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.

That would have been unbelievable, if the Soviets got involved...

That would have been unbelievable, if the Soviets got involved...

You put that really well Atari, much better than I've heard any history teacher put it.

You should be a college professor.

does anyone else hear an echo??

I like yr avatar...

if only the Japanese knew how to say "klaatu barada nikto".

Clatto Verata N... Necktie... Nickel... It's an "N" word, it's definitely an "N" word!

why a bomb...why not 3

ba dm tsssssh

bad joke i know

the bombs were dropped just to see if they worked, and most historians agree that they were dropped to show the russians that they existed, functioned, and could be used against them. the japanese were already defeated after the fire bombing of Tokyo, which killed as many civilians as did both atomic bombs...

the bombs were like military toys, the US could have destroyed Japan through conventional bombing (oh wait, they already did, in fact they had intentionally saved four cities as targets for the a-bomb, or they would have already destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki earlier with regular bombs) but they just had to use their new toy...

so of course they wouldn't have used it on the germans, it didn't exist when the germans were still fighting. if the japanse had already surrended by the time, then they would have waited and used it in Korea.... they just needed some people to kill with their new bomb and the japanese happened to be the people that the US were killing at the time...

there are some three-headed lizards in the New Mexican desert that might disagree with this statement.



let's analyze that statement using facts:

• Firebombing of Tokyo: March 9-10, 1945
• Lil' Boy: August 6, 1945
• Fat Man: August 9, 1945
• Japan surenders: August 15, 1945

one of these kids is doing their own thing.

Most historian's agree? Sort of like 4 out of 5 dentists recommend?

That honestly doesn't make a lot of sense to me. They demonstrated it with the first test. The Russians could see how powerful the bombing was from the pictures of the original test.

If "using our new toy to kill people to show the Russians" was a policy, wouldn't the H-bomb have been used on people then later ICBMs?


That said, I don't think a conventional bombing of nagasaki and hiroshima would have forced a Japanese surrender.

The bomb wasn't just a big ass powerful bomb that could kill a lot of people. It was also a huge psychological weapon.

Also. . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing...n_World_War_II

firebombing took more lives and was much more gruesome

conventional bombing wasn't effective

that is precisely what I am saying?! The bomb was dropped just to show its effects. Oh yeah, the russians had their own bomb (almost) and they could easily see how destructive it could be, but why not just show them how destructive it actually is, by using it on people. and the japanse, well in WWII people didn't care to much about japanese civilian life... in fact, after years of killing on massive scales, people didn't seem to respect life at all..

in other words they dropped the bomb to prove that it worked (on people) at the only time in history they could do it, because popular support was on their side.. they could not do it by the time of thermonuclear devices, because people were beginning to feel bad about about killing people on massive scales. why do you think we never returned to carpet bombing cities like in the war? (because after the fact people began to develop a conscience)

In what parallel universe did this take place?

I only know what happened in this reality

Sorry

No, what I'm saying is that it was used as a psychological weapon to force Japan's surrender.

You don't need to prove something like that works on humans. You see an explosion on fake town with dummies, obviously it is gonna kill a bunch of humans just as well.

What would you have done if you were fighting Japan?

There is no right way to win a war, only wrong ones. The best thing you can do is play the numbers game and hope you're right.

oh, sweet tedium.

I've come to the conclusion that there's no use in arguing with the kooks on this board.

a tenuous grasp on reality prevents any sort logic from seeping through the cranium.

can you people not handle yr drugs?

Exactly what I thought as soon as I read the first post.

ato balewleta (kind sir):

could you politely explain what happened in "reality" that shows my inaccuracies?

I think floatingslowly did it already

• Firebombing of Tokyo: March 9-10, 1945
• Lil' Boy: August 6, 1945
• Fat Man: August 9, 1945
• Japan surenders: August 15, 1945

I note you failed to address the point he made so succinctly

I've seen plenty of your "facts" blown out of the water in a few threads, and instead of you admitting "I got that wrong" all I see is "its the whites fault"

so the fact that they dropped the atomic bomb months after tokyo proved what? i said that the war could have been won aside from nuclear technology, and that conventional bombing, as in tokyo, would have been just as 'successful' to 'win' the war (if such a thing can really happen, are there really winners or losers when everybody is dying?) implying that the a-bomb was not the cause of 'victory' and that it was not needed to prevent a land invasion, as is the justification given by US military historians... it is all bullshit is what I said, and I stick too it, and thus far no one has corrected me here.

With the gun stats, I am sorry, I was wrong, apparantly in 2005 52% of all gunshot related homicides in America were committed by black Americans, an considering that black Americans make up less then 15% of the overall population this is obviously a problem. However, I jumped to the bigger conclusion, the racism involved, like the origin of these guns and also the social/environmental circumstances of living in a racist country, which in fact was founded on the principles of racism, which are perpetuated even unto this day. There is a myth that individuals are somehow entirely responsible for all of their actions, but this is not always the case, especially when there is outside influence. Sure, the black man who shoots another is responsible, but is not manufacturer, distributer, government regulators, and even our gun-oriented society at large also responsible for allowing such conditions to exist where person has access to such a tool of human destruction to begin with?

oh yeah, and what other fact did I get proved wrong on so quickly, the English situation of JA immigration? hardly...