Would completly squash their point.
No, I’m not talking about the “Fair Tax” again, I’m talking about ‘Captain Future’, one of inmates at the Kos Kids Animal Farm and Petting Zoo.
Here, Captain Future equates the bombing done by US and Britain’s WWII air corps over Germany with the random firing of rockets by Hezbollah.
He also uses this HuffPo post by Norman Soloman to claim that the dropping of the first nuclear bomb over Hiroshima was an American terrorist act and that then President, Harry S. Truman, lied about the circumstances in pick Hiroshima as a target.
Actually, the U.S. government went out of its way to select Japanese cities of sufficient size to showcase the extent of the A-bomb’s deadly power — in Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and in Nagasaki on Aug. 9. As a result of those two bombings, hundreds of thousands of civilians died, immediately or eventually. If Truman’s conscience had been clear, it’s doubtful he would have felt compelled to engage in such a basic distortion at the dawn of the nuclear era.
In the real world, the word “showcase” means “test” and “deadly power” means “destruction radius”.
Captain Future continues:
In fact, Hiroshima had no military bases, and had not been bombed before–one of the principal reasons it was chosen for the A-bomb, so its destructive power would be more obvious to the Japanese and clearer for Americans studying those effects. It was considered a “safe city” to the extent that some parents in California who were forced into internment camps, sent their children to the safety of Hiroshima. So the victims of the U.S. atomic bomb likely included American children.
First off, I have never seen a claim that any American of Japanese descent sent their child back to Hiroshima after war was declared. When a nation is pissed off enough to lock up an entire community based on their ancestry, the safe bet is not to send your children back to the country that attacked them.
Secondly, anyone who knows even the smallest bit of history of the factors used to select the targets for our attempt to end WWII knows that Hiroshima was a heavly fortified and near constant port of supply for both the Japanese Army and Navy until the bomb was dropped.
A student of WWII history also knows that we purposely held off bombing Hiroshima in order to 1. Keep pre-Little Boy damage to a minimum, and 2. To make sure they weren’t spooked everytime they saw a B-29 fly over.
But then again, these are members of “The Reality Based Community” and I’m sure that they have “Reality Based Historical Facts” that make them feel superior, even though those facts resemble nothing close to the truth.
One of the other points I’ve seen brought up on the Democratic Underground’s “Why We think the A-Bomb was a Bad Idea” is that by bombing Nagasaki, it single-handedly wiped out a center of Japanese Christianity, something which the Japanese emperors and shogun hadn’t been able to completely do for over 400 years.
While true that Nagasaki was home to a Christian church, Japanese Christianity was not wiped out, and Christianity can still be found in Japan to this day.
“A student of WWII history also knows that we purposely held off bombing Hiroshima in order to 1. Keep pre-Little Boy damage to a minimum, and 2. To make sure they weren’t spooked everytime they saw a B-29 fly over.”
I hope you don’t mind if I add a little to that…
“1. Keep pre-Little Boy damage to a minimum” – so that there could be an accurate Bomb Damage Assesment (BDA) when the A-Bomb was used against an actual city target as opposed to just using a mock-up of buildings and vehicles out in the desert. We knew that the bomb could knock buildings flat, but had no way of predicting the damage done to the underground water system. (over 17k breaks in the water mains nullified fire fighting attempts in Hiroshima.)
“2. To make sure they weren’t spooked everytime they saw a B-29 fly over.” – We had one B-29 weather plane fly over Hiroshima every day so the citizens would not get spooked when a single -29 flew overhead. The air raid sirens would sound, but like Pavlov’s dogs, the citizens were conditioned to not really give it a second thought by 06 Aug so they didn’t “duck and cover” and we got a good idea what kind of casualties the bomb could cause.
And to make this even more drawn out, here’s a snippet from my blog about the atomic bombings of Japan taken from a WWII timeline found on “The Great Raid” DVD…
“July 26 1945 – At a conference in Potsdam, Germany, the Big Three – President Harry Truman, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Premier Josef Stalin – issue an ultimatum to Japan: Surrender unconditionally or face total destruction.
Aug 3 1945 – High-flying B-29 Superfortresses drop 750,000 leaflets on Hiroshima, warning the citizens to depart because the city will be wiped out if Japan fails to surrender. American propaganda, the civilians felt.
(“Well howdy yourself, White House Operator… This is Dubya, can you connect me to that crazy towel-head sumbitch in Tehran?? Thanks.”)
Aug 6 1945 – At 0815 Yoshitake Mimura, a professor at Hiroshima Bunri University, tells 500 Japanese Army officers that Japanese scientists are developing a revolutionary new weapon called an atomic bomb. A few minutes later, there is the sound of a B-29 Superfortress high in the sky. A brilliant, pinkish light bursts over Hiroshima and the city is virtually destroyed.
(Sounds like a REAL bad case of day late, dollar short and being in the WAY wrong place at the WORST time…)
Aug 7 1945 – Superfortresses scatter 16 million leaflets over Japanese cities, warning that a second bomb would be used if the Emperor did not surrender.
Aug 9 1945 – At 0901 a giant ball of fire, belching forth enormous white smoke rings, rises from the industrial city of Nagasaki. Most of the city is incinerated.”
To me it seems like dropping millions of leaflets warning your enemy of their impending doom isn’t terrorism, but I could be wrong. Israel’s doing it, and apparently they are the biggest terrorists in the Mid-East today.
Analogkid;
The far Left have their own version of history, as recited by Howard Zinn in The People’s History of the United States This waste of paper tells them that the U.S.- and the West in general- oppresses the individual, and doesn’t do enough for the ‘greater good’ of ‘the people’.
Socialist BS.
I would say that to consider the unrestricted air war over Germany to be a “terrorist act” is too shallow a word, bombing Dresden was horrific and atrocious, likewise V-1s and V-2s hitting London may be more comparable, but WWII was brimming with the most horrific atrocities committed against civilians and the infrastructures’ of the countries involved. British and Canadians routinely executed prisoners, the SS butchered whole Czech and Hungarian towns, the Soviets tossed several generations worth of people into the gulags, the US firebombed Dresden into ash and many countries sat complacently as pogroms were acted against Jews (just a few examples).
The Allied bombing of Dresden was not random. The German annihilation of “untermensch” was not random. The Soviets Gulags were not random, but all of these were specifically targeted against civilians. I am not comparing casualties, as obviously the Holocaust outnumbers Dresden’s destruction and the Soviet Gulags many times more than both, but rather the nature of the target.
We terrorize the bad guys with the aid of Dynamic Entry, we fill civilians with horror when we blow up their weapons filled houses, and we use, have used and will continue to use terror as a weapon. Artillery is terrifying, and frequently sails into another target, but we don’t fill houses with civilians and then wait for it to be hit. Modern doctrine does not dictate that we firebomb cities (I could do without ‘Frisco), but instead our terror is more powerful than any bomb. We have modernized. We no longer need to destroy a whole city, we do not need to exterminate a population, we can end a war with a push of a button, but instead we offer them another option, peace. Not Pax Americana, but life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (beer). It is not convert or die, it is “knock it off, you spoiled child and eat your green beans.†I guess some people still fear that, maybe they would prefer napalm.