08-08-2017, 09:26 AM
(08-07-2017, 10:33 PM)Millhouse Wrote: I dont understand why there are differing opinions on using the a-bombs to end WW2, or people feeling sympathetic towards "innocent" German cities that got leveled.
Would it have been nice for Japan to unconditionally surrender after Okinawa was won? Yes, it would have. Would it have been better to simply have invaded the mainland of Japan, to avoid dropping two a-bombs on the two cities? No. Not at all, even if Russia invaded Japan with us.
The loss of life from conventional means would have been immeasurably worse for the Japanese with far more destruction. Not only that, the amount of American life lost would have been horrific, which ultimately was more important back then and rightfully so. The a-bombs, as destructive as they were, saved far more lives and ruin than what they delivered, and in the process the ultimate goal of the war was achieved. Japan was left with much of it's infrastructure intact while not being occupied by the Soviets as well.
As for Germany, yes innocent is the correct word to use. Look up things like the Dresden bombing. We flattened a historic city with little to no military value killing 25k innocent civilian people. It wasn't the only time we did it, and in reality we did it because we were simply tired of war and didn't care about civilian casualties at that point late in the war.
As for Japan, I still disagree. They were surrendering we simply didn't want to take it. The bombing survey showed they probably would have surrendered by November which is when we planned for the invasion. If we would have been willing to allow the emperor to be cleared of war crimes, which we ended up letting him be anyways, it would have ended without the use of the weapons. Leahy, Nimitz, Halsey, Arnold, LaMay, MacArthuer, basically every important military figure of the time agreed that either Japanese were ready to surrender, or that it was unnecessary to go that far. Hell even Eisenhower later said that the bombs were unnecessary, a guy who knows the struggles of being a president and a military leader.
War sucks I get it, but we as a country have crossed the line many times in history but have always been in the fortunate position of getting to write our own narrative or cover up for the most part what we did.
