Japan In Wwii

[vee]

A couple of points Im not sure have already been made as I will have to reread the thread more carefully so apologies if someone has already mentioned these things.

1. It took TWO bombs to force Japan to surrender TWO, and there were still high level government officials who didnt want to quit. You would think that after the first one a country that was about to surrender anyway would have been sending out a flurry of "we quit"messages." The night before the emperor`s surrender speech was to air there were several higher ups who broke into the imperial palace trying to find that recording and destroy it. Some people just didnt want to quit even if it meant total destruction of their own country.

2. Russia had just joined the war against Japan. By the US forcing Japan to surrender to them alone it prevented the Communists from getting any part of the country. I think what happened in countries who had to surrender to Russia and live under the iron or bamboo curtain was just as bad if not worse than being nuked.

[toledo_jesus]

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' date='04 April 2010 - 09:59 PM' timestamp='1270429144' post='2086758']
I'm interested as to exactly what part of this post you have a problem with. Last time I picked up my Bible, I recall reading a lot about the narrow path, laying down one's life, and being perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect. Hope I wasn't imagining that stuff.
I'm pretty sure that being a "fanatic" is the general idea.
[/quote]
Last time I picked up my Bible, I read a cool story about a guy killing a war elephant.

I don't have a problem with the post. I just disagree with his assessment of what is practicable in the real world. When you are talking about this particular situation, and start seriously suggesting that soldiers on your side should be sacrificed in opposition to military and strategic good sense, to serve a worthy Christian virtue - my point is that you may be right, but being right and dead counts for precisely nothing in war and failure to realize that is fanaticism. War forces us to make such choices, which is why it's so terrible.
Avoid war where possible, but when you're in it fight to win. If your enemy can exploit a weakness it is [b]his [/b]responsibility to his people to do so.

[Innocent]

[quote name='toledo_jesus' date='05 April 2010 - 05:50 PM' timestamp='1270466413' post='2086885']
War forces us to make such choices, which is why it's so terrible.
Avoid war where possible, but when you're in it fight to win.
[/quote]


Just asking a question to understand your position better: In your opinion, are there any acts that may not be done in a war, (this is probably not a very good example at all, but I mean something like what Batman says in the film [i]Dark Knight[/i]: "I have one rule.") or is anything acceptable in a war, as long as one of the parties in the war has reason to think that it might improve their chances of victory?

Edited April 5, 2010 by Innocent

[toledo_jesus]

[quote name='Innocent' date='05 April 2010 - 08:29 AM' timestamp='1270466965' post='2086886']
Just asking a question to understand your position better: In your opinion, are there any acts that may not be done in a war, (this is probably not a very good example at all, but I mean something like what Batman says in the film [i]Dark Knight[/i]: "I have one rule.") or is anything acceptable in a war, as long as one of the parties in the war has reason to think that it might improve their chances of victory?
[/quote]
No, not everything in war is justifiable. But in this form of war, where every aspect of a civilization is geared towards a war effort, civilian casualties are unavoidable. Regrettable.

[toledo_jesus]

somewhat tangential to the conversation, but I think [url="http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=NGFkNDQ0ZjMxMmVlNTU1OWE1YjUwYWU1ZmQzNWMwYmM="]this video[/url] and its subsequent chapters are fairly interesting.

[dairygirl4u2c]

in my mind, this is a fact discussion. what are the facts taht make it seem surrender was relatively imminent, and what are the facts taht say we needed to drop the bomb to make it all stop, and reduce casualty etc. if a person is willing to change their stance based on the facts... that's awesome. my stance changes with the facts. it seems most here just find facts to support their preconceived notion, and that's almost as sinful as anything ive seen them do in these wars, really. causet hat's what caused so many problems in the world.

sure, if there were indicators that japan or other enemeies might be about to get the nuke, that might be a good reason in my mind to drop the nuke. but i dont see it. and i doubt we could use that as our justification. but this is a pretty strong point per maybe nukes were okay? id need more info. and it's a good poit to help lessen the culpability of those who dropped it.

just because they didnt surrender after th first, doesn't mean we had to drop the second. it's completely unrealiastic to think a political body can decide to surrender in a day or two, the time it took to drop the second. in fact, it took i think a couple weeks after the second for them to surrender. that again illustrates the time it took. so they should have gave it time after the first one, too. and like i siad before, we could have kept dropping them,but we didnt, assuming we had mroe to drop of course, cause we knew to give it time etc, and it was gong too far. my point, that they didnt surrender the second o the first doesnt justify te second.

that theys aid 'it wont be another six months till they surrender' does help the cause that we needed to nuke something, but if they were goig to surrender, i doubt we even needed to invade them and face US casualties, as they had been planning on doing. we should have just set some bombs off to show we could, and bomb some military places.

i dont see anything that says dropping the bombs as occurred was justificable. it's barbaric and unjustifiable. to say justified, really, at least for anyone who's christian or even by any means ethiecal.... really, its irrational.

[Lilllabettt]

The Interim committee was obsessed with calculating how long it would take Japan to surrender.

They were always afraid if they "gave" a little on the unconditional surrender thing, that might give the hardliners in the Imperial government more power, i.e. the ability to say "look the Americans are weakening, we should hold out!" ... and that by doing that, bending a little would actually prolong the war ... so they were constantly agonizing over every little word. The Potsdam Declaration was, they thought, their last ditch attempt to end the war sans nukes. Its either this, or prompt and utter destruction.

They hashed out a way of saying "unconditional surrender" but allowing conditions all the same ... in other words, "unconditional surrender," resulting with a government in line with the "expressed will of the Japanese people" (e.g., if they want the emperor, they can keep him.) They wanted to say it without coming out and saying it, in case being more direct would help the hardliners. The Japanese Foreign Minister, who was a dove, picked up on that, and tried to get the Japanese government to swallow. But all he could do was get them to not denounce it.

Unfortunately, when the Japanese issued a statement in reply to the Potsdam Declaration, they used this verb, "[i]mokusatsu[/i]." It can be translasted "withhold comment." Or it can be translated as "ignore" or "hold in silent contempt." Whichever way the Japanese intended it, the Interim Committee read a translation that had the connotation of silent contempt.

So, after this, they thought: "we gave them the opportunity to surrender with conditions, and they didn't take it. Clearly our inflexibility is not the problem and they are just not ready to let go."

It's sad that something so stupid like a mistranslation of a single word could lead to such a horrible outcome.

[Lilllabettt]

[quote name='dairygirl4u2c' date='05 April 2010 - 10:08 AM' timestamp='1270472884' post='2086914']
just because they didnt surrender after th first, doesn't mean we had to drop the second. it's completely unrealiastic to think a political body can decide to surrender in a day or two, the time it took to drop the second. in fact, it took i think a couple weeks after the second for them to surrender. that again illustrates the time it took. so they should have gave it time after the first one, too. and like i siad before, we could have kept dropping them,but we didnt, assuming we had mroe to drop of course, cause we knew to give it time etc, and it was gong too far. my point, that they didnt surrender the second o the first doesnt justify te second.

that theys aid 'it wont be another six months till they surrender' does help the cause that we needed to nuke something, but if they were goig to surrender, i doubt we even needed to invade them and face US casualties, as they had been planning on doing. we should have just set some bombs off to show we could, and bomb some military places.

[/quote]


The reason they didn't take more time is the casualty/day ratio. Americans had been holding their positions for a number of weeks before the bombs; they didn't move forward. Nevertheless, they kept losing people ... a couple hundred a day. There was tremendous pressure not to let Americans die needlessly, in a war that as already over. Its kind of nauseating, to think "well just give it another day, see what happens tomorrow," when you know overnight another couple hundred of your people are going to die because you decided to wait. The interim Committee was therefore not very patient.

The idea of dropping the bombs on some uninhabited Island occurred to them. A couple of times, its in there, someone suggesting it. But it always got shot down with: we don't have an endless supply of these, it takes months to make them, what if bombing an uninhabited island isn't enough to shock them into surrender ...
which seems kind of paranoid. On the other hand, after the dropping of the first atomic bomb, the hardliners in the Japanese government were giving reports to the Emperor saying that the damage in Hiroshima wasn't that bad, and that it wasn't an atomic bomb, and they should hold on ... which makes it seem like the US was right to be paranoid.

To me it seems like a fairly clear moral question. But in the universe in which they dropped the bomb ... I don't know. They didn't think of it in terms of a moral question. The scientists who worked on the bomb thought they were doing a moral thing. They'd go to these meetings and talk about how this weapon was going to bring world peace and end all war ... which in a way it did (no nuclear power has ever gone to war with another nuclear power ... although mutually assured destruction is unethical it does "work")

I think they should have thought more about the moral question. Maybe if they'd thought about it, they would have come to a different course of action. But they never really asked themselves, would it be wrong to drop this? They were solely concerned with ending the war as soon as possible, always just evaluating what cocktail of pressures would make that happen soonest.

[Nihil Obstat]

[quote name='toledo_jesus' date='05 April 2010 - 06:20 AM' timestamp='1270466413' post='2086885']
Last time I picked up my Bible, I read a cool story about a guy killing a war elephant.

I don't have a problem with the post. I just disagree with his assessment of what is practicable in the real world. When you are talking about this particular situation, and start seriously suggesting that soldiers on your side should be sacrificed in opposition to military and strategic good sense, to serve a worthy Christian virtue - my point is that you may be right, but being right and dead counts for precisely nothing in war and failure to realize that is fanaticism. War forces us to make such choices, which is why it's so terrible.
Avoid war where possible, but when you're in it fight to win. If your enemy can exploit a weakness it is [b]his [/b]responsibility to his people to do so.
[/quote]
So what you're saying is that it's ok to sacrifice morals now and then, if the situation is really really tough?

[CatherineM]

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' date='05 April 2010 - 09:47 AM' timestamp='1270478864' post='2086932']
So what you're saying is that it's ok to sacrifice morals now and then, if the situation is really really tough?
[/quote]
Sometimes there is a difference between what's okay and what's realistic. None of us live in a monastery on some hill side where we have no contact with the outside world, and no worries or concerns. I remember very vividly trying to decide whether to have a civil marriage ceremony, or try to do the moral thing and wait until we could have a church wedding. In the end, I chose the immoral civil ceremony, and lived the longest 6 months of my life living without the Eucharist. Had I chosen to wait, I would have been deported, and may not have been allowed back into the country for at least 5 years. The human in me couldn't bear that. I was grateful for God's mercy in Reconciliation.

This is the problem with looking at the actions of those who lived some time ago. We can't truly know what was in their hearts. We can see things with 20/20 vision. We have more information than they had to make their decisions. We can't know the fear they were in without truly living through it. My father described to me seeing the faces of the men on the deck of the submarine before he sunk it. It had been shooting torpedoes at troop carriers with thousands of men on them. They dropped bombs to force it to surface. When it did, instead of surrendering, they manned their deck guns shooting both at his plane, and at the carriers. He saw their faces right before the explosion that sent them to the bottom. I grew up hearing him scream in the night. He saw the faces of the men he killed every night in his sleep. Sometimes in life we have to make decisions that haunt us. All we can do is hope in God's mercy when our time comes.

[Nihil Obstat]

[quote name='CatherineM' date='05 April 2010 - 12:41 PM' timestamp='1270489315' post='2087025']
Sometimes there is a difference between what's okay and what's realistic. None of us live in a monastery on some hill side where we have no contact with the outside world, and no worries or concerns. I remember very vividly trying to decide whether to have a civil marriage ceremony, or try to do the moral thing and wait until we could have a church wedding. In the end, I chose the immoral civil ceremony, and lived the longest 6 months of my life living without the Eucharist. Had I chosen to wait, I would have been deported, and may not have been allowed back into the country for at least 5 years. The human in me couldn't bear that. I was grateful for God's mercy in Reconciliation.

This is the problem with looking at the actions of those who lived some time ago. We can't truly know what was in their hearts. We can see things with 20/20 vision. We have more information than they had to make their decisions. We can't know the fear they were in without truly living through it. My father described to me seeing the faces of the men on the deck of the submarine before he sunk it. It had been shooting torpedoes at troop carriers with thousands of men on them. They dropped bombs to force it to surface. When it did, instead of surrendering, they manned their deck guns shooting both at his plane, and at the carriers. He saw their faces right before the explosion that sent them to the bottom. I grew up hearing him scream in the night. He saw the faces of the men he killed every night in his sleep. Sometimes in life we have to make decisions that haunt us. All we can do is hope in God's mercy when our time comes.
[/quote]
I understand that people face terrible choices. The choices in WWII were truly horrific. I know that people make mistakes, and I'm perfectly willing to believe, if prompted, that a person merely made a mistake, rather than believe that they are an evil person. Maybe that's what this was. Maybe this was a collective, enormous mistake by the administration of the United States military. What I'm not willing to do is try to reason that it wasn't really a mistake.
They faced an awful choice. I believe they made the wrong one, and I believe that based on Catholic moral principles. Some good came out of it (i.e. the surrender of Japan), but obviously we're not utilitarian, and the good results can't justify the immoral means. I'm willing to accept that it was done with the best of intentions, but I'm not willing to accept that these intentions made the act itself moral or right.
I wouldn't want to be forced into a situation where I had to make a similar choice. I pray that I never have to do so. At the same time, while I know they were in a very very challenging situation, I cannot believe that nobody was aware of the moral concept that [i] indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants[/i] is prohibited. That is Catholic doctrine, but it's not exclusive to Catholics by any stretch.

[Laudate_Dominum]

Edith Keeler was right.

[Nihil Obstat]

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' date='05 April 2010 - 12:50 PM' timestamp='1270489856' post='2087033']
Edith Keeler was right.
[/quote]
Lawl. I had to look that up.

[cmotherofpirl]

[quote name='Nihil Obstat' date='05 April 2010 - 02:50 PM' timestamp='1270489847' post='2087032']
I understand that people face terrible choices. The choices in WWII were truly horrific. I know that people make mistakes, and I'm perfectly willing to believe, if prompted, that a person merely made a mistake, rather than believe that they are an evil person. Maybe that's what this was. Maybe this was a collective, enormous mistake by the administration of the United States military. What I'm not willing to do is try to reason that it wasn't really a mistake.
They faced an awful choice. I believe they made the wrong one, and I believe that based on Catholic moral principles. Some good came out of it (i.e. the surrender of Japan), but obviously we're not utilitarian, and the good results can't justify the immoral means. I'm willing to accept that it was done with the best of intentions, but I'm not willing to accept that these intentions made the act itself moral or right.
I wouldn't want to be forced into a situation where I had to make a similar choice. I pray that I never have to do so. At the same time, while I know they were in a very very challenging situation, I cannot believe that nobody was aware of the moral concept that [i] indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants[/i] is prohibited. That is Catholic doctrine, but it's not exclusive to Catholics by any stretch.
[/quote]
We will agree to disagree then. I think they were greatly aware of what they were doing, and they made the right choice.

[Nihil Obstat]

[quote name='cmotherofpirl' date='05 April 2010 - 01:05 PM' timestamp='1270490711' post='2087044']
We will agree to disagree then. I think they were greatly aware of what they were doing, and they made the right choice.
[/quote]
I don't understand how you reason around what we read in the Catechism though.

(Obviously we didn't have our current Catechism during WWII, but I'm working on the premise that all these doctrines were fairly clear nonetheless.)

We read:
The Church greatly respects those who have dedicated their lives to the defense of their nation. "If they carry out their duty honorably, they truly contribute to the common good of the nation and the maintenance of peace. [Cf. Gaudium et spes 79, 5]" However, she cautions combatants that not everything is licit in war. Actions which are forbidden, and which constitute morally unlawful orders that may not be followed, include:

- [b]attacks against[/b], and mistreatment of, [b]non-combatants[/b], wounded soldiers, and prisoners;

- genocide, whether of [b]a people, nation[/b] or ethnic minorities;

- [b]indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants.[/b]

Given the modern means of warfare, especially nuclear, biological and chemical, these crimes against humanity must be especially guarded against.




Dropping those bombs, and the continued firebombing, very clearly fall into the category of indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants. It seems to me that this stipulation entirely preempts any concerns about how quickly the war could be stopped, etc.. It seems to be to be terrible utilitarian to justify these in the context of ending the war quicker.
The way I'm looking at it, you could say (in theory):
"We may bomb this area [b]as long as[/b] a) we don't attack or mistreat non combatants, etc., b) we are not committing genocide, and c) we are not indiscriminately destroying entire cities or vast areas."

It's like formal logic, when we say "If [u]and only if[/u] A, then B." So if A is false, B is also false.