Appologise for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

[Aetites]

I found an interesting article that I woudln't mind hearing peoples opinions on. Warning, this gets very political.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...s-2045890.html

The article is a bit bull but the comments are generally pretty good.

For my part I would like to address:

Japan were in no way ready to surrender. It had been drilled into Japanese soldiers from day one that to surrender was paramount to heresy, to a crime, to extreme cowardice. While I don't have the exact numbers I can guarentee that the percentage of Japanese soldiers surrendering were FAR below that of any other nation. People who did surrender were less than human, which is a big reason why Japan treated it's prisoners so abominably.

Why do you think Hogan's heroes was not set in a Japanese pow camp. Because Hogan would have been worked to death and beheaded if he wasn't. The fact is Japan was lead by an immoral totalitarian leadership and like Germany many abhorrent policies were widespread if not official.

Neither was Japan 'mostly murdering soldiers' Some examples are the rape of Nanking and China to Singapore. Pretty much any civilian captured by the Japanese suffered horribly.

From the aticle i gleaned this quote from Lord Louis Mountbatten - "I am responsible for trying to kill as many Japanese as I can. War is crazy ... But it would be even more crazy if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese"

The fact is mounting an invasion of Japan would have cost hundred's of thousands of Allied (and Japanese) lives, but is that comparable to the civilians who died in the atomic blasts?

There is no doubt both sides did disgusting things from the fire bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, the German treatment of Russian POWs and vice versa, to the Jewish holocaust (both by Germany and the USSR) and the aformentioned Japanese treatment of civilians and pows.

That being said though I don't find because the other side has not appolgised first, a reasonable argument against saying sorry. Someone has to be first and even if the other side doesn't appolgise, that does not make it wrong to do so when warrented.

But is the dropping of the atomic bombs a 'war crime' worthy of saying sorry?

[Mandallorean]

For my part, I would certainly argue against apology. While on the surface, it initially sounds like something supportable, it serves no purpose and in fact, does a disservice to the men and women that fought and died trying to stave off the advances of Imperical Japan during the 1930s and 40s.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on WWII, but I have read enough and the Japanese Imperial Army at that time was a barbaric, murderous machine. They were guilty of many, many atrocities in China, Indo-China and the Korean Peninsula long before they turned their attention toward us at Pearl Harbor. In fact, Japan was at war in China as far back as 1931, 10 years before Pearl Harbor. In 1937, one of the worst genocides of the 20th century occurred in Nanking, China where the Japanese army killed over 300,000 men, women and children. You can read a very detailed account of this at:

http://www.historyplace.com/worldhis...de/nanking.htm
(warning, this is not for the faint of heart).

This is an example of how the Japanese waged war during this time.

Fast forward to the WWII battles on islands like Guadelcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa and it became clear that the Japanese army (along with the general population) would fight to the death if the allies tried a standard invasion of Japan the way that Germany was defeated. One estimate projected that invading the Japanese home islands would cost “1.7 to 4 million American casualties, including 400,000 to 800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities” and take over 10 years to complete.

I think as time goes by, we tend to forget just how terrible this war was. This was a war unlike any other. It wasn’t like Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, This was an entire world at war. A true threat to life and liberty of every human living at the time. The “bad guys” truly had global ambitions to take over and run the entire planet, using the “loser” populations as so much slave labor to be disposed of when they were no longer useful.

Apologize for using atomic weapons to end that threat? I don’t think so.

[Lydos]

I agree with Lou on this one I feel no need to apologize for taking the necessary action to finish something we did not start. Had we not dropped the bomb there would have been many more casualties on both sides.