He most certainly was not. His actions, while horrific, ended a war that would have certainly resulted in even thousands more dying than did by dropping the bomb.
Just a terrible lie. Read Ralph Raico.
I read it. It uses a handful of cherry picked quotes to support the assertion. It is flawed on so many fronts that it is practically comedy. Or it would be if it wasn't so sad.
If you go looking at History to learn and to understand everything about it you possibly can, you're starting in the right frame of mind. If you go searching for proof for a previously held belief, then you're doing a lot of work to justify your ideals instead of learning. You aren't learning, you're proving an assertion.
Ralph does not examine the question from the end of the 1800's like he should. Science Fiction was already examining the issue of air controlling the ground when the First World War starts. HG Wells wrote about an attack on New York City that drove America to it's knees in 1908. He wasn't alone. He wasn't the only one imagining and thinking of this kind of stuff. Jules Verne also wrote books about the subject in the 1880's.
You have to start much much earlier than 1945, or even 1944 to really understand the issue. You have to examine the period between World Wars, and you have to actually begin far before the First World War, when gas lanterns were the awesome invention that would replace candles.
That is when this all begins. The technology, the tactics, and strategies develop from that point.
With a few notable exceptions the military we will fight the war with in the 1940's is either developed, or in development in the late 1930's. The idea of strategic bombing, bombing targets that would harm enemy war efforts was in development. Close Air Support was proven by the Germans in Spain during the Civil War. That was the place where Blitzkreig was perfected.
There is so much more to consider.
No. Ralph logically blows up Truman's many changing reasons for his criminal act. What he did was no different from what the Nazis did with their extermination camps. Many leading Nazis were hung for their crimes.
Truth is hard for some Americans to accept. Man up.
Actually no. Ralph cherry picks a handful of quotes to justify the conclusion he wants. That isn't history. That is revisionist history. That is not truth.
It can be done. It was done with the battle of midway in the book Shattered Sword. But it was done with an intensive study of the totality of documents from the era. That effort shows what really led to the Japanese defeat at Midway.
Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway
I love truth. I call myself a truth whore, i will take it from anyone.
I don't think you understand history. Ralph quotes Truman and others you were in the leadership at the time. That is history. He also states facts such as the two cities were not military bases, like Pearl Harbor was.
Ralph is an extremely intelligent man with many accomplishments. A PhD. What are your credentials?
A PhD does not make you right. For example, has Ralph addressed the simple fact that any place where roads or rail converged was considered a military target and had been by this time in the war for six years? That's the justification for the bombing of every single city. They were military communications junctures. In other words, the roads and rails converged. Or are you and he suggesting that there were no roads in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki?
Additionally Hiroshima had the headquarters for the 2nd Army.
Avalon Project - The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
So you have lines of communication, that's what roads and rail and sea ways are called to the military, and military headquarters. Unless Yale University is full of shit that is.
That's the problem with Ralph's analysis. You have to get rid of literally decades of work by literally tens of thousands of researchers to join with him. It's like the fools who claim that Roosevelt wanted the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor as an excuse to get into the war. It doesn't make any sense. If the Japanese had attacked a prepared Pearl Harbor, and been defeated the war would have still been on. Or that Kimmel and Short were idiots chosen to be the fall guys, I've read that. It was ludicrous. Both of them had exceptional records, and the evidence clearly shows that they were chosen because they both had long careers of successful assignments.
I've heard most of this nonsense before, and it flies in the face of all the evidence, and all the history. Johnathan Parshel did this with both the battles of Guadalcanal, and the Battle of Midway. In the Midway book he showed that the accepted view, that the bombers hit the Japanese carriers five minutes before they would have launched their own attack against the Americans is nonsense. He had to dive into the procedure manuals, construction records for the Japanese ships, Standard Operating Procedure manuals, and he was able to show it did not happen that way.
I'll give you a hint. It took an hour to move the airplanes from the hanger deck to the flight deck to prepare them for launch. While these planes are on the flight deck, with a straight deck carrier, you can't land anything. So the fighters that were recorded as landing to be rearmed, and refueled and sent back aloft would have caused a massive crash and destruction as they landed into parked aircraft. Carriers in that era could launch aircraft, or recover aircraft. They could not do both at once.
The movie Battle of Midway has the pilot claiming that bombs were on the decks. Plainly visible in other words. Again, virtually impossible. The elevators for the munitions did not rise to the carrier flight decks, only as far as the hanger decks. And while the planes were being rearmed, they would have prevented the staging and launching of fighters to fight the waves of American planes. So rearming them on the deck was not happening.
Why did the Japanese Carriers go up so fast? In short, Damage Control policy and procedures.
All of this was referenced and demonstrated and any reader who doubted the conclusion could go to the archives and see for themselves. Yes, it changes the way we view an event decades later, but it does so by questioning every assumption, and belief. It just doesn't discount them, the author went and checked the facts.
Ralph writing a handful of quotes is absolutely just revisionist history. There was no prohibition against atomic weapons, because they did not exist before. There were no international agreements on how airplanes would be used. We had not the time as a people to really consider it.
Conflicting estimates that claim this many casualties, or that man, is normal. Everyone has an opinion, and reasons for it. But make no mistake, the Japanese were not ready to surrender. The Emporer was nearly killed when he did make the decision thanks to a Coup Attempt.
Oh, they would never do that to their beloved emporer right? Guess what. Hirohito's father was locked in his chambers for his own protection after he rolled a parchment into a cylinder and peered through it like he was a pirate using a telescope. From then on all Imperial Scripts, that is to say orders, were taken to the chambers by the trusted aides, and then brought back out signed and sealed.
Hirohito knew this, saw it, and knew if he did not act exactly the way the military wanted, he would likely be subjected to the same fate, for his own protection.
Do you think these actions were faked? Even after the first bomb, the Japanese Military was not ready to surrender. It took Hirohito to personally order it, clearly, not just a suggestion or vague desire. That only took place after the second bomb. Finally the war he didn't want, was over. The chosen people were defeated.
You can't just cherry pick a few quotes and say that the rest of the information, the rest of the evidence does not matter. That's what Ralph is doing. It's history, the picture is never going to line up perfectly, but you can get it pretty clear. Ralph is ignoring everything, and trying to prove the Picture was faked. He needs a lot more than a few quotes, and he doesn't have it.
