View Full Version : Konichiwa
Roguish Lawyer
08-11-2023, 21:33
I am leaving Japan after two weeks here. Yesterday we visited the museum at the Hiroshima Peace Park. They had a guestbook where they encouraged you to leave your thoughts. Some guy — no idea who — wrote “Remember Pearl Harbor.”
Now if it had been written in Japanese:
真珠湾を忘れない
Nice...saved lives it did on both sides...can you imagine what an invasion would have looked like, and the number of armed civilians killed?
mark46th
08-12-2023, 09:48
My dad drove landing craft in the Pacific during WW II. I am here because of the bomb.
My maternal grandfather joined the Navy when he was 31 or 32 and was on an oiler at Okinawa. He said that after seeing what went on there, he couldn't imagine what an attack on the mainland would look like.
Badger52
08-12-2023, 16:37
Nice...saved lives it did on both sides...can you imagine what an invasion would have looked like, and the number of armed civilians killed?One of the few times my Dad talked (B-29 driver off Tinian) we were flipping through his unit history and looked at some before/after strike photos. He said, quite candidly, that he still had trouble understanding why it ever had to get to the bomb, looking at what "we" (Lemay's new tactics) had done to Japan already, yet they wouldn't surrender. A general land invasion was inconceivable to him.
The Reaper
08-20-2023, 11:01
The Red Army switching sides and going through the Japanese forces in China like crap through a goose at the same time might have also had a little something to do with it, too.
Ultimately, what was the destructive difference between the firebombing of Tokyo (or Dresden or Hamburg, for that matter) and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? At some point, you are just bouncing rubble and re-killing the dead.
I guess you could say we saved gas by only sending one plane at the time.
Just my .02, YMMV.
TR