The ending of World War Two.

[RetiredGySgt]

Since this comes up every so many months with an ignorant claim that we did not need to drop atomic Bombs on Japan, that the Japanese were trying to surrender and that they were on their last legs and wanted nothing other then to surrender. I will provide you all with some SOURCE documents.

These documents show that A) the Japanese did not actually offer a reasonable or acceptable proposal to the Soviets in hopes they would broker a peace. In fact the documents show that Japan's idea of surrender was to keep everything they had, have their original Islands captured returned to them, give up nothing in China and have a "surrender" occur where the allies simply agreed to stop attacking them. No disarmament , no occupation, no lose of territory, no disbanding their military and absolutely no foreigners allowed in Japan.

B) That Japan was not ready to surrender before either bomb was dropped and in fact after the first were still not ready to surrender. The Army which controlled the Government refused to even consider a surrender. The so called "peace group" had to appeal directly to the Emperor and even he was not willing to order a surrender after one bomb. It took 2 and then it took the direct intervention of the Emperor to over rule the Army in the Government. Followed by an attempted Coup to stop the Emperor's address to the nation and the delivery of the agreement to surrender.

C) that an invasion would have been less costly then the dropping of the two bombs. It was estimated that 1 million allied troops would be wounded or killed in an Invasion of just one main Island. On the Japanese side the plan was to arm the population with bamboo spears and human wave rush the landing beaches. If carried out, and they were working on doing just that, MILLIONS of Japanese would have died. Millions more would have committed suicide rather then be captured. The evidence of this is on Saipan and Okinawa, where the Japanese civilian population killed itself in large numbers rather then be captured. On Okinawa Japanese soldiers crowded Okinawa civilians into caves and enclosed spaces and killed them with themselves with grenades. ( Okinawan's are not Japanese)

The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II: A Collection of Primary Sources

 

[JW Frogen]

Some times you have to be cruel to be kind.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

Some times you have to be cruel to be kind.

Less people died in the 2 atomic bomb blasts then in the firebombing of Tokyo.

 

[strollingbones]

fighting ignorant claims before they are made......

 

[JW Frogen]

Some times you have to be cruel to be kind.

Less people died in the 2 atomic bomb blasts then in the firebombing of Tokyo.

I was a Seabee for a time, and even then the Marines could not figure out I was on their side.

 

[strollingbones]

dresdan

 

[namvet]

dresdan

= brits

 

[JakeStarkey]

The data supports Retired's conclusion. The materials released in the last five years reveal that the landings in Japan were going to be near-run things. And since the Japanese were not giving any viable signals of surrender, and since portions of the Japanese military tried to stop the Emperor's speech to the Japanese population to prepare to "bear the unbearable", then, yes, the droppings of those horrors were the morally and militarily correct actions.

 

[namvet]

that broadcast almost didn't get aired. the night before Army hot heads, refusing to give up raided the palace, murdered the commander of the Imperial Guards Division, surrounded the palace, disarmed its police, and seized technicians from the Nippon Broadcasting Company--but not the precious recordings, which were concealed in an office used by a lady-in-waiting to the empress. the lights were off because of an air raid. i think it was the last raid of the war.

 

[eagleseven]

Your second point, the fact that it took TWO bombs for the Japanese to surrender, reveals the Japanese resolve and the lunacy of people like Pat Buchanan and Noam Chomsky.

 

[JW Frogen]

Switzerland owes one hell of a refund.

 

[mightypeon]

That still leaves the point:
Wont you agree that the Japanese "WAR BANZAAAAI" group would be a bit diminished if the oversized Sledge Hammer of the Red army crushed down on Manchuria?
It was totally clear that the Soviet attack was comming, why not wait for that first?
Mind you, the Soviets took out around 1 Million Japanese Soldiers in a matter of 2 (and lonly lost about 30K troops, a casulty ration around 1:30) weeks, a number that greatly exceeds the effective loss of life suffered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (besides, loosing a million Soldiers will, on average, hurt a nation more than loosing a million civilians).

The bombs were not dropped to get the Japanese to surrender, they were dropped to make them surrender to the right nation. The US obviously wished to prevent the USSR from pulling a D-Day in Japan and getting more of the spoils than it payed for in blood.

 

[editec]

Feeling queasy about how terribly we treated the Japs in oder to end their empire in WWII?

Read this:

Eyewitness accounts of Westerners and Chinese present at Nanking in the weeks after the fall of the city state that over the course of six weeks following the fall of Nanking, Japanese troops engaged in rape, murder, theft, arson, and other war crimes. Some of these accounts came from foreigners who opted to stay behind in order to protect Chinese civilians from harm, including the diaries of German John Rabe and American Minnie Vautrin. Other accounts include first-person testimonies of the Nanking Massacre survivors, eyewitness reports of journalists (both Western and Japanese), as well as the field diaries of military personnel. An American missionary, John Magee, stayed behind to provide a 16 mm film documentary and first-hand photographs of the Nanking Massacre.
A group of foreign expatriates headed by John Rabe had formed the 15-man International Committee on November 22 and mapped out the Nanking Safety Zone in order to safeguard civilians in the city, where the population numbered from 200,000 to 250,000. Rabe and American missionary Lewis S. C. Smythe, secretary of the International Committee and a professor of sociology at the University of Nanking, recorded the actions of the Japanese troops and filed complaints to the Japanese embassy.

[edit] Rape


Woman killed by Japanese army in Nanking[34]


The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that 20,000 women were raped, including infants and the elderly.[35] A large portion of these rapes were systematized in a process where soldiers would search door-to-door for young girls, with many women taken captive and gang raped.[36] The women were often killed immediately after the rape, often through explicit mutilation[37] or by stabbing a bayonet, long stick of bamboo[38], or other objects into the vagina.
On 19 December 1937, Reverend James M. McCallum wrote in his diary :

"I know not where to end. Never I have heard or read such brutality. Rape! Rape! Rape! We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night, and many by day. In case of resistance or anything that seems like disapproval, there is a bayonet stab or a bullet... People are hysterical... Women are being carried off every morning, afternoon and evening. The whole Japanese army seems to be free to go and come as it pleases, and to do whatever it pleases." [39]
​

On March 7, 1938, Robert O. Wilson, a surgeon at the American-administered University Hospital in the Safety Zone, wrote in a letter to his family, "a conservative estimate of people slaughtered in cold blood is somewhere about 100,000, including of course thousands of soldiers that had thrown down their arms".[40]
Here are two excerpts from his letters of 15 and 18 December 1937 to his family :

"The slaughter of civilians is appalling. I could go on for pages telling of cases of rape and brutality almost beyond belief. Two bayoneted corpses are the only survivors of seven street cleaners who were sitting in their headquarters when Japanese soldiers came in without warning or reason and killed five of their number and wounded the two that found their way to the hospital."
​

"Let me recount some instances occurring in the last two days. Last night the house of one of the Chinese staff members of the university was broken into and two of the women, his relatives, were raped. Two girls, about 16, were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. In the University Middle School where there are 8,000 people the Japs came in ten times last night, over the wall, stole food, clothing, and raped until they were satisfied. They bayoneted one little boy of eight who have [sic] five bayonet wounds including one that penetrated his stomach, a portion of omentum was outside the abdomen. I think he will live."[41]
​

In his diary kept during the aggression to the city and its occupation by the Imperial Japanese Army, the leader of the Safety Zone, John Rabe, wrote many comments about Japanese atrocities. For the 17th December:

"Two Japanese soldiers have climbed over the garden wall and are about to break into our house. When I appear they give the excuse that they saw two Chinese soldiers climb over the wall. When I show them my party badge, they return the same way. In one of the houses in the narrow street behind my garden wall, a woman was raped, and then wounded in the neck with a bayonet. I managed to get an ambulance so we can take her to Kulou Hospital. (...) Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped, about 100 girls at Ginling College Girls alone. You hear nothing but rape. If husbands or brothers intervene, they're shot. What you hear and see on all sides is the brutality and bestiality of the Japanese soldiers."[42]
​

There are also accounts of Japanese troops forcing families to commit acts of incest.[43] Sons were forced to rape their mothers, fathers were forced to rape daughters. One pregnant woman was gang-raped by Japanese soldiers gave birth only a few hours later; although the baby appeared to be physically unharmed (Robert B. Edgerton, Warriors of the Rising Sun). Monks who had declared a life of celibacy were also forced to rape women.

[edit] Murder of civilians

On 13 December 1937, John Rabe wrote in his diary :

"It is not until we tour the city that we learn the extent of destruction. We come across corpses every 100 to 200 yards. The bodies of civilians that I examined had bullet holes in their backs. These people had presumably been fleeing and were shot from behind. The Japanese march through the city in groups of ten to twenty soldiers and loot the shops (...) I watched with my own eyes as they looted the café of our German baker Herr Kiessling. Hempel's hotel was broken into as well, as almost every shop on Chung Shang and Taiping Road." [44]
​

On 10 February 1938, Legation Secretary of the German Embassy, Rosen, wrote to his Foreign Ministry about a film made in December by Reverend John Magee to recommend its purchase. Here is an excerpt from his letter and a description of some of its shots, kept in the Political Archives of the Foreign Ministry in Berlin.

"During the Japanese reign of terror in Nanking - which, by the way, continues to this day to a considerable degree - the Reverend John Magee, a member of the American Episcopal Church Mission who has been here for almost a quarter of a centuty, took motion pictures that eloquently bear witness to the atrocities committed by the Japanese. (....) One will have to wait and see whether the highest officers in the Japanese army succeed, as they have indicated, in stopping the activities of their troops, which continue even today(...)"[45]
​

"On December 13, about 30 soldiers came to a Chinese house at #5 Hsing Lu Koo in the southeastern part of Nanking, and demanded entrance. The door was open by the landlord, a Mohammedan named Ha. They killed him immediately with a revolver and also Mrs. Ha, who knelt before them after Ha's death, begging them not to kill anyone else. Mrs. Ha asked them why they killed her husband and they shot her dead. Mrs. Hsia was dragged out from under a table in the guest hall where she had tried to hide with her 1 year old baby. After being stripped and raped by one or more men, she was bayoneted in the chest, and then had a bottle thrust into her vagina. The baby was killed with a bayonet. Some soldiers then went to the next room, where Mrs. Hsia's parents, aged 76 and 74, and her two daughters aged 16 and 14. They were about to rape the girls when the grandmother tried to protect them. The soldiers killed her with a revolver. The grandfather grasped the body of his wife and was killed. The two girls were then stripped, the elder being raped by 2-3 men, and the younger by 3. The older girl was stabbed afterwards and a cane was rammed in her vagina. The younger girl was bayoneted also but was spared the horrible treatment that had been meted out to her sister and mother. The soldiers then bayoneted another sister of between 7-8, who was also in the room. The last murders in the house were of Ha's two children, aged 4 and 2 respectively. The older was bayoneted and the younger split down through the head with a sword. (...)"[46]
​

Pregnant women were a target of murder, as they would often be bayoneted in the stomach, sometimes after rape. Tang Junshan, survivor and witness to one of the Japanese army’s systematic mass killings, testified:

"The seventh and last person in the first row was a pregnant woman. The soldier thought he might as well rape her before killing her, so he pulled her out of the group to a spot about ten meters away. As he was trying to rape her, the woman resisted fiercely...The soldier abruptly stabbed her in the belly with a bayonet. She gave a final scream as her intestines spilled out. Then the soldier stabbed the fetus, with its umbilical cord clearly visible, and tossed it aside."[47]
​

Thousands were led away and mass-executed in an excavation known as the "Ten-Thousand-Corpse Ditch", a trench measuring about 300m long and 5m wide. Since records were not kept, estimates regarding the number of victims buried in the ditch range from 4,000 to 20,000. However, most scholars and historians consider the number to be more than 12,000 victims.[48]
The Japanese officers turned the act of murder into sport. They would set out to kill a certain number of Chinese before the other. Young men would also be used for bayonet training. Their limbs would be restrained or they would be tied to a post while the Japanese soldiers took turns plunging their bayonets into the victims' bodies.[citation needed]

source

Seriously now, folks.

How many American soldiers do you think we should have wasted to end the regime which did the above to unarmed civilians?

Save your liberal guilt for people who deserve it,

Imperial Japan deserved far worse than it got.

 

[namvet]

[youtube]bAp8bSdE5MQ[/youtube]