Was Hiroshima an act of terrorism?

Rana said:
Yes, Japan was never informed that the US had a new weapon when the warned Japan of total destruction.

The Emporer was planning to surrender, he only asked for immunity for the royal family and that they have the right to rule to maintain the rule of law in Japan.
Click to expand...


lies
 
evince said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/japan_no_surrender_01.shtml






The end of hostilities

When Emperor Hirohito made his first ever broadcast to the Japanese people on 15 August 1945, and enjoined his subjects 'to endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable', he brought to an end a state of war - both declared and undeclared - that had wracked his country for 14 years.

He never spoke explicitly about 'surrender' or 'defeat', but simply remarked that the war 'did not turn in Japan's favour'. It was a classic piece of understatement. Nearly three million Japanese were dead, many more wounded or seriously ill, and the country lay in ruins.

To most Japanese - not to mention those who had suffered at their hands during the war - the end of hostilities came as blessed relief. Yet not everybody was to lay down their arms. Tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers remained in China, either caught in no-man's land between the Communists and Nationalists or fighting for one side or the other.

Other, smaller groups continued fighting on Guadalcanal, Peleliu and in various parts of the Philippines right up to 1948. But the most extraordinary story belongs to Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who continued fighting on the Philippine island of Lubang until 9 March 1974 - nearly 29 years after the end of the war.






Lieutenant Onoda... doggedly refused to lay down his arms...



Two years earlier, another Japanese soldier, Corporal Shoichi Yokoi, had been found fishing in the Talofofo River on Guam. Yokoi still had his Imperial Army issue rifle, but he had stopped fighting many years before. When questioned by the local police, he admitted he knew the war had been over for 20 years. He had simply been too frightened to give himself up.

Lieutenant Onoda, by contrast, doggedly refused to lay down his arms until he received formal orders to surrender. He was the sole survivor of a small band that had sporadically attacked the local population. Although one of them surrendered in 1950 after becoming separated from the others, Onoda's two remaining companions died in gun battles with local forces - one in 1954, the other in 1972.

Top


A worthy enemy?

Photograph showing two Japanese soldiers After early attempts to flush them out had failed, humanitarian missions were sent to Lubang to try to persuade Lieutenant Onoda and his companions that the war really was over, but they would have none of it. Even today, Hiroo Onoda insists they believed the missions were enemy tricks designed to lower their guard. As a soldier, he knew it was his duty to obey orders; and without any orders to the contrary, he had to keep on fighting.

To survive in the jungle of Lubang, he had kept virtually constantly on the move, living off the land, and shooting cattle for meat. Onoda's grim determination personifies one of the most enduring images of Japanese soldiers during the war - that Japanese fighting men did not surrender, even in the face of insuperable odds.






...Japanese fighting men did not surrender, even in the face of insuperable odds.



Before hostilities with the Allies broke out, most British and American military experts held a completely different view, regarding the Japanese army with deep contempt. In early 1941, General Robert Brooke-Popham, Commander-in-Chief of British forces in the Far East, reported that one of his battalion commanders had lamented, 'Don't you think (our men) are worthy of some better enemy than the Japanese?'

This gross underestimation can in part be explained by the fact that Japan had become interminably bogged down by its undeclared war against China since 1931. Since Japan was having such difficulties in China, the reasoning went, its armed forces would be no match for the British.

The speed and ease with which the Japanese sank the British warships, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, off Singapore just two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor - followed by the humiliating capture of Singapore and Hong Kong - transformed their image overnight. From figures of derision, they were turned into supermen - an image that was to endure and harden as the intensity and savagery of fighting increased.
Click to expand...

FACTS
 
Mott the Hoople said:
OK, why the distinction between the use of the atomic bomb and the use of fire bombing, developed by the Brits, and which killed more people in Dresdan and Hamburg than were killed by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan? Particularly Dresdan which served no strategic or tactical military purpose other than to terrorize the German population.

You end up going back to my point that these actions are never, ever justified on moral or ethical grounds.

The greatest military general of 19th century summed it up correctly. War is hell.
Click to expand...

Yes Dresden was indeed controversial, so much so that Churchill did his best to disown Bomber Command after the war, that certainly wasn't his finest hour. Now as to figures, between 18-25,000 died there, contrast that against the numbers of dead from both nuclear weapons and it is around 200,000, a little research goes a long way!! There is of course an extremely important difference as it ushered in the Cold War arms race.

http://www.spiegel.de/international...-died-in-the-bombing-of-dresden-a-581992.html
 
evince said:
why are you trying to trash Truman with fucking lies
Click to expand...

Nobody warned the Japanese about nuclear weapons. One, because Truman was scared that the Japanese would move prisoners of war near likely targets and two, the uranium bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima hadn't even been tested unlike the plutonium bomb. What would the reaction be if the United States warned of a horrible new weapon, only to have it prove a dud, with the wreckage of the weapon itself now in Japanese hands?
 
CFM said:
Actually his views, like mine on this issue, are lodged in the mindset that in war you fight to WIN.

A Paleshitstain rock thrower talking about killing civilians. Why don't you tell that shit to your kind that strap bombs to themselves and run into a building where there are civilians.
Click to expand...

You trumpet like an armchair warrior- a coward and a moron. Stick to wanking.
 
Thing1 said:
Sorry - that's a total crock of shit.

War is war. It's hell, but there are rules. One of those rules is that you do not deliberately target innocent civilians.

Targeting innocent civilians? That's terrorism. That's what the people who we call "terrorists" do.
Click to expand...

Then what do you call putting military instillations and targets, within civilian areas?
 
USFREEDOM911 said:
Then what do you call putting military instillations and targets, within civilian areas?
Click to expand...

I think that's immoral, as well.

Civilians should be kept out of warfare. I don't think there is a way to avoid civilian casualties in most wars - but deliberately targeting civilians is a completely different story.
 
Thing1 said:
No mischief.

Civilians get killled in pretty much every war. To intentionally target them is a completely different story.

Are you suggesting that this should be an acceptable practice in war? That anything goes, as long as it leads to a "win"? You'd be okay w/ any kind of practice - torture, targeting civilians, chemical weapons?

And you're different from the average terrorist...how again?

Btw - terrorists have causes too. They have the same kind of excuses that you do.
Click to expand...

I'm not suggesting anything except that I'm a realist who accepts the prospect innocent people dying amongst the bad guys any time you fight a war.

Oops, there's that term: 'bad guys'. What makes Hiroshima different from 9/11 is our objective was to end a war; in contrast, 9/11 happened because radical Islamists hold some really nasty ideas. One of which is to establish a global caliphate. I wasn't here at the time, but I recall getting mocked and derided for making the claim until ISIS came along.

'Terrorism' is a tactic. If you insist on throwing all 'terrorism' into the same basket, the only way to judge whether it's 'good terrorism' or 'bad terrorism' to explore their respective underlying objectives.

Part of the reason these lame equivocations are attempted is because Bush named our fight against radical Islam The War on Terror. In response to 9/11, Bush declared war on a tactic, which is an absurdity.

Not to be outdone in the absurdity department [not sure what it is with liberals and absurdities but they rock it lol], Obama comes along and gives us 'overseas contingency operations' with the added measure of never, ever, uttering the term radical Islam. Idk, maybe he thinks OBL will come back from the dead if he says 'radical Islam' three times lol.

Meanwhile, the 'terrorists' think we are idiots. That argument isn't without some merit.
 
Rana said:
Yes, Japan was never informed that the US had a new weapon when the warned Japan of total destruction.

The Emporer was planning to surrender, he only asked for immunity for the royal family and that they have the right to rule to maintain the rule of law in Japan.
Click to expand...

Regardless of your theory, explain how that is terrorism.
 
mogur said:
And we were terrorists when Britain tried to fight a 'proper' war with us. But we decided that wearing blue uniforms and standing in line didn't get us very far. So we wore normal clothing and ambushed the British whenever we could. It worked. But it certainly would be called 'terrorism' by anyone with more than three brain cells. Didn't matter to us. We won.

Now, consider the Japanese war effort. It was do or die. We wanted to demoralize them. Killing them softly didn't work. Slaughtering them wholesale did work. It WAS war. But it was also terrorism. Whether it was justified doesn't affect the fact that it was terrorism.
Click to expand...

That makes no sense. War is not terrorism by the modern definition and I don't believe any definition.
 
Thing1 said:
This is the correct answer.

We deliberately targeted civilians in a war. Of course it was terrorism.
Click to expand...

Did Japan and Germany engage in terrorism? In what definition is deliberately targeting civilians in war mean it must be terrorism? That is usually considered war crimes.
 
Thing1 said:
I think that's immoral, as well.

Civilians should be kept out of warfare. I don't think there is a way to avoid civilian casualties in most wars - but deliberately targeting civilians is a completely different story.
Click to expand...

Let's bear in mind- at the very forefront of our minds- that war is illegal. It's very easy to be lulled into the belief that war is an acceptable course of action.
 
Thing1 said:
If you don't think Hiroshima was terrorism, you don't know what the word terrorism means. It was exactly that - designed to cause terror. It doesn't matter what the ultimate goal was.
Click to expand...

I find it fascinating how you're not saying Germany or Japan engaged in terrorism. You seem to go out of your way to apologize for America's enemies.
 
Thing1 said:
I actually got a little queasy reading that.

I mean, really - if there's a hell. The 1st thing I thought of was Dylan's "Masters of War" (that song is so spot on about guys like this, & the architects of Vietnam & Iraq).
Click to expand...

They were so cold-blooded and they absolutely meant to take out citizens. If there's a hell I hope these people are front and center in it.

"...aircrews should “endeavor to place … [the] gadget in [the] center of selected city.” They were quite explicit about this: The plane should target the heart of a major city. One reason was that the aircraft had to release the bomb from a great height—some 30,000 feet—to escape the shock wave and avoid the radioactive cloud; that limited the target to large urban areas easily visible from the air. Captain William “Deak” Parsons, associate director of Los Alamos’s Ordnance Division, gave another reason to drop the bomb on a city center: “The human and material destruction would be obvious.”
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top