Japan In Wwii

[Resurrexi]

While the circumstances surrounding an act can make a morally good action an evil one, the circumstances can never change an intrinsically evil action into a good one.

Edited April 3, 2010 by Resurrexi

[Skinzo]

I think there is little doubt from a Catholic moral standpoint that these bombings were immoral, and there is little doubt now that they also were unnecessary. The USA was demanding unconditional surrrender of Japan which is an unjust demand to make of anyone. That is what Dr. Warren Carroll always taught at Christendom College. Another thing to keep in mind is that the Japanese were NOT obstinately refusing to surrender. They had already offered to surrender asking only that the Emperor's person be respected. This in fact, was eventually accepted by the USA.
There is little doubt now that Truman dropped the bomb primarily to impress Stalin and the world with the new power of the USA.

See: [url="http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html"]http://www.ihr.org/j...3p-4_Weber.html[/url]

[url="http://mises.org/journals/scholar/severance.pdf"]http://mises.org/jou...r/severance.pdf[/url]

[url="http://www.jimmyakin.org/2009/05/harry-truman-was-a-war-criminal.html"]http://www.jimmyakin...r-criminal.html[/url]

S.

Edited April 3, 2010 by Skinzo

[toledo_jesus]

[quote name='Skinzo' date='02 April 2010 - 11:46 PM' timestamp='1270262815' post='2085828']
I think there is little doubt from a Catholic moral standpoint that these bombings were immoral. and there is little doubt now that they also were unnecessary. The USA was demanding unconditional surrrender of Japan which is an unjust demand to make of anyone. That is what Dr. Warren Carroll always taught at Christendom College. Another thing to keep in mind is that the Japanese were NOT obstinately refusing to surrender. They had already offered to surrender asking only that the Emperor's person be respected. This in fact, was eventually accepted by the USA.
There is little doubt now that Truman dropped the bomb primarily to impress Stalin and the world with the new power of the USA.

See: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html

http://mises.org/journals/scholar/severance.pdf

S.
[/quote]
If there is little doubt, then the larger part of the little bit resides in me.

[Saint Therese]

I don't agree that they were unnecessary.

[toledo_jesus]

[quote name='Saint Therese' date='03 April 2010 - 12:09 AM' timestamp='1270264148' post='2085838']
I don't agree that they were unnecessary.
[/quote]
ditto

[dairygirl4u2c]

i like this section...

[quote]Apart from the moral questions involved, were the atomic bombings militarily necessary? [b]By any rational yardstick, they were not. [/b]Japan already had been defeated militarily by June 1945. Almost nothing was left of the once mighty Imperial Navy, and Japan's air force had been all but totally destroyed. Against only token opposition, American war planes ranged at will over the country, and US bombers rained down devastation on her cities, steadily reducing them to rubble.

What was left of Japan's factories and workshops struggled fitfully to turn out weapons and other goods from inadequate raw materials. (Oil supplies had not been available since April.) By July about a quarter of all the houses in Japan had been destroyed, and her transportation system was near collapse. Food had become so scarce that most Japanese were subsisting on a sub-starvation diet.

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, a wave of 300 American bombers struck Tokyo, killing 100,000 people. Dropping nearly 1,700 tons of bombs, the war planes ravaged much of the capital city, completely burning out 16 square miles and destroying a quarter of a million structures. A million residents were left homeless.

On May 23, eleven weeks later, came the greatest air raid of the Pacific War, when 520 giant B-29 "Superfortress" bombers unleashed 4,500 tons of incendiary bombs on the heart of the already battered Japanese capital. Generating gale-force winds, the exploding incendiaries obliterated Tokyo's commercial center and railway yards, and consumed the Ginza entertainment district. Two days later, on May 25, a second strike of 502 "Superfortress" planes roared low over Tokyo, raining down some 4,000 tons of explosives. Together these two B-29 raids destroyed 56 square miles of the Japanese capital.

Even before the Hiroshima attack, American air force General Curtis LeMay boasted that American bombers were "driving them [Japanese] back to the stone age." [b]Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse."[/b] This was confirmed by former [b]Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s."[/quote][/b]

[dairygirl4u2c]

[quote name='toledo_jesus' date='02 April 2010 - 11:18 PM' timestamp='1270264688' post='2085844']
ditto
[/quote]

if you guys based your arguments on reason, people might buy it. it seems like you're just being stubborn, as far as i can see. it's not even an issue of whether the ends justify the means.. even if you're given that, your positio doesn't make sense.
i like being the underdog in debates and all, and part of me would like to jump in with ya, but on this issue, you're way off the mark.

[dairygirl4u2c]

the japanese were already surrendering, and the president even knew about it.
note, the bombs were dropped the first two weeks of august, 1945, for reference.

[quote]In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, [b]Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)[/b]

This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. Specifically, the terms of these peace overtures included:

Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.
Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war.
Release of all prisoners of war and internees.
Surrender of designated war criminals. [/quote]

roosevelt died soon after receiving the memo. im not sure if truman, who dropped the bomb, saw it. id assume so, though, and that he at least had the same intelligence as roosevelt, and adivce of the general quoted above about how they were beaten down.
those japanese who were not going to bow,,,, those were surely the soldiers. soliders might fight to death as a matter of honor, but the government itself was ready to quit.

Edited April 3, 2010 by dairygirl4u2c

[dominicansoul]

[quote name='cmotherofpirl' date='02 April 2010 - 06:42 PM' timestamp='1270248163' post='2085743']
Wrong.
So you think we should avoid a military town because catholics live in it?
Seriously?
[/quote]


we should have avoided them because they were civilian towns...NOT military!

[dairygirl4u2c]

you can see more overtures and attempts at peace by the japs here... along with refutations of the propagada 'it saved millions only by bombing' etc etc that was used. along with points like how we didnt have to bomb a city, and it was because of civilians that we bombed there.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html
all poitns i was making, without reading it. great minds must think alike. *cough

[dominicansoul]

truman just wanted to see if the bombs worked...and their effect...

[dairygirl4u2c]

[quote name='dominicansoul' date='02 April 2010 - 11:52 PM' timestamp='1270266738' post='2085859']
we should have avoided them because they were civilian towns...NOT military!
[/quote]

[quote]President Truman steadfastly defended his use of the atomic bomb, claiming that it "saved millions of lives" by bringing the war to a quick end. Justifying his decision, he went so far as to declare: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."

This was a preposterous statement. In fact, almost all of the victims were civilians, and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (issued in 1946) stated in its official report: "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population."

If the atomic bomb was dropped to impress the Japanese leaders with the immense destructive power of a new weapon, this could have been accomplished by deploying it on an isolated military base. It was not necessary to destroy a large city. And whatever the justification for the Hiroshima blast, it is much more difficult to defend the second bombing of Nagasaki.[/quote]

[dairygirl4u2c]

the mroe i read about it, the more i realize that the atomic bombs were up there with Auschwitz etc, in terms of war crimes etc. not as bad, cause we weren't trying to make concentration camps, and it was at least superficially for defnese etc, and part of war. but it's up there, as a sign of disgrace, for mankind, let alone the united states.

[dairygirl4u2c]

[quote]A leading voice of American Protestantism, Christian Century, strongly condemned the bombings. An editorial entitled "America's Atomic Atrocity" in the issue of August 29, 1945, told readers:

The atomic bomb was used at a time when Japan's navy was sunk, her air force virtually destroyed, her homeland surrounded, her supplies cut off, and our forces poised for the final stroke ... Our leaders seem not to have weighed the moral considerations involved. No sooner was the bomb ready than it was rushed to the front and dropped on two helpless cities ... The atomic bomb can fairly be said to have struck Christianity itself ... The churches of America must dissociate themselves and their faith from this inhuman and reckless act of the American Government.

A leading American Catholic voice, Commonweal, took a similar view. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the magazine editorialized, "are names for American guilt and shame."

Pope Pius XII likewise condemned the bombings, expressing a view in keeping with the traditional Roman Catholic position that "every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man." The Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano commented in its August 7, 1945, issue: "This war provides a catastrophic conclusion. Incredibly this destructive weapon remains as a temptation for posterity, which, we know by bitter experience, learns so little from history."[/quote]

[dairygirl4u2c]

[quote]American leaders who were in a position to know the facts did not believe, either at the time or later, that the atomic bombings were needed to end the war.

When he was informed in mid-July 1945 by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson of the decision to use the atomic bomb, General Dwight Eisenhower was deeply troubled. He disclosed his strong reservations about using the new weapon in his 1963 memoir, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (pp. 312-313):

During his [Stimson's] recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of "face."

"The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing ... I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon," Eisenhower said in 1963.

Shortly after "V-J Day," the end of the Pacific war, Brig. General Bonnie Fellers summed up in a memo for General MacArthur: "Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan's unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either these events took place."[/quote]