Innocent people are going to die in a war. The average life was discounted pretty heavily by the end of WWII, that's just a sad fact, and pretty much nothing was out of bounds. I'm not so sure it would have been better to have lived in Dresden when it was firebombed than Hiroshima when it was nuked.
The raid on Dresden was a two part raid. First the concrete busting bombs took out the water mains and ensured that the fire would burn unchecked until it ran out of fuel. Then the incendiaries were dropped. 25,000 people, mostly women and children were killed. There were industrial facilities on the outskirts of the city. On the third day of the raid these were finally bombed in a much smaller raid than the two previous days. Nothing like having a moustache on your war crime. Can you picture what the War Crimes Tribunal would have looked like if the Allies lost the war?
The point is that no good man orders the intentional killing of thousands of innocent civilians. We did that repeatedly during the war. The Dresden bombing was surpassed by an even worse set of atrocities against Japanese civilians in the latter days of the war. That the German and Japanese and Russians were worse than us is no excuse. The ends don't justify the means and if it ever gets to the point that they do, well then we're kind of giving the terrorists permission to nuke us, assuming they win of course.
Simple answer. There wouldn't have even been a war crimes tribunal if the Allies lost the war because the psychos they would've lost to weren't in the business of hosting fair tribunals. They were more about perverted tyranny and destruction.... ethnic cleansing, etc.
If my ex gf who is Japanese born and raised understands that sometimes the ends do justify the means because it would have been way worse had we not dropped the bombs then I'm sure you can as well.
It's not something I'm proud of. Being the only country to ever drop the A bomb on other people. I don't know enough about the argument that it saved lives. Plus a precedent in terms of after affects of nuclear weapons like fallout etc that could destroy the world. Did you ever read On The Beach?
Hollywood has you by the nuts my friend. Ever wonder why the bad guy is so bad in most Hollywood films and the hero has no faults?
read between the lines bradway. and by "lines" I mean the two fingers next to my middle one congratulations you succeeded in getting a rise out of people. me, at least
There's one on Netflix right now: Hiroshima: BBC History Of WWII Book: Hiroshima by John Hersey. Very popular. Read it years ago. Dresden: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. A novel. Based on the authors experience in WWII. Just a perspective
In high school I was in a debate about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. I took the Pro side and my teammates and I won the debate. The thing that was hysterical was that nobody debating on either side actually thought the bombings were morally justified. We won the debate because we carried an argument that nobody believed. The truth is that by the end of the war Allied leaders and commanders were every bit as savage as their counterparts on the German and Japanese sides. This is understandable from the standpoint of total war. However it's not morally justified and it never has been morally justified. It's the sanitizing of our actions during the war that is so disgusting. We don't have a national holiday for the victims of World War. Why is that? Where is our Manzanar Day to make sure that we never separate out a class of citizens based on race or ethnicity and lock them all up? Where is our Hiroshima Day to make sure that we never use WMD's against a civilian population again? We'll just keep trucking on about special heroic America until the next time we wind up 3 inches deep in the mud and take the easy way out again. BTW, the ultimate answer to the "how could Truman not have dropped the bombs?" question is that we could have easily put a blockade around Japan that forced them to surrender. We'd already won the war, there was no question about that. Japan wasn't coming back from the position they were in in August 1945. Instead we dropped not one but two WMD's on civilian populations and killed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women and children and the elderly. Celebrate that if you want but just remember when the guy does it to you he'll feel the same way you do.
There's been a line of demarcation among the countries of the world when it comes to atomic warfare. Because of the destruction plus an On The Beach scenario of destroying the world. Even (so far) rogue countries like North Korea who have the bomb haven't used it. Or stepped across that line. Only the U.S. has. I can't see celebrating this event.
Are people actually celebrating it? I don't see any parades or gatherings. One idiot from Nebraska posting on a football message board isn't much of a celebration.
If you gave me a word association quiz on Truman I'd have to say: good president, good person. That's been my uneducated opinion on him just basic reading. Except for one big red thumb that always pops up in the conversation: the A bombing of Japan. I've just never been that interested in Truman to read about him. Who knows maybe I'll pick up the David McCullough book on Truman to see what he had to say about this dilemma.
You're just flat out wrong. Read up about the Japanese atrocities during WW2. They were just as bad as the Nazi's with their orchestrated exterminations. It's estimated that they killed 10-14 million people during this era, raping whole cities, chopping POWs dicks off and shoving them down their throats, conducting chemical experiments on prisoners, twice the number of American POW's died in Japanese camps than in German one's, mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians at a time. Saying we were just as bad: GFY!You think we could just embargo them? That's real cute, maybe we could have just asked them nicely to stop instead? We would've invaded, millions of Japanese would have died. Even Japanese people understand this.
