This date marks the 78th Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb over Hiroshima.

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16. Not an EQUAL comparison

At Pearl Harbor, 3000 Americans died.

At Hiroshima the best estimates are 140,000 dead.

Is that a proportional response?


Americans like to think it's all about them. We know what happened on August 6th and 9th, 1945. But damn few Americans can tell me without looking it up what happened on August 8th, 1945. The Soviet Union attacked across a broad front in Manchuria and threw the Japanese army back with their strength and technological superiority. The Japanese had sent out peace feelers in June of 1945 through the only allied power that had not declared war on them - the Soviets. The feelers were rebuffed because the Allies had agreed to unconditional surrender and the Japanese had a condition they had to have.....their Emperor, who was not just a man, but GOD on earth. (Later MacArthur would let them have their emperor. Hirohito was never tried as a war criminal and remained emperor of Japan until his death in 1989.)

From a tactical and strategic point of view, from August 8th 1945 the Japanese were trapped. Consider:

The Soviets had one of the best battlefield tanks in the world, the T-34/85. No Japanese tank in Manchuria could stand up against it.
The Soviets had the best anti-tank destroyer in the Ilyushin Il-2, considered by many to be the finest ground attack airplane in WWII.
The Americans had at least three fighter planes that were technologically superior to anything the Japanese had.
The Americans with The B29 were firebombing Japanese cities at will.
The American Navy by August of 1945 totally controlled the seas and the Japanese Navy had ceased to be an effective fighting force.
Fighter sweeps over Japan by carrier based airplanes in June of 1945 were finding few to no targets worthy of attacking.

But, more importantly, and mostly unknown now to the American public, is the fact that the Japanese never beat the American submarine force. The Allies had fought a seasaw battle with the Germans in the early years of the war called the Battle of the Atlantic. The Allies won that battle by defeating the German submarines. Japan, an island nation with few natural resources, needed their sea commerce to survive. The American submarine fleet was strangling the island nation.

Beginning in 1944, US submarines began to target Japanese tankers. By the summer of 1945 no fuel oil from Java or Sumatra was getting through to the Japanese homeland. Their population would have froze to death in the winter of 1945-46.

By August 1945 the Americans had fire bombed 67 Japanese cities. To the Japanese, two more cities gone was not the impact that Americans like to think it was.

The winners get to re-write history to soothe any troubled conscience.