A-Bomb Against Nazis?
 

I was watching this show on The History Channel where these historians had serious doubts that the U.S. would have nuked Germany if the need had arose. They said that the Japanese were made, by the media and army propaganda, to seem sub-human so it was an easy call as opposed to nuking "white" people. I'm not so sure, we didn't have any qualms about fire bombing the hell out of Dresden and other German cities, an A-bomb wouldn't have been much worse save for the fallout (which was still an unknown quality). They also had a cool, but kinda wild, theory about what would have occured had Charles Lindbergh ran for president, he had "suspected" Nazi sympathy...interesting stuff.

Dropping the A-bomb on Japan, in the middle of the Pacific = no risk of collateral damage to friendly neighbours.
Dropping the A-bomb on Germany, in the middle of Europe = highf risk of collateral damage to friendly neighbours.

I don't think they really understood much about fallout before it was used, so I'm not sure that was much of a factor.

I think it had more to do with the fact that Germany was already defeated, but the Japanese were still fervent for their god-emperor and showed no sign of surrender.

True, as devoted through fear as the Nazis were to Hitler and the Third Reich, they had nothing in this department on the Japanese.
What many people do not know is that as a last-ditch effort in fending off bombing raids into Germany, Hitler's Luftwaffe, taking a page from the Japanese, formed an aerial suicide squad called the ELBE (had this as ELBA for awhile...oops) whose mission was to take their fighters and ram U.S. bomber planes. But it was much too little much too late to possibly have much effect. We had more planes, better pilots (most of their better pilots were already spent thanks to the RAF) and better technology. Nazi engineers developed the first jet fighters, but again, they were too little too late. Our tech included radar developed with British engineers and other advances that allowed fighter planes to engage at night as well. Many American troops didn't know the extent of what was going on in the death camps, but when they arrived in Germany, they were horrified. In most cases, the Americans forced the nearby townspeople and villagers around the death camps to clean up the atrocious messes of corpses not yet incinerated or buried, and rightfully so.

Now the Japanese were very ruthless in their determination to fight at any cost. Everyone knows about the Kamikaze attacks on U.S. warships, but few know that they had a reserve of 10,000 (oops, it was actually 5,000) Kamikaze Zeroes that they were saving for when the attack on the Japanese mainland finally came. After seeing the indescribably inhumane effects of the Kamikaze raids in the Pacific, we weren't about to subject troops to the same sort of thing again. The A-bomb came along right around that same time and Truman decided to use two of them, as everyone knows, on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Further testament to the Japanese ruthlessness are the invention of the Ocha and their Bonzai ground tactics.
The Ocha was essentially a large missile that was dropped out of a Japanese bomber with a pilot in it. It was invented because Kamikaze Zeroes and other fighter planes had difficulty sinking larger warships like Destroyers and Aircraft Carriers. The tactic was extremely effective, but again, it was too little too late to ward off our invasion. As elucidated upon in the recent Ken Burns documentary series The War, Bonzai troops consisted of everyone that was available. The Japanese would send wave after wave of any warm bodies at American trenches to be slaughtered. Many were old men, and many had nothing for weapons besides stones or clubs. Whenever Americans would win battles and advance, the Japanese would round up all the women and children in the area and take them to an adjacent countryside to hide out. They would tell them not to ever talk to us and to kill themselves if they were ever captured. Again, as The War reveals, the straggling Japanese infantry would actually execute the women and children if their enclave of hiding was about to be discovered. Honestly, these tactics scared us shitless as we simply realized that "we were not like them...truly," at least in this peculiar and horrible psychological sense, and that overwhelming knowledge, coupled with the sheer insanity of the bravura the Japanese displayed with contemporary attacks on China, the (then) Soviet Union, and America with Pearl Harbor, I'm sure, played a large part in why atomic bombs were used on Japan.

That was pretty interesting reading, Atari. Thank you.

Do you have any links to more info on this?

When I think ocha I think Green Tea.

it doesn't take a whole lot of fish and tentacle porn to tell me that this holds true today.

loljapan.

http://avia.russian.ee/air/japan/yoko_ohka.php

I don't think there is any question that Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathiser, like Henry Ford and Bush's Grandfather.

You're absolutely correct, "Ocha" is green tea.

THE KUGISHO MXY7-K1 OHKA (Cherry Blossom)

http://www.b-29s-over-korea.com/Japa...amikaze05.html

I misspelled it.
I first heard about these on The History Channel Dogfights series. The very first show, "Kamikaze."



http://www.history.com/shows.do?acti...isodeId=233149

The History Channel has many good shows, but I avoid the tabloid-y "UFO Files" show like the plague. That series is an embarrasment to a usually otherwise fine channel.

If they didn't have the production slump and was capable of sacking the British Isles, the idea of dropping an A-bomb on German proper to offset a U.S. counter invasion doesn't sound all that improbable to me.

And Atari is right, Japan's long history of warrior self-sacrifice and high regard for honor made them a far more dangerous opponent. Even today, the majority of German has put those days behind them and are quite apologetic (for example, The Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany) but many of Japan feel that the war "castrated" the Japanese sense of power (as that one Japanese pop artist explained) which has gone on to influence much of their culture.

sales in the US of this stuff proves you wrong.

Thanks for all the links! I have some reading to do.

don't get me wrong, I love the japanese.

mostly, I LOVE weird, and they do weird like nobody else's business.

however, lil' fish squirting out some girl's ass into a cup and dog butt licking aren't really my cup of ocha.

maybe the NEXT WAR should be fought with porn.

I think it was easier to nuke the Japanese as they had attacked the USA directly at Pearl Harbour as opposed to Germany which became an enemy as Japans ally

I totally agree with the remarks made about the potential loss of lives without the nukes

The Japanese cult of the Emperor mentality would have caused countless more deaths

Look at how many lives were lost taking Iwo Jima and other islands

Japan consists of literally thousands of islands, the war could have dragged on for years

all good points

Isn't khchris half-japanese?

are you suggesting that we nuke him? :eek:

It might work... Or he just might send you a PM saying how this board is full of flamers and trolls, and now you've gone and nuked him, he has no choice but to type in capital letters for days at a time...

I think it really comes down to a numbers game. They were estimating a million lives lost in an invasion of Japan. Intelligence indicated that they were teaching women and children to bury themselves under the sand with explosives and trigger them while allied troops invaded.

Also, the US wanted to win the Pacific war before the USSR got involved.

HOMOPHOBE.