Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire WikiLeaks: Who's Hiding What and Why - Fred Reed

shooting at German soldiers or auxiliaries where ever they can be found with whatever ordnance is available is not the same as your prior statement, as I read it. and of course, the problem in the Stan is that everybody dresses the same...hard to tell what team somebody is playing for, but you can't waste him on suspicion. at least, we don't.....are you suggesting we should?

other than via strategic bombing, the US has never countenanced warfare intentionally directed against civilians. nor have the other civilized nations. collateral damage is inevitable, but not the intentional slaughter that you apparently endorse.

I didn't say that war is immoral.

But the Bush/Obama wars are certainly immoral, at least on the US side.

As a matter of fact, the last American war that wasn't immoral, in my opinion, was the Revolutionary War.

a new contender for dumbest post of the year.....three in one thread.....he's on a roll.

Ah, not since Japan......and that was to save American lives.

that was strategic bombing....and the debate about that was a long one. the use of incendiaries against cities was resisted by many in the government, both in and out of the Air Corps. Even Churchill initially recoiled from it, but he got over it.


happen to be in the middle of Max Hastings' book Retribution about the war against Japan...1944-45. Particularly like his rebuttal of the old saw...still parroted by maroons like Barak...that the US war against Japan was different from the war with Germany because of racism. Obviously wrong for two reasons.....one, the brutality of the Pacific war was a result of Japanese conduct, both toward allied troops and, even more brutally, toward the Asians they conquered, and, two, the US had a love affair with the Chinese and Philipinos, and spent a great deal of blood and treasure in their interest, despite their being Asians. Great book, as is his Armageddon about the end game against Germany.

"..not since Japan."
I may be splitting hairs here, Stan; but didn't many of Japan's cities by 1944 have a multitude of shops used for military production spread far and wide in residential districts?

Gives somewhat of a justification for LeMay's bombing campaign against Japan, at least to my mind.

Well, we can call it whatever we want, the bottom line is that Japan was brought to her knees to prevent hundreds of thousands of Ameirican combat troops dying and in so doing we targeted Japanese civilians....I don't disagree with the decision.

We did give the Japanese notice...like we did Damsad. They were warned and didn't heed the warning.

What a colossal level of dumbphuckitude on display. Of all the hyperbole about the War of Northern Aggression being "morally right" because of slavery, of WWII being... well, if you can't see being morally right when combatting Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, I can't fathom what planet you're on....

Then again, perhaps with all those Nazis and Japanese war criminal convicted at Nuremberg, Barak has an unnatural affinity for those felonious monsters. Go figure...

Partially true; to prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American service personnel, and MILLIONS of Japanese, we targeted a couple Japanese cities and brought Japan to it's knees.

An invasion of Japan would have turned the entire island nation into a combat zone, and leveled every village and nearly every living Japanese citizen.

You tell me which was the most moral and humane decision....

Actually, we fire bombed nearly every city in Japan larger than a village. It was far more than a "couple". In LeMay's own words we "...burned everything worth burning..." in the entire country.

Millions of Japanese were killed that way. In the fire bombing of Toyko, there may have been as many as 180,000 Japanese killed.

True.
In fact, the folks that decided which cities to atomic bomb had a pretty limited list of suitable targets due to most of the country being in cinders.

The bombs saved thousands of Japanese from jumping off cliffs. But, we did target civilians and we then regained their trust and today we have a great ally in Japan. The lesson was 'don't start no chit and there won't be no chit'.....we don't teach that anymore.

Yep, their military industry was largely a "cottage industry." Decentralized in order to prevent it being shut down by narrowly targeted bombing raids.

And then there was Dresden.

minimizing of Japanese civilian deaths was an explicit consideration in US planning.....the deaths of an estimated 150,000 civilians in the Okinawa operation were a small sample of what would have happened if the home islands had to be invaded.


brutal as it was, the atomic bombs were perhaps the only thing that could have sufficiently shocked the rulers of Japan into a surrender short of invasion and occupation of the home islands......the incineration of Japanese cities had not affected the Army's willingness to fight it out.

Of course, the Japanese Army had millions of troops living in relative comfort in China who were never engaged against the US forces moving up through the Pacific islands, and some fanatics thought they could carry on the war in China even if Japan fell.

Joe;

As usual, you miss the point. As pointed out beforehand, MOST of, if not nearly ALL of, those villages and cities had military installations and production facilities: just like we did here. So, you hit everything that was a target, with the capabilities at hand.

We targeted 67 cities in the last six or seven months, all of which had significant military production capacity and installations (Tokyo, included). Hiroshima was a primary military and production location. Nagasaki lacked the military production and installations of the other parts of the nation, and was targeted because it was left, and because in order to bring about the end of the war prior to an absolutely hellish invasion (on all sides), it was hit.

Given that I have relatives from Dresden, you might want to reconsider going that route.

Dresden was a central rail hub, and a source of considerable production capacity for the Third Reich, as well as home to more than a few Nazi units. Death tolls by lie-berals and defeatists have been sorely exaggerated for years (as I am sure your going to try to do), as has the military and industrial importance understated by the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II

Suffice to say, from folks THAT WERE THERE, Dresden was FAR from non-military.

I don't want to fight the whole war over again, I merely wished to point out that you were wrong in saying that we bombed a "couple" of cities. Regardless of the justification or rectitude of the cause or lack thereof, Japan was subjected to the most intense bombardment in the history of mankind. Millions of Japanese were killed in these cities.

The atom bomb was superfluous. Not necessarily because it was unnecessary to use it, but rather because it was actually not as destructive as an incendiary raid.

I reckon, but most of the population was starving, pilots were down to one mission flights, Kamakazees....their Navy was history so they were prepared for women and children to commit hari kari with a garden hoe when troops hit their beaches and fight to the death. Japan's industrial complex capability in Nagasaki and Hiroshima wasn't the determining factor for those hits.....

the bulk of the Second Army and its HQ was at Hiroshima, including more than 40,000 troops, and was obliterated by the atom bomb.

Hiroshima was also home to the massive Kure naval shipyard, home of the Imperial Japanese Fleet.