Excessive use of force in war

Discussion in 'History' started by spacemansteve, Jun 20, 2006.

  1. AmishRakeFight Remember, remember. Registered Senior Member

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    Of course we had a choice! I wholeheartedly agree with you. Our choices, in the minds of America's leaders, were as follows:

    a) Commence Operation Downfall (with it's sub-operations Coronet and Olympic) and bring the fight to the enemy with an "Asian D-Day".

    -The estimated American deaths for the first 90 days of Operation Olympic (the planned invasion of Kyushu) as projected by several different staff studies were 456,000 casualties, with 109,000 or more dead or missing. A study done for Secretary of War Henry Stimson's staff by William Shockley produced results that a complete invasion of Japan would result in 1.7–4 million American casualties, including 400,000–800,000 fatalities.

    -In the same study conducted for Secretary of War Henry Stimson, it was concluded that conquering mainland Japan would result in 5-10 million Japanese casualties. This figure is a sum of both military and civilians; militarily, including air force, army, and navy. "The key assumption was a large-scale participation of civilians in the defense of Japan." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Estimated_casualties_for_Downfall) As several members here have shown, the Japanese fought to the death, not allowing themselves to surrender or to be captured. This mentality derived from the reigning mindset of the Japanese people as a whole that their emperor was divine. Therefore, the assumption made by Allied strategists was not one of faulty logic or fuzzy reasoning: the Japanese, as shown by several island battles, would not surrender easily, nor give up any inch of soil unless it is first saturated liberally in blood (and what nationalities blood it is does not concern them.)

    b) Pull out of the war, which was no option at all, in all honesty.

    c) Kill several birds with one stone by dropping a new futuristic weapon on a Japanese city. This would allow America and the world to witness and test the destructive power of the almighty weapon straight from the Manhatten cradle. Also, this would put the bite back into America's constant bark by launching a crushing attack on an enemy whose "Japanese military officials", unless convinced otherwise, "were unanimously opposed to any negotiations." (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki).

    When compared to options A and B, C doesn't seem like too bad of a choice. It was relatively assured that, if Option A was pursued, the civilians that would be bombed would become active enemies against the invaders, for the reasons stated earlier by myself and several other members. Therefore, yes, women, children, and babies (I honestly laughed out loud when I read you trying to play a sympathetic card by adding "babies" in there) were killed. But are women and children so superior to men in terms of human rights and worth that 400,000 civilians being killed are a better option than over 14 million people, both American and Japanese, being killed? Sure, American men would be dying, but in light of the evidence, it was more humane to launch the A-Bombs than to launch a full scale invasion that would not only wipe out the 400,000 civilians who died in Nagasaki and Hiroshima but also kill twentyfold that number of military soldiers and civilians alike! And keep in mind, minor military posts are still military posts the same as minor criminals are still criminals. Military posts are military posts are military posts.

    AmishRakeFight
     
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  3. spacemansteve Not enough brain space Registered Senior Member

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    Buffalo Roam:
    I've been trying to find info on Ketso-Go for quite some time now, thanks for the link, Its a pretty good read

    G. F. Schleebenhorst:
    You seem to be getting quite worked up about this. So clearly no matter what we say is going to change your opinion. However it is an opinion made in recent times, not realising the full situation during 1945. It is an opinion typical of Anti Military types who want to believe that man is capable of peacefull living when it clearly is not. We are all territorial just like most animals are, we all experience jealousy, anger and other such feelings. Peace is something the world unfortunately will never see.

    I will never say that the thought of dropping a bomb on unarmed civilians gives me warm fuzzies all over, and i begin to sweat with excitement. But when it comes to choosing the lesser evil, it is easily justified.

    I think the US is justified in this argument so i'm going to make a request that all references/discussions/debates about the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki cease. People can argue over and over about the justification of this strike but i want to move onto different examples.

    I was just remembering the bombing of Al Zarqarwi in Iraq recently (Glad to be rid of him). The USAF used 2 x 1000lb bombs (i think it was 1000, correct me if i'm wrong). Would sending troops have been better? I'll keep my opinion on this quiet until i've seen discussion on this
     
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  5. leopold Valued Senior Member

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    it seems to me that if the military can achieve an objective by mechanized forces only without the loss of our men then it would be advantageous to do so.

    edit
    paraphrasing patton:
    the idea in war is not for you to die for your country but to make the other poor dumb bastard die for his.
     
    Last edited: Jun 26, 2006
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  7. Buffalo Roam Registered Senior Member

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    Hay Steve it was a pair of lazer guided 500lb gp's.
     
  8. G. F. Schleebenhorst England != UK Registered Senior Member

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    Were there no babies there? Did they evacuate them all or something? Since when is the truth "playing a sympathetic card"?



    You are basing this on ESTIMATES. Estimates that as far as a lot of people agree were vastly inflated after the bomb was dropped. Did those women and children attack pearl harbour? No, the nationalist militarist ruling government of Japan did. The figure of 14 million is a joke. In any case, even if it WAS 14 million, that's absolutely no justification to DELIBERATELY kill women and children, or carry out an act of terrorism.


    What evidence? In light of a bunch of guesses is more like it.

    You seem to forget the hundreds of thousands of women and children who lived in those cities. Do you know why those two cities were as of yet untouched? Because they were of no military significance.

    By that rationale the World Trade Centre was a military target. I am sure there were some aircraft carriers or a soldier in New York Somewhere on that day. So if I am to concede that the A-Bombings were a military operation against a military target, you concede that the WTC attacks were in fact nothing more than the same. Deal?
     
  9. G. F. Schleebenhorst England != UK Registered Senior Member

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    I totally agree with you. I don't see why you think based on my arguments that I am an "anti military type", because I am not. In fact I am a realist and someone who thinks that it is more important to think for yourself than simply to accept what your government/your history books tell you and rather look at things logically based on facts and not estimates or "facts" that sprung up at convenient moments.

    I remember hearing that several civilians were killed in the attack.

    The fact that the US won't even keep a civilian death toll is probably the thing that worries me the most about the whole Iraq thing.
     
  10. AmishRakeFight Remember, remember. Registered Senior Member

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    I completely agree with you in that the stats I posted are estimates. But then again, since we never carried out Operation Downfall, we will never have anything but estimates about the casualties. I'm sure that if we went forward with Operation Downfall, we would be sitting here debating estimates over how many people would have died had we just ended it with the two nukes. All I'm saying is are the lives of 300,000 people are worth so much more than fourteen million, or ten million, or five million, or 300,001 people? I agree with you that the civilians were innocent, but had Operation Downfall been conducted, it was fairly common knowledge that the civilians would become active fighters against the Allied invaders.

    Also, keep in mind that the Japanese people were taught to regard their emperor as a God. Let's take a look at what history says about people fighting for their god: The Crusades. The Christians blowing up abortion clinics because they're "immoral". The Muslims destroying the infidels. The Japanese kamakazi'ing into battleships. The Persians warring with Alexander the Great. If history has taught us anything, it's that people motivated by belief in a higher being to do work will beg, borrow, steal, kill, and utterly vanquish to complete that task.

    Having a few soldiers in an area does not make it a military base! Hiroshima was a minor supply and logistics base for the Japanese military. "The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops. It was one of several Japanese cities left deliberately untouched by American bombing, allowing an ideal environment to measure the damage caused by the atomic bomb." Wikipedia did my work for me. The World Trade Centers had nothing to do with American military logistics, supply, or communications, and they certainly weren't a storage point or an assembly area for troops.

    By the way, have you ever heard the saying "Pride comes before the fall"? The Americans dropped leaflets by the hundreds of thousands all over Nagasaki and Hiroshima telling the Japanese to get the hell out of Dodge if they know what's good for them.

    Darwin 1 Japanese 0

    AmishRakeFight
     
  11. G. F. Schleebenhorst England != UK Registered Senior Member

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    That has been my point all along, though. The moment they take up arms against your armed forces they are no longer innocent civilians. There is a difference, as I have said before, between a 6 year old girl walking to school, and that same 6 year old girl charging you with a knife in her teeth with a bomb strapped to her. That doesn't mean you can kill her JUST IN CASE she takes up arms, does it?

    Well, if, without "fighting for their god", they are prepared to kill 300,000 unarmed and completely innocent civilians for no reason other than to flex some military might and show the commies what we can do, and then lie about it afterwards, your point isn't really as valid as you think it was.



    If Hiroshima or Nagasaki had been of any real military significance they would have been bombed to nothing long before August 1945.

    If I ring your doorbell and tell you "get out of your house and move somewhere else or I'll come back tomorrow and shoot you because I don't agree with the war in Iraq" does that then absolve me of murder when I come back the next day and machinegun your family? Would you think it acceptable if I shot an old woman because I wanted Bush out of the whitehouse?

    More like terrorism: 1 honour: 0.
     
    Last edited: Jun 26, 2006
  12. Buffalo Roam Registered Senior Member

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    If you have the ability to take a large enemy reasource out of the fight before it begins do you do it, or do you wait untill you are engauged and are taking multiple tens of thousands of casualities, and then try to explain to the people back home that you are taking unnessary cassulties because you were splitting hairs over when these people were legal targets for destruction as a combat force, If you were in charge back then and I found out that you had gotten any of my family killed because of your overly developed sence of fair play, I would hunt you down and kill you my self, these people were a threat to our troops and I'm sorry in some situations you can't seperate the goats from the sheep if there are any sheep.

    ps: when it comes to war and dieing, honor be damed, survival and winning comes first, and Patton was right, you make the other poor bastard die for his country!
     
  13. TW Scott Minister of Technology Registered Senior Member

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    4,149
    There was no JUST IN CASE here. That six year old was being trained to do this and in such case immediately becomes a soldier. Smae with the women. If we thought we could have taken the Island without civillian losses we would have done it.

    Why do you say that? Is it becuase we left a staging point alone when we had other targets to bomb. The we realized hey we got two targets here that are viable and largely untouched. They are also less heavily popolated that the other areas we could bomb.

    Huge strawman.

    Actually if we were at war and you were kind enough to warn me before bombing my house I would run.

    More like US 1 Japan -1
     
  14. G. F. Schleebenhorst England != UK Registered Senior Member

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    So you are basically saying that in your opinion women and children are fair game in a war and that the military should target and kill them at will?

    What if the enemy starts killing your women and children for the reasons you have given above? Wouldn't you call them terrorists?
     
  15. Buffalo Roam Registered Senior Member

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    16,931
    Are you really that slow, yes if the women and children are going to become active participant in the active war they become ligament target, and the Japanese were training the civilians to become a active element in the defence of the home Island, I have seen the films of the training that was being conducted with the civilians, men, women, and children, part of the idea was to tangel up the U.S. military with the civilians taking the brunt of the casulties and then the Imperal Forces would attack the americans with the hope of then defeating the landings and throwing them back into the sea, the belief that to die and take a enemy with you for the Emporer was the greatest act of self sacrifice that you could do. was well engraned in the population at the time, And it took the Emporer to tell them to stop, and it took the bombs to convince the Emporer.
     
  16. G. F. Schleebenhorst England != UK Registered Senior Member

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    Was that really a question?

    Well, you've seen my argument. There's no point in going around in circles so I will just say this once more.

    It doesn't matter whether you have seen films detailing what training they have been given, that's still no excuse for anyone to exterminate those civilians "just in case" they decide to oppose the invasion.

    Once again:

    There is no excuse for deliberately exterminating innocent, non-combatant women and children in a war.
     
  17. AmishRakeFight Remember, remember. Registered Senior Member

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    Once again, I'll agree with you 'til I'm blue in the face but your missing the point. There is no "just in case" here! I am 100% in agreement with you in that if the civilians had been exterminated because there is a chance that they might fight against an invasion then it was wrong. But the fact of the matter is that the Japanese civilians were in a basic training of sorts. They were being taught how, why, where, and when they should die for their Emperor. Saying that killing the Japanese civilians because they haven't fought yet is tantamount to saying that Japanese men in basic training shouldn't be killed because they haven't shot you yet.

    Check wikipedia, it verifies this 100% from several reputable sources.

    AmishRakeFight
     
  18. G. F. Schleebenhorst England != UK Registered Senior Member

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    Well, I'd consider Eisenhower a "reputable source", and I'd consider Admiral Leahy a "reputable source". They both considered, at the time and in biographies, the A-Bombings to have been completely unnecessary, as a surrender could have been negotiated a number of other ways. If you want reputable sources I don't think you can do better than that. I think Gen. Douglas MacArthur is another one who shares their opinion.

    The thing that it comes down to is that they never intended to invade mainland Japan (and neither did they have to), it was all just the perfect excuse for some muscle-flexing and an extremely sick experiment.
     
  19. leopold Valued Senior Member

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  20. leopold Valued Senior Member

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    you are arguing just for the sake of it.

    lets take a scenario
    you own a farm that produces chickens
    there is also in the area a colony of killer bees that like nothing more than chicken soup.
    by your reasoning you would only kill the bees that killed your chickens.
    in such a case you will NEVER STOP killing bees.
    the most reasonable course of action would be to take out the entire colony and be done with it. then put measures in place that will prevent such a thing from happening again.

    as you know the americans followed the second option.
     
  21. spacemansteve Not enough brain space Registered Senior Member

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    Thanks Leopold99 for trying to move the debate into more constructive area's, and thanks Buffalo for correcting me, i knew my original guess was wrong but wasn't buggered at the time to research it hehe

    Now i'm going to ask this ONE MORE TIME!

    NO MORE ARGUING ABOUT THE HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI BOMBINGS! WE'LL ALL TURN BLUE OVER THIS DIVIDE. AGREE TO DISAGREE!! LETS MOVE TO MORE INTERESTING AND CONSTRUCTIVE AREA'S LIKE THE ONE MENTIONED ABOVE. 2 x 500LB BOMBS ON AL ZARQAWI

    NEXT PERSON WHO DISOBEYS THIS WITHIN THE NEXT HOUR I WILL STRIVE TO PUNISH FOR NOT BEING INTERESTING! hehe

    THAT MEANS YOU G. F. SCHLEENBENHORST
     
  22. G. F. Schleebenhorst England != UK Registered Senior Member

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    OK then, on a slightly different subject....to all the "A-bombing defenders", here's a scenario for you: You are a captain on a battleship in WWII and you have just sank an enemy battleship quite close (a few hundred miles) to the coast of a neutral country. However, it sank slowly and as a result there are boatloads of sailors who managed to get away in lifeboats and are now floating in the water. The rest of the enemy fleet has evaded you.

    Would you:

    a) Pick up the survivors and take them prisoner....
    b) Machine gun/kill the survivors....
    c) Leave them behind in their lifeboats?
     
  23. snake river rufus Registered Senior Member

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    Pick up the survivoors if I have room, if not leave them in their lifeboats.
     

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