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August 6: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima
There is a lot to say about this day, when 72 years ago, the United States became the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons.
So much is said every day about Iran and nuclear weapons, and terrorists and nuclear weapons, Putin with nuclear weapons and so forth, but that one fact remains among all the blather. For all the talk, only America has dropped the bomb.We did it twice (the Nagasaki bomb was on August 9) and we did it on two civilian targets. There is no use arguing that the two cities had significant military value; if there had been, they would have already been firebombed to tinder the way Tokyo and other cities in Japan had been. Nagasaki was a port, but not far away was the major naval base at Sasebo, which some say was not bombed because the U.S. planned to take possession of it after the war for our own navy (we did.) Both cities had some defense industry, but pretty much any place in Japan larger than a village also did.
Civilians were not, in today’s language, collateral damage. They were the targets. The image above shows what one child victim then looked like as an adult.
Please think of him when you hear some American say the Japs deserved it.
So we’ll leave it at this. As part of my research for my next book, Hooper’s War, I found this, below, an accounting by the United States of the exact, precise number of school children it killed on that hot August morning in 1945.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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John Poole said...
1Peter- you’re again trying to make Americans feel bad about themselves. You’re raining on their parade for saying that they enjoy raining bombs on lesser humans. They don’t appreciate that “downer” message.
08/6/15 8:40 AM | Comment Link
Helen Marshall said...
2How could anyone look at this photograph and sleep tonight?
08/6/15 12:39 PM | Comment Link
wemeantwell said...
3Or victims of a drone strike?
08/6/15 12:41 PM | Comment Link
bloodypitchfork said...
4“Please think of him when you hear some American say the Japs deserved it.”
Yeah, well they need to have dinner with the guy in the photo… and see if they can keep it down.
Meanwhile, a bit of truth seeps out …
quote”In the United States, virtually all reports about the devastation and radiation-related deaths stopped after a confidential memo to American media outlets requested that all reports about the atomic bombs be pre-approved by the War Department — particularly those containing scientific or technical details.”unquote
A memo. To the MSM. Naw…really? Pre-approved. By the “War Department”. Color me shocked. Not.
Oh, then there’s this..
“Two articles by prominent government officials — the first by Karl T. Compton, a respected physicist who had helped develop the atomic bombs, and the second by former Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson — offered intelligent and persuasive “behind the scenes” perspectives on the U.S. decision to use the bombs. These powerful justifications effectively quelled civic dissent and directed focus away from the ongoing suffering of the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.”unquote
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0809-southard-atomic-bomb-survivors-20150806-story.html#page=1
There you have it. Living proof how propaganda worked in the post war years. Sound familiar?
08/7/15 7:36 AM | Comment Link
Harland Doud said...
5On the evening of August 6, 1915, Allied forces commanded by Sir Frederick Stopford land at Suvla Bay, on the Aegean Sea, to launch a fresh attack against Turkish and German forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula during World War I. The landing at Suvla Bay was part of the larger August. Japanese time, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, drops the world s first atom bomb, over the city of Hiroshima.
09/4/15 4:44 AM | Comment Link
Bruce said...
6Thanks, Pitch fork (teh US PNACis for their) Abjectly DEPRAVED development of their neutron bomb to exponentially exacerbate described H/N-inflicted radioactive suffering of their future victims $0ULY for their real estate. Groves was an Apt precedent M0N$TER of their ilk, rationalizing their gamma- irradiated victims’ agonizing deaths; rather, as a ‘humane’ and “wonderful” way to die! A fiend, I0W; who died instead of aortic calcification (N0 heart) a quarter century (t)hereafter.
08/6/17 2:25 PM | Comment Link