you want and quote all the hindsight articles you want but you will never know how it was in 1945 unless you lived through it.

Have a good day and may you live a long and prosperous life under the umbrella of security fought for by an earlier generation.

That the decision to bomb largely civilian targets saved a million American servicemen's lives is by no means uncontestable.

Quite a number of prominent figures at the time, both civilian and military, opposed the bombing, on grounds that Japan had already begun pressing for peace. (http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm)


This was a wholly unnecessary act. Japan had by that time been decimated, deprived of any air force or naval assets of any value. What, pray tell, would have prevented the Allies from simply cordoning off the home islands? Were the Japanese really in a position to "force" Americans into invading?

The worse part of all is that the bombing was all for naught. After all, the Allies eventually agreed to Japan's pre-Hiroshima terms. Had they simply agreed to keep Hirohito on as a figurehead, 200,000 people would not have died.

many more supporting Truman's decision to use the bomb.

Like most subjective decisions, there are usually vocal groups of advisers both pro and con.

If you go back to July and August 1945 and put yourself in the place of troops en route to invade Japan, you would probably thank Truman for ending the war and possibly sparing your life.

then why even reply with statement that tries to disqualify it? "No reall appreciation"? That's not what we are talking about. But thanks anyway.

Spin all you want.... and yes, my opinion is based on hindsight.. sue me.

Killing so many civilians is Stupid and to those who might be spiritual, it's sick.

lives.

You sit here so comfortable in 2008, cherry-pick history and fantasize about a different ending to the horrors of WWII.

That's OK but if you were on a ship bound for Japan in August 1945, you would have a different set of memories.

I suggest you really educate yourself about that event by locating a few soldiers, sailors, and marines who were on such ships and ask them how they felt about Truman dropping the bomb.

didnt u just post this the other day as a whole other thread?