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Little Boy And Fat Man


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The US Department of Defense was (and still is) very big on contingency planning.

 

Contingency plan Rainbow 5 was "How do you fight simultaneous wars in Europe and the Pacific?" (It may have been specifically with Germany and Japan, I don't recall.) It called for fighting a holding action in the Pacific while you win the war in Europe, and then give the Pacific your undivided attention.

 

And WHADDAYA KNOW, it worked!

 

I may have already mentioned this. I was for a while reading some of the popular literature of the time. It made it quite clear that, by early to mid-1941, the US was planning on entering World War II, in Europe. Preparations and training were WELL underway by about June of 1941. It may just be an accident of history that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and set the date. I don't know.

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FDR had assigned US Navy and Coast Guard ships to guard convoys to the UK long before the US actually "entered" the war. These ships engaged in anti-submarine warfare, including attacking U-boats, in what was hardly neutral behaviour. Also, it was a US Navy seaplane based in England that located the pocket battleship Bismark back in August 1940 and notified the Royal Navy of her location. This is without mentioning the Lend Lease agreement that saw the US Navy turn over 50 World War I era destroyers to the RN for convoy use. Americans may have been neutral before 7 December 1941, but the US government wasn't.

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Like my father said when we were at the Peace museum in Hiroshima...they never should have started it! He was in WWII, medals

from Normandy, etc.

 

Ask a prisoner of war who spent time with the Japanese if the bombs should have been dropped...hell ya!!!

 

OK - we have a very famous Aussie, Japanese prisoner of war Tom Uren, who not only worked the Burma Thai death railway for three years, also got sent to Japan where he was 60kms from Nagasaki, and saw the sky change colour from the bomb.

 

Mr Uren was captured by the Japanese in Timor in 1942 and after nine months in Koepang, a stint in Java and then a brief period in Singapore he was sent north to build the railway.

He bore witness to the brutality and disease that killed 2650 of the 13,000 Australians who worked in the project. He suffered from amoebic dysentery.

After the railway was built he was shipped to Japan to work in a copper smelting plant. He suffered malnutrition, contracted the tropical disease beriberi and, in August 1945, witnessed the atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki,

He had spent three years as a prisoner of the Japanese, forced to work on the Burma-Thai death railway before being shipped to Japan to labour in copper and lead smelters. He was in a camp at Omura, about 60 kilometres from Nagasaki, when the sky discoloured.

â€As I got to understand nuclear war and the nuclear industry I realised the dropping of those bombs on Japan was a crime against humanity,†he says.

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In the Nuremburg trials, high ranking Germans were prosecuted for war crimes, most of them were convicted and executed. That is because the allies won and could do it. If the Japanese could have miraculously turned things around and won the war, impossible I know, then they would have conducted their own trials were the likes of Truman and Bill Parsons. They would have been as justified to do that as the allies thought they were justified in conducting the Nuremburg trials. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime just as much as the German attempted extermination of the Jews was.

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So, would the bombing of Dresden, which killed more people than either atomic bomb, be considered a war crime by the U.S. and British governments? Or is turnabout fair play, since Hitler bombed London?

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So, would the bombing of Dresden, which killed more people than either atomic bomb, be considered a war crime by the U.S. and British governments? Or is turnabout fair play, since Hitler bombed London?

 

WTF are you on about

 

Dresden 25,000 Casualties Maximum

UK Civilians of Blitzkreig 67,000 Casualties

Nagasaki 60-80,000 Casualties

Hiroshima 90-160,000 Casualties

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I just spent 15 minutes looking at 10 sites that deal with the number of people that died at Dresden. It is a fairly large gap; between 18,000 and 500,000. Most put the range from 35,000 to 135,000. One, a recent study of historians, gives the figure of 18,000 to 35,000. No one knows, just like no one knows an accurate number for the 2 atomic bombs. If, as in the historian's study, Hitler vastly inflated the number of dead to bring moral outrage against the allies, the Japanese government could have done the same. Anyway, the point of my post was not to get into a pissing match over exact figures. In both instances, many thousands died. In the case of the 2 atomic bombs, the U.S. was using a weapon many times more powerful than any weapon before it. It was used to demonstrate to the Japanese government that there was now no longer any reason to carry on the war. It was also calculated that as many as 1,000,000 allied soldiers could die in an all out invasion of Japan. Dresden was carried out to destroy key installations and to demoralize the German people. The bombs used were conventional but overwhelming. The question that I posed was; how different was the bombing of Dresden versus the dropping of the two atomic bombs? Should both acts be considered "war crimes," neither act or one act over the other?

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