Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Fat Man Bomb - Nagasaki

We might call most of the victims "innocents", but in reality Japan had armed the adults, including the women, to kill as many Americans as possible. I would venture that the bombs saved many more Japanese lives than they took. the Japanese were prepared to fight to the death.

The Japanese worked hard to earn what they got from those two bombs.

Only ignorant people try to single out Hiroshima and Nagasaki as some horrendous act of cruelty toward "innocent men, women and children," simply because of the nuclear aspect of the bomb.

The ruins of Dresden, 1945.

My first cousin piloted a B-52 from Viet Nam until right around Desert Storm. He flew conventional weapons until post-Viet Nam, transitioning to nukes while flying for SAC.

One thing that stuck with him, he always said, was how small the bomb really is that he had aboard. That huge bomb bay...one bomb in it. He told me it was roughly 7-8 feet long and a little less than 3 feet in diameter. I saw the shell of that type bomb on display at an air museum one time and he was right. It’s a tiny thing compared to its lethality.

Ask the citizens of Nan King if there was anything inhumane about our use of the atom bombs.

Drop one on the Chi Coms

My dad was on the Japanese islands in combat until he got sick with malaria, got shipped to Australian hospital, recovered and shipped back to Phillipines base waiting to go on the Japanese mainland invasion when they dropped the bomb........I know it killed alot of people but and invasion would have been just as bad or worse as far as loss of life.......the right choice was made. It was war.

Had one uncle fly figher bomber off of carriers for the Marines in WWII bombing islands before they invaded. He crop dusted after the war for awhile. This uncle was with some Australians who bragged about cutting the heads off Japanese soldiers.

Had another uncle that was a tail gunner on a B-17. He got the flu before one mission and his replacement tail gunner got killed.

My dad was a mechanic in the 3rd Army under Patton. He was in England, France, Luxembourg, Germany and Czechoslovakia. Lost his friend in the relief of Bastogne, told mom his face was blown off. He never watched a war movie, but would watch cowboys and indians. If the family was watching a war movie, when the shelling and gunfire started, he would go outside and smoke cigarettes.

I just wish I would have talked to them more about what they did in WWII.

My grandfather on my mother's side was a security guard in WWI in the army, and was a state prison guard in WWII.

Amazing how few know anything about what we did in Dresden.

Nasty horrible. To innocents.

Except, there are no "innocents" in that kind of industrial warfare.


Not to go on a tangent, but I get dam mad at people judging others
in the past. Using the here and now.

Yesterday's hero killed people.
Today he is a criminal for slugging someone.

Rules and circumstances change.

LeMay was quoted after the war as saying that if the Japanese had won, he’d have been tried, convicted, and executed as a war criminal.



P

It is good to be on the right side of history.

I think the revised death toll was around 25,000 for the Dresden bombing raids. I think it gets the attention it gets because it was a beautiful city, and the point if the bombing was to choke the area with refugees and convince yhe civillians the war was completely lost.

Yet we had a policy of not going after any but the very top officers... and worst offenders...

My dad passed away on 10/7/2020 at 96 and 4 months to the day. A veteran of WW 2 in the US Army he was on a troop ship in the Pacific headed for the staging area for the invasion of the home islands when they dropped the bombs and ended the war. Never saw my dad really pissef off until one day when some liberal know it all was running off at the mouth about why we should have never done that. My dad gave him a piece of his mind in his mid 70's. I am not ignorant of the ramifications of the US dropping the bombs, dad said the US command figured 50% casualty rate on 1 million plus in the invasion with a Japanese casualty rate as high or higher. The bombs were the least costly way to go in human loss for both sides. Mb

My Dad used to shoot trap with Paul Tibbets pilot of the Enola Gay when I was a kid. I didn’t realize the significance of who he was until I was older. The B29 “Bocks Car”, that dropped the Nagasaki bomb is at the Air Force museum in Dayton Ohio.

Ron

Ron

I share your sentiment.

I knew an old fella who was in the Army Air Corps in WWII and he had nothing good to say about them. Plenty of bad things, though.

My dad served in the Philippines during WW2. He was only 18 when he got drafted.
In 1955, when I was 6, on Saturdays, I would ride along with him when he delivered fresh meat to corner grocery stores around Kansas City.
One day he pulled over on the side of a residential street, he pointed at a small white haired man mowing his tiny front yard with a push mower. My Dad told me that guy was the reason I was alive—wasn’t until many years later that I even knew what he was talking about.

The white haired man was actually in Independence, right?

After the Bataan death march they got what they deserved.

Dean