padisha emperor said:
Zhukov : the Japanese armed forces offense USA at Pearl Harbor, and during the war. But the population, the civilian guys in the japanese metropolitan cities, didn't kill US soldiers, they maybe worked in some weapons factory, but it's a normal trhing in war time.
They didn't declare war on the U.S. Army or the U.S. Navy, Japan declared war on the United States of America. In response we declared war not on the Imperial Japanese Navy or the Imperial Japanese Army, we declared war on the Empire of Japan. That included every man, woman, and child who could be considered a citizen of their Empire.
If your nation is intent on perpetrating wars of agression with the sole intent to steal land and enslave or exterminate that land's original inhabitats and you do not leave or stay to put your life on the line to stop your government then you are complicit, what's more you are in the line of fire. I have no pity for those who died because of the Hiroshima bombing. Their government was evil and they did nothing. For them it was not a matter of right or wrong, it was about honor and dishonor. That is a poisonous mentality, and they paid for it with their lives. Some call it karma.
Japanese children were mobilized through the school system to to assist in the construction of war materiel and defensive obstacles for the imminent U.S. invasion they all thought was coming.
It wasn't our fault they were using child labor.
As for denying the Soviets a partition of Japan, let me pose a hypothetical question. Were you to ask all those citizens living in what was to become Eastern Germany shortly before the end of the war if they
a.) would take the chance of being in either of two mystery cities wherein all the people would be killed, but if they lived they would be thereafter be free, or
b.) they, and their children, would have to live under Communist domination for the rest of their lives, which do you think they'd pick?
Yet another way in which we did the Japanese a favor by nuking them.
As for ordering the attack before the ultimatum was issued, as Zoom pointed out it was obviously possible to cancel the bomb's use if they had surrendered, but the real telling thing about that tidbit of information is that Truman wasn't stupid. He knew full well the Japanese were not yet willing to accept an unconditional surrender.
As for Nagasaki, we can discuss that on the Tuesday the 9th.
I don't buy into historical revision. You don't want your cities nuked? Then you had best not be doing things like this:
human experimentation
germ warfare
live dissection of American POWs
nanking
Fact is, if in a fit of righteous anger we had exterminated them all, I wouldn't apologise for that either. Two atomic bombs? They got off easy.
Finally, I smell the waft of hyprocrisy from someone who venerates the memory of the greedy narcissitic war-mongering butcher Napoleon who, in his day, wreaked unprecented death and destruction upon an entire continent for little other purpose than to suck his own ego, and yet who waves his finger disapprovingly at the completely justified atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
