Japan marks 76th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings

[Dial H For Hero]

https://www.euronews.com/2021/08/06/japan-marks-76th-anniversary-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-nuclear-bombings

Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga attended a memorial commemorating the 76th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Survivors and relatives marked the blast anniversary with a minute of silence; many who survived the attacks continue to require welfare and medical care.

August 6, 1945

The United States dropped the world's first nuclear bomb used against civilians at 08:15 local time in the southwestern city of Hiroshima.

The bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" destroyed the city and immediately killed 80,000 civilians, which represented around 30% of the population at the time.

[Blues Heron]

1. remember- when the going gets tough against an enemy

slaughter their grandparents and children en masse - that's straight from the VMI valor encylopedia.

[Dial H For Hero]

17. "Smart" weapons were in their infancy in 1945, less than 0.00001% of munitions.

Weapons causing mass casualties were all we had at the strategic level.

[MarineCombatEngineer]

18. Don't start nuthin,

won't be nuthin.
Words Japan should have lived by.

[HAB911]

2. Horrible, but

it saved my fathers life, and thus mine, and 4 of his brother's lives

[Blues Heron]

3. easy to say but you don't know that.

[HAB911]

4. easy to say because

I do know that

[MarineCombatEngineer]

8. +100. nt

[MarineCombatEngineer]

7. I do know that,

my father was in the first wave slated to go ashore, and it was expected to be a 100% casualty rate for the first wave.

[HAB911]

10. Marines and SeaBees doin' the work

[MarineCombatEngineer]

12. Uh Rah, and of course

Can Do.

[Johnny2X2X]

5. I agree

I know there's some suggestion that Japan would have surrendered eventually without an invasion, but I don't think that's likely. And the Japanese were fanatics, they would fight to the death and their citizens would have died before giving an inch.

It's always going to be debated, but I don't think people have an appreciation for how depraved and fanatical the Japanese soldiers and people were at that time. The soldiers who fought in both theaters said the Germans were cream puffs compared to the Japanese. The Germans would surrender when defeated in battle, the Japanese would fight to the death to the last man.

[HAB911]

6. My dad was on a PT boat base in New Guinea

a SeaBee on the front lines on the march to Japan and one of my uncles was in the Army at Hickham on Dec 7th and fought hand to hand through the Pacific until surrender. When he came home he had no mind, and that's no hyperbole.

PT boat base paper my dad brought back:

[Johnny2X2X]

11. My grandfather fought in Europe

He stormed the beaches at Normandy, he was an explosives expert and came home with little hearing. If we had had to have invaded Japan, he would have been there.

When we were kids, whenever we went and saw him he'd bring us a couple blocks away to see his war buddy, Joe, Joe had lost both legs and 1 arm in WWII, it wasn't until I got older that I realized he wanted to show Joe what they made possible as well as lift his spirits.

[marie999]

28. Absolutely not needed.

They had already contacted Russia about ending the war. They wanted to surrender unconditionally except for wanting to keep the emperor which is what Truman approved after showing Russia our nuclear arsenal.

[11 Bravo]

33. Likely the same for my Dad, and thus my three siblings.

Dad was a fighter pilot on a carrier off of Okinawa, and the kamikazes were getting, in his words, "pretty damned thick".

[MarineCombatEngineer]

9. ....

[Archae]

13. Every year around this time...

Somebody pops up here, or Facebook, or Twitter calling Truman a "terrorist" for having given the order to drop The Bombs.

The reality is far different.

At that time, nukes were being developed to be used against Hitler and his goons.

Hitler blew his own brains out, and his goons most surrendered in late April and early May of 1945.

The fanatical War party of Japan was far more willing to fight to the death.

All anyone needs to do is watch the films of Japanese Kamikaze attacks, when Okinawa was invaded.
Japan even developed a rocket-powered guided missile, it's guidance being the pilot.

The Japanese ground troops were just as bad, hurling themselves against US armored vehicles with explosives strapped to their bodies.

They even had a plan to sacrifice their biggest battleship in a suicide attack, it was located long before reaching it's target, pounded into scrap by US carrier planes and blown up.

The A-bomb was thought of as simply a bomb with a bigger bang, and the shock of not one, but two of those bombs took the wind out of the War Party's sails.

Even so, a group of junior fanatical officers tried and failed to stop the Emperor's radio broadcast, and when they failed, they killed themselves en masse.

[MarineCombatEngineer]

15. And this is exactly what invading US troops would have faced,

every man, woman and child were prepared to sacrifice their lives to kill as many Americans as they could.

[betsuni]

34. Like in the Battle of Okinawa.

Film of people jumping off cliffs to their deaths, schoolchildren hiding in caves with their teachers with hand grenades to blow themselves up with. Gruesome.

[roamer65]

14. The third bomb would have been dropped on 19 August 1945.

Likely target would have been Kokura. The target that was skipped on 9 August 1945 due to bad weather.

We could manufacture 3-4 bombs per month and the debate was whether to continue dropping them or save them up for the main invasion, according to a declassified document I read a few years back.

[GregariousGroundhog]

25. Indeed

The main targets considered were Kyoto, Hiroshima, Kokura, Yokohama, and Niigata. The Whitehouse opposed using an atom bomb on Kyoto, and it was replaced on the list by Nagasaki.

[HAB911]

16. THE END RESULT

[hardluck]

19. Did they mark the 76th anniversary of the rape of Manila?

Must have missed it.

[Sympthsical]

20. There's a really good BBC documentary/dramatization about it

It used to be on Netflix, which is where I saw it. Now it seems it's only available from Amazon.

Pretty gripping version of events of what happened before, during, and after in the city.

[sarisataka]

21. Is it already that time of the year

For historical revisionism and crystal ball would've-should've-could've? How time flies.

I will be next to Como Park tomorrow so I will make my annual stop at the Japanese garden there in honor of our sister city.

It is possible to realize that all options to end the war were going to be horrible. The bombs were probably the least horrible in number of casualties but at least were horrible enough so they haven't been used since.

[Dial H For Hero]

22. One of my "favorites": Don't drop the bombs, just continue the blockade.

That way Japan is in no position to significantly attack us, and they’ll eventually give up, with few having been killed.

Other than the literal millions who would have starved to death in the next year alone, mind you.

[sarisataka]

23. Yes, that is one

Thousands killed is horrible but millions would have been better.

[ProfessorGAC]

35. Nailed It!

Also, we are CERTAIN that a radical faction of the military plotted to prevent the emperor from making the surrender address to the people.
There's no doubt that some military leadership were willing to exterminate their own population rather than surrender.
It's silly to think that a slow, painful famine would have had the crystallizing effect that the bomb attacks did.
Compared to mass starvation, the bomb was the lesser of two evils.

[LexVegas]

24. I celebrate it. nt

[roamer65]

26. Once the Soviets started island hopping in the Kurils, it was only a matter of time till surrender.

Next invasion by the Soviets was to be Hokkaido Island. Hirohito knew there would be no mercy for Japanese civilians from the Russians.

With his cities vaporizing, the Russians nearing invasion of Hokkaido and his last oil refinery gone, for Hirohito the only sane option left was to surrender to the Americans.

Truman held off on dropping the third bomb because he knew they would buckle under the pressure. The Japanese HATE the Russians.

[marie999]

29. Agree, they were afraid of the Russians not our bombing of their cities.

[MineralMan]

27. Just over a week after I was born.

I was truly an "Atomic Bomb Baby." My mother told me when I was in my 20s that she was incredibly worried at the time about bringing a child into the world after that bomb. My father was still in Italy, flying B-17s on transport missions, moving US personnel around on their way back to the USA.

He came home three months after I was born, and started a new life.

[mitch96]

30. Ironically the firebombing of Tokyo did more damage and killed more people.

Did not faze the japanese. Like what was said, after the atom bombs and Russia getting in the war the hand writing was on the wall..ymmv

m
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-09/tokyo-wwii-firebombing-remembered-70-years-on/6287486

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_1945)

[Leith]

31. The Japanese of the 1940s were nothing like the Japanese of today

The closest comparison would be to imagine if North Korea had 4 times the population, invaded China, Manchuria, the Philippines, all of SE Asia mainland, and seriously threatened Australia, and had already attacked Hawaii.

North Koreans are already starving and performing mandatory slave labor. They have a fanatical cult in their emperor. They have an irrational fear of being invaded by the rest of the world. The country puts more importance in their weapons of war than the wellbeing of their own people. And they would fight an invasion with to the last man, woman, and child. THAT was Japan of the 1930s and 1940s.

In the 1980s, one could still see old women, survivors of the horrors of the war, bent over from malnutrition in a way that would make Groucho Marx complain about back trouble. I felt bad for them because their own country did that to them.

At the same time, being hibakusha (victims of an atomic bomb) has made them completely oblivious to the horrors their fathers and grandfathers committed on the rest of Asia. To this very day, the Japanese have never faced their own culpability and actions during the war.

I won't second guess Truman. He did the right thing at the right time.

[gratuitous]

32. Known in the United States as "Our shit don't stink" day

U!S!A!