On Nov 2, 4:12 pm, Tim wrote:
wrote:
On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 10:59:13 -0700, Chuck Gould
wrote:

We had reduced Japanese naval power to the point where an effective
blockade of the island nation would probably have inspired its
surrender within a matter of weeks...likely without an invasio

The GIs who took Okinawa would probably dissagree with this
assessment. There were still Japanese soldiers holding out on islands
years after the war

Even up to a few years ago, there were forgotten and ancient japanese
soldiers living off the land on many of the thousands of islands, that
were still manning their posts.

Quite commendable actually.

I don't think they were defeated, and I never met one soldier from
that theatre that thought they were either.

On Nov 2, 1:34?pm, wrote:
On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 10:59:13 -0700, Chuck Gould

wrote:
We had reduced Japanese naval power to the point where an effective
blockade of the island nation would probably have inspired its
surrender within a matter of weeks...likely without an invasio

The GIs who took Okinawa would probably dissagree with this
assessment. There were still Japanese soldiers holding out on islands
years after the war. I dsoubt there was any kind of attrition war that
would have defeated them and we might still have an Iraqi style
insurrection around the world.
Remember the Japanese invented the suicide bomber.

The conquest of Okinawa undoubtedly contributed to the disheartened
state of the Japanese empire at the time of the bombing. From what I
have been able to learn after the fact, I tend to agree with the
opinions expressed by Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur, as well as
Admiral Leahy. We had options. We chose one that proved to work
decisively.
Monday morning quarterbacks and certain generals and admirals will
long debate whether we chose the "best" option. We succeeded in
keeping the Russians out of Japan, denying them warm water Pacific
naval bases that would have allowed them to more easily launch a
conventional, 1940's style war against the United States.

On Nov 2, 3:30?pm, John H. wrote:
On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:57:13 -0700, Chuck Gould





wrote:
On Nov 2, 1:34?pm, wrote:
On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 10:59:13 -0700, Chuck Gould

wrote:
We had reduced Japanese naval power to the point where an effective
blockade of the island nation would probably have inspired its
surrender within a matter of weeks...likely without an invasio

The GIs who took Okinawa would probably dissagree with this
assessment. There were still Japanese soldiers holding out on islands
years after the war. I dsoubt there was any kind of attrition war that
would have defeated them and we might still have an Iraqi style
insurrection around the world.
Remember the Japanese invented the suicide bomber.

The conquest of Okinawa undoubtedly contributed to the disheartened
state of the Japanese empire at the time of the bombing. From what I
have been able to learn after the fact, I tend to agree with the
opinions expressed by Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur, as well as
Admiral Leahy. We had options. We chose one that proved to work
decisively.
Monday morning quarterbacks and certain generals and admirals will
long debate whether we chose the "best" option. We succeeded in
keeping the Russians out of Japan, denying them warm water Pacific
naval bases that would have allowed them to more easily launch a
conventional, 1940's style war against the United States.

Speaking of Japanese in a boating forum...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinyo

These came up in a novel I'm reading. Interesting vessels!- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Sort of an ominous caption on the second photo

"A Shinyo underway, being tested by an American soldier".

What? Was he a prisoner, strapped into place? Let's hope the testing
was *after* the war was over..........

On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:57:13 -0700, Chuck Gould
wrote:

On Nov 2, 1:34?pm, wrote:
On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 10:59:13 -0700, Chuck Gould

wrote:
We had reduced Japanese naval power to the point where an effective
blockade of the island nation would probably have inspired its
surrender within a matter of weeks...likely without an invasio

The GIs who took Okinawa would probably dissagree with this
assessment. There were still Japanese soldiers holding out on islands
years after the war. I dsoubt there was any kind of attrition war that
would have defeated them and we might still have an Iraqi style
insurrection around the world.
Remember the Japanese invented the suicide bomber.

The conquest of Okinawa undoubtedly contributed to the disheartened
state of the Japanese empire at the time of the bombing. From what I
have been able to learn after the fact, I tend to agree with the
opinions expressed by Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur, as well as
Admiral Leahy. We had options. We chose one that proved to work
decisively.
Monday morning quarterbacks and certain generals and admirals will
long debate whether we chose the "best" option. We succeeded in
keeping the Russians out of Japan, denying them warm water Pacific
naval bases that would have allowed them to more easily launch a
conventional, 1940's style war against the United States.

Speaking of Japanese in a boating forum...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinyo

These came up in a novel I'm reading. Interesting vessels!

On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:08:53 -0700, Tim wrote:


Eisboch wrote:
"Chuck Gould" wrote in message
oups.com...


We had reduced Japanese naval power to the point where an effective
blockade of the island nation would probably have inspired its
surrender within a matter of weeks...likely without an invasion.


rest snipped for brevity

Monday morning quarterbacking is always easier than playing the game and
we'll probably never know for sure, but there where many then and many today
that believed Japan was close to using an A-bomb ... on *us
http://www.kimsoft.com/korea/jp-hung.htm

Eisboch

I didn't know that Japan had that type of technology....yet.

Nothing close. That's an "internet speculation piece" to me.
A few facts, then like fission, they split into a mushroom cloud of
speculation.
Might as well believe anything. Like Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction. Garbage intelligence, and mindless and erroneous
speculation.
The MacArthur and Ike views mentioned by Chuck are almost irrelevant,
if even accurate and contemporaneous with the time the bombs were
dropped. Theater generals painting rosy scenarios of easy victory, or
greatly underestimating actual costs wasn't new then, and still
happens.
Truman and Marshall were running the show, and had the best picture.
Personally, I would have asked a grunt who survived Tarawa or Iwo Jima
or Okinawa, who had seen, heard and smelled the mayhem, his buddies
killed and maimed. He fought the Japs on those islands, and the Japs
fought to their death.
"Well, son, we have a choice. We can drop a couple A-bombs on Japan,
war's over, and you can go home. Or if you prefer, gear up and we'll
land you in Japan to fight more Japs. What'll it be?"
Then go with the answer. Truman already knew the answer.
Anyway, having read much on the then Japanese view of combat and
honor, it isn't much different in effect than Islamo-facism. They
were nuts. The A-bomb was a nutcracker.
Nukes generate a lot of fear, which is perfectly understandable, but
the firebombing of cities, starvation, disease, and endless combat
needed to take Japan would have been much worse.
Victory in combat was the primary Jap goal, but dying in combat ran a
close second. Being toasted by an unseen enemy tossing a nuke on
your head turned their world upside down, and cracked the nut.
IMHO.
Tibbets belonged to that great generation to whom we owe so much,
and I salute him. May he RIP.
BTW, I was born in 1947. For all I know, my Dad might have died in
the invasion of Japan in '45 or '46 and then I would be writing this
as somebody else.

But then again, anyone who can (at that time) successfully calculate
bombs carried by weather ballons, that could make it to the US from
Japan all those thousands of miles across the Pacific, were actually
no dummies.

Fat lot of good that did them. Might as well throw TNT-rigged
coconuts in the gulf stream to blow up Ireland.
But hey, everything can help in war. Kept some number of
West-coasters busy on balloon patrol.
Whenever the Jap balloons come up, I'm reminded of the American bat
guy whose bats, incendiaries on their legs, were near the point of
being dropped in Japan. Those bats might have caused more Jap
casualties than the A-bombs. Who knows?

--Vic

On Nov 2, 1:59 pm, Chuck Gould wrote:
On Nov 1, 7:38?pm, Tim wrote:
On Nov 1, 3:59 pm, Short Wave Sportfishing wrote:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...article=1&catn...

"...Tibbets, then a 30-year-old colonel.."

WOAH! I think he has the right idea over secrecy in his burial,
though.

Knowing what I know now, I don't know if I could have done his job or
not. Even though it was probablyt he right thing to do, I don't think
it would be a prideful act.

But I wasn't there either.

mixed emotions

We had reduced Japanese naval power to the point where an effective
blockade of the island nation would probably have inspired its
surrender within a matter of weeks...likely without an invasion.

Perhaps, but that wasn't guaranteed. And it wasn't a reason to delay
the A-bombs.



Truman felt it was neccessary to demonstrate the effectiveness of both
the uranium bomb (Hiroshima) and the plutonium bomb (Nagasaki) to
convince the Russians that we had the will and capability to react to
any threat "with extreme prejudice".

Perhaps to some extent, but Truman's main concern was convincing Japan
to surrender.

There was no desire to demonstrate different types of bombs. The only
reason two bombs were used is because Japan surrendered between the
second and third bombs. Had Japan surrendered between the third and
fourth bombs, they'd have been nuked three times.



I was also strategically critical
to end the Japanese war before our Russian "allies" marched in during
the mop up with possible plans for occupying some of the islands and
thereby establishing effective Naval bases in the Pacfic.

True. We definitely preferred keeping the Soviets out of Japan.

But on the other hand, the Soviets were coming in because we had
invited them. We didn't want to invade Japan without the Soviets
attacking Manchuria.



Japanese people continued to die from radiation poisoning for many
years after the explosions, with more than 500,000 civilian deaths by
1951.

Nope. The death rate returned to normal a few months after the A-
bombs. There have only been a few thousand deaths attributed to A-
bomb radiation since 1945.



Many military leaders of the day disagreed with Truman's decision to
use the atomic bomb.

Maybe long after the war had ended. But there wasn't any great
groundswell of military disagreement during the war.



Dwight Eisenhower said that when he was infromed of Truman's decision
to use nuclear bombs, "I voiced my misgivings, first on the basis of
my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb
was completely unneccesary, and secondly because I thought that our
country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon who
employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save
American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment,
seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of face."

Yes, Ike was the one military leader who thought during the war that
the A-bombs were unnecessary.

But he never made much of a fuss about it. It's unlikely that Truman
even knew Ike had objected until Ike mentioned it in his post-
presidential memoirs.



Admiral William Leahy, Chief of Saff to Presidents Roosevelt and
Truman, said in his autobiography "It is my opinion that the use of
this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material
assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already
defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade
and the successful bombing with conventional weapons."

Hindsight. All Leahy said about the A-bombs *during the war* was "I'm
an expert in explosives and I say these things will never work".



General MacArthur apparently did not voice any official support for or
opposition to the bombing in 1945, but his consultant Norman Cousins
wrote in 1987 that MacArthur's oft-stated private opinion was "The war
might have ended weeks earlier if the United States had agreed, as it
later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."

One thing MacArthur said just after Hiroshima was that he thought
Japan was nowhere near surrendering and we'd probably still have to
invade before they gave up.



Authors Robert Jay Lifton and
Greg Mitchell,
("Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denmial" published by Grossett/
Putnam in 1995), claim to have documentation that official US
estimates for the number of military deaths that would result from an
invasion of Japan would be between 20,000 and 63,000.

They seem to have missed the projections of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
which pointed to 1,200,000 American casualties (including 267,000
dead) from Operation Downfall.

And how about the study the War Department had done that estimated
that invading Japan would cost 1,700,000 to 4,000,000 American
casualties (including 400,000 to 800,000 dead)?

On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 23:24:10 -0600, Vic Smith wrote:


Fat lot of good that did them. Might as well throw TNT-rigged coconuts
in the gulf stream to blow up Ireland. But hey, everything can help in
war. Kept some number of West-coasters busy on balloon patrol. Whenever
the Jap balloons come up, I'm reminded of the American bat guy whose
bats, incendiaries on their legs, were near the point of being dropped
in Japan. Those bats might have caused more Jap casualties than the
A-bombs. Who knows?

Those Japanese balloon bombs could have been an effective terrorism weapon, except for a
few small details. They were mostly incendiary devices, meant to start forest fires, some
landing as far east as Michigan, but that was back in the day where the press could keep a
secret, and very few people knew about them. Not much terror in an unknown weapon. The
other, perhaps more important reason, they were released over the winter of 1944-45. Not
the best time to be setting a forest fire in the Pacific Northwet. However, the recent fires in
California show their potential.

On Nov 2, 11:23?pm, Hiroshima Facts wrote:
On Nov 2, 1:59 pm, Chuck Gould wrote:





On Nov 1, 7:38?pm, Tim wrote:
On Nov 1, 3:59 pm, Short Wave Sportfishing wrote:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...article=1&catn...

"...Tibbets, then a 30-year-old colonel.."

WOAH! I think he has the right idea over secrecy in his burial,
though.

Knowing what I know now, I don't know if I could have done his job or
not. Even though it was probablyt he right thing to do, I don't think
it would be a prideful act.

But I wasn't there either.

mixed emotions

We had reduced Japanese naval power to the point where an effective
blockade of the island nation would probably have inspired its
surrender within a matter of weeks...likely without an invasion.

Perhaps, but that wasn't guaranteed. And it wasn't a reason to delay
the A-bombs.

Truman felt it was neccessary to demonstrate the effectiveness of both
the uranium bomb (Hiroshima) and the plutonium bomb (Nagasaki) to
convince the Russians that we had the will and capability to react to
any threat "with extreme prejudice".

Perhaps to some extent, but Truman's main concern was convincing Japan
to surrender.

There was no desire to demonstrate different types of bombs. The only
reason two bombs were used is because Japan surrendered between the
second and third bombs. Had Japan surrendered between the third and
fourth bombs, they'd have been nuked three times.

I was also strategically critical
to end the Japanese war before our Russian "allies" marched in during
the mop up with possible plans for occupying some of the islands and
thereby establishing effective Naval bases in the Pacfic.

True. We definitely preferred keeping the Soviets out of Japan.

But on the other hand, the Soviets were coming in because we had
invited them. We didn't want to invade Japan without the Soviets
attacking Manchuria.

Japanese people continued to die from radiation poisoning for many
years after the explosions, with more than 500,000 civilian deaths by
1951.

Nope. The death rate returned to normal a few months after the A-
bombs. There have only been a few thousand deaths attributed to A-
bomb radiation since 1945.

Many military leaders of the day disagreed with Truman's decision to
use the atomic bomb.

Maybe long after the war had ended. But there wasn't any great
groundswell of military disagreement during the war.

Dwight Eisenhower said that when he was infromed of Truman's decision
to use nuclear bombs, "I voiced my misgivings, first on the basis of
my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb
was completely unneccesary, and secondly because I thought that our
country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon who
employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save
American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment,
seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of face."

Yes, Ike was the one military leader who thought during the war that
the A-bombs were unnecessary.

But he never made much of a fuss about it. It's unlikely that Truman
even knew Ike had objected until Ike mentioned it in his post-
presidential memoirs.

Admiral William Leahy, Chief of Saff to Presidents Roosevelt and
Truman, said in his autobiography "It is my opinion that the use of
this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material
assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already
defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade
and the successful bombing with conventional weapons."

Hindsight. All Leahy said about the A-bombs *during the war* was "I'm
an expert in explosives and I say these things will never work".

General MacArthur apparently did not voice any official support for or
opposition to the bombing in 1945, but his consultant Norman Cousins
wrote in 1987 that MacArthur's oft-stated private opinion was "The war
might have ended weeks earlier if the United States had agreed, as it
later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."

One thing MacArthur said just after Hiroshima was that he thought
Japan was nowhere near surrendering and we'd probably still have to
invade before they gave up.

Authors Robert Jay Lifton and
Greg Mitchell,
("Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denmial" published by Grossett/
Putnam in 1995), claim to have documentation that official US
estimates for the number of military deaths that would result from an
invasion of Japan would be between 20,000 and 63,000.

They seem to have missed the projections of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
which pointed to 1,200,000 American casualties (including 267,000
dead) from Operation Downfall.

And how about the study the War Department had done that estimated
that invading Japan would cost 1,700,000 to 4,000,000 American
casualties (including 400,000 to 800,000 dead)?- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

http://www.unm.edu/~abqteach/atomica...rica_cover.htm

On Sat, 03 Nov 2007 09:12:54 -0400, JimH wrote:


There was no 3rd bomb ready for use. It was months away from
development.

Not months, weeks. The US expected to have another bomb ready in the third week of
August, and another three in September and October.

On Nov 3, 9:12 am, " JimH" ask wrote:
"Hiroshima Facts" wrote in message
ups.com...
On Nov 2, 1:59 pm, Chuck Gould wrote:
On Nov 1, 7:38?pm, Tim wrote:
On Nov 1, 3:59 pm, Short Wave Sportfishing wrote:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...article=1&catn...

"...Tibbets, then a 30-year-old colonel.."

WOAH! I think he has the right idea over secrecy in his burial,
though.

Knowing what I know now, I don't know if I could have done his job or
not. Even though it was probablyt he right thing to do, I don't think
it would be a prideful act.

But I wasn't there either.

mixed emotions

We had reduced Japanese naval power to the point where an effective
blockade of the island nation would probably have inspired its
surrender within a matter of weeks...likely without an invasion.

Perhaps, but that wasn't guaranteed. And it wasn't a reason to delay
the A-bombs.

Truman felt it was neccessary to demonstrate the effectiveness of both
the uranium bomb (Hiroshima) and the plutonium bomb (Nagasaki) to
convince the Russians that we had the will and capability to react to
any threat "with extreme prejudice".

Perhaps to some extent, but Truman's main concern was convincing Japan
to surrender.

There was no desire to demonstrate different types of bombs. The only
reason two bombs were used is because Japan surrendered between the
second and third bombs. Had Japan surrendered between the third and
fourth bombs, they'd have been nuked three times.

There was no 3rd bomb ready for use. It was months away from development.

That is incorrect. Japan missed the third A-bomb by about a week.

There were implosion assemblies already at Tinian. All they needed
was a plutonium core to put in them.

On August 11, that core was just leaving Los Alamos, to be flown to
the Pacific for a bombing around August 17-18. However, Japan had
begun to talk about surrendering the day before, and Truman had
responded by ordering a temporary halt to A-bombing to give them a
little breathing room. Groves took that a step further and ordered a
halt to shipping the core. The core only made it as far as the Los
Alamos parking lot before it was recalled.

On August 14, Truman ordered that the core be shipped and that it be
used on Tokyo. However, a few hours later Japan surrendered and the
war was over. Because of the three day delay in shipping the core,
the bombing would have been around August 20-21.

After the third bomb, there would have been a delay of some months,
but not because we lacked A-bombs. The delay would have been because
we would have begun saving them up to clear the beaches just before we
invaded.

Expected production rates would have been another three in September,
another four in October, another five in November, another seven (or
more) in December, and about ten a month from then on.