:mad:
I think Derrida would have had a field day with the slight bias of bomber people essentially patting themselves on the back for single handily being able to win the war despite those annoying ground forces wanting to get themselves killed in a glorious land invasion…
I think Derrida’s biggest problem was that he spent too much time doing something singlehanded while alone, which is reflected in his wanker work, while the Survey at times, despite many more hands applied to more impressive analytical tools, emulates him. 
Uh-hem…
The other “contradiction” in the Survey was the fact that they were just using incendiaries rather than atom-bombs to devastate cities. Hiroshima may well have been just burned to the ground rather than nuked…
I think Keegan had some pointed comments regarding Le May and Spaatz (and Harris as well) aside from the A-bombings. Mainly, that the firebombing of Japanese cities was largely unnecessary as air power could have been better used by isolating Japan by mining harbors, targeting rail and fuel centers, and finishing off any naval or merchant shipping left. In essence, instead of targeting the hard to get at Japanese industry that was dispersed by burning the cities around them, they could have strangled the resources and transportation centers that made Japan so vulnerable to begin with. Also, bombers could have been concentrated against the Japanese home island garrisons inflicting a prolonged, grinding bombardment attack that would have weakened them for the invasion forces…
But of course they continued to blunder under the same delusion that Bomber Harris had. That air power could better win wars singlehandedly rather than in direct support of armies. These notions, never really ever backed by solid evidence, caused countless civilians to die unnecessarily…
My bold
Diverting the two A bomb B-29’s to mine laying wouldn’t have had any impact on the war’s end, but there was a significant and effective aerial minelaying operation which helped Japan towards surrender (Nick, I expect you know this from your earlier post, but I’m expanding on it for other forum members who might not know about it.)
Summary
A classic example of the use of influence mines was a multiphased mining campaign called Operation Starvation, carried out by the U.S. against the Japanese during the final stages of the war in the Pacific. Over 12,000 mines were laid by U.S. aircraft in Japanese shipping routes and harbor approaches , sinking 650 Japanese ships and totally disrupting all maritime shipping. Japan was completely unprepared to cope with these influence mines which saturated her home waters; and those not sunk by mines were either forced to stay in closed ports or divert to a few overcrowded ports where they were prey to attack by aircraft and submarine. The virtual collapse of Japan’s seaborne transportation and heavy industry resulted.
http://members.aol.com/helmineron/minehist.htm
Yup! But it could have been expanded even further…I don’t think the targeting of cities to the extent that they were was necessitated…
How much would diverting aircraft to minelaying have actually helped, given just how effective the submarine campaign was already? The relevant statistic isn’t the number of ships sunk by mines, but the number if ships sunk per aircraft mission which would not otherwise have been sunk by allied submarines.
I suspect the value is actually pretty small, and as such the aircraft would have been better employed against land targets - notably the railways.
Bingo, you’ve it in one.
Although I’m not sure about the mother lode of super cannabis, more like too much imbibing of a good local red.:mrgreen:
Had this debate with a mate sometime back,and he couldn’t get the gist of it, so I thought I’d run it by you guys and was SURE I’d get some positive feedback from the knowledgeable posters on here.
I was basing my argument on the U.S. Strategic bombing survey, so, as I posted, if anyone thinks the survey is a load of old cobblers, we’re back to square one, and those ‘‘bombs had to be dropped argument’’ which is fair enough.
Although I’m not convinced.
This is the Survey, worth a look…
http://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm
It was established for the purpose of conducting an impartial and expert study of the effects of our aerial attack on Germany and Japan and has no U.S. Air force influence as far as I can tell.
Me neither.
Despite Japan putting out peace feelers to the USSR, there is nothing to suggest that it would have surrendered on terms acceptable to all the Allies just by being strangled and conventionally bombed. Japan absorbed the Tokyo firebombings and the USN turkey shoot in its coastal waters and various other assaults and disasters, and responded by simply hunkering down for a civilian bamboo spear defence of the homeland.
But for the atom bombs, the invasion would have gone ahead.
Which brings me to the point that I think the threatened invasion is still relevant to modern considerations about Japan’s surrender and the effect of the atom bombs.
Forgive me if the point I’m about to express has been made before, because I really didn’t want to wade through all the preceding pages here. An early statement (1st page) certainly contains some of the elements:
The importance of Hirishima/Nagasaki for the future isn’t whetther or not it should have happened but have we learned enough from what did happen to keep it from happening again
Have you thought of the consequences of NOT dropping the bomb(s)? Large, well-equipped armies, cold-war tensions, improving technology, and no historical demonstration of the weapon being used on cities to act as a deterrent? Add to this the notion that there will always be elements within any military organization that wishes to/will test a new weapon/strategy/tactic out in combat (especially if their side starts to lose), and you have the recipe for a large-scale nuclear war that would make the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pale to nothing by comparison. Those two bombings, ghastly as they were, may well have saved ALL of the rest of us.
And, as a side note, I’m sure someone else in the preceding 38 (!) pages has noted that Japan was working on its own bomb. And of course, in their desperate straits, I’m sure it would NEVER EVER occur to the Japanese military of the time to use the bomb should it have come into their hands. :roll:
Stop beating a dead horse and let this thread die the death it deserves…
I have noticed with some amusement that the Russians on here see everything through mirrors - that is, it’s always all about Russia, or, in this case, about the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. As Whoopie Goldberg said at the Academy Awards one year, “It’s all about me!”
Frankly, this is a fine bit of nonsense, especially since Truman had already told Stalin that the US had a bomb of unusual power. None of this was news to Stalin anyway since in spite of all odds, he had penetrated the security screen to a degree at Los Alamos. Hard to keep such a huge project a complete secret anyway.
The main, and probably the only real reason for dropping the bomb was to push the Japanese into surrender and to save the US from incurring huge casualty and death lists. Incredibly, even after the first bomb had been dropped, the Japanese continued to dither. It could be true, nevertheless, that we might have waited longer between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but there’s not much evidence that the Jaopanese would have surrendered in the meantime.
Interestingly, the Japanese themselves were conducting atomic research with the same but elusive goal of creating a high powered explosive device. They were even less far along than the Germans, however, the original target of the a-bomb in any event. Had they succeeded, it’s doubtful they would have hesitated to use it on the Americans, British and Australians.
Was I wrong about the Japanese being less far along than the Germans? I don’t know, honestly, but from what I have read, I came away with that thought.
I’m sure the Great and Maganimous Leader Joseph Stalin had only the finest and most charitable motives in mind. I have heard this before. You are welcome to your opinion, but I don’t have to believe a word of it, nor you, mine. Just one question: were the Russians prepared to accept anything less than UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER from the Germans? LOL. I thought so.
More BS. The quote is not from “The Great Leader Stalin” but by the German Clausewitz. Do they teach history in Russia?
Stalin desperately needed the time to ship his divisions from the west to the east. An early Japanese surrender to the Americans would have meant that he could not retake the “lost islands”. Speed was not something he was interested in other than in shipping his troops east. Much earlier, the Americans British had asked Stalin to open a front against the Japanese but he had refused because he was busy killing Germans. Nobody can blame him for that. Later on, when it looked like the Japanese would be beaten by the Americans in any case, the prospects of sharing the victory with the Soviets looked very unattractive. Fortunately, one of Macarthur’s few smart moves after the US had occupied Japan, was to tell the Russians to back off. It worked.
The irony of it all was that the second the first bomb hit an American deck in Honolulu, the Japanese were already beaten. They could hit the Dutch who were hanging on a string and governing a colony whose inhabitants did not support them, unlike the British in India. They could have attacked the British and nothing would have happened - not enough troops, transport or arms; they could have (and did) attack the Australians but Australia did not have a navy or air force or troops enough to challenge the Japanese. They could, however, fend them off. The Americans, sleepy and smug and profoundly in denial as they were, had all of those things and the capacity for so much more. Attacking the US fleet in Hawaii was probably the single most stupid thing the Japanese could have done and without any followup at a time when they were most vulnerable. In the long litany of Japanese errors and misteps this has to be the biggest of all because it ensured their defeat from the very beginning.
I no longer see any viable reason why we are in Germany. The only things keeping us there seem to be as forward air bases and hospitals for questionable adventures in the Middle East, plus the fact that we have literally invested hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure to service our military. But strategically, the point is lacking and the effort seems to be mostly wasted.
If the German Government asked us to leave, we would leave, pure and simple. The Germans like us there because we spend lots of money in Germany, but we are there by permission, in spite of the wrong headed assertions of our Russian friends.
Temperature makes Russia great? LOL! Then what does temperature make Chad? Or norethern Canada? Or Finland. What horse pucky.
Pretty loose thinking, Rsing Sun…
LOL. Let’s not compare the Lada with anything other than my lawnmower, puleeze. Actually right here in lil ol San Antonio, Texas, we have a huge Toyota plant (brand new). Unfortunately, they make Tundra Trucks here so they are cutting production. If they convert it to Prius it’ll take a couple of years to make the transition.
Can someone please tell me what German province Enrico Fermi was from? Oh yes, the man who built the first controlled nuclear reaction under the grandstands at the Univerity of Chicago was Italian, not German.
[QUOTE=Rising Sun*;123829]I missed that little gem of contorted logic, but it’s so good it can’t be allowed to go unnoticed.
This, to the extent there is any logic in Herman the Second’s thought, produces the logical process:
Canadians don’t really make cars.
Most Canadian cars come from Japan.
Actually, Rising Sun, the Canadians do make some cars. Probably the majority of canadian cars are now from japan, but the presence of General Motors and Ford directly across the border from Dearborn and Detroit made Canadian car manufacture inevitable. For all I know, the Japanese have plants in Canada too.