Hell yeah try to find the WW1 or Mongol episodes if you can. I think the Japanese empire ones are still free.
Supernova in the East is a great listen… I read Chris Wallace’s Countdown to 1945 just before I listened to this, inadvertently. Pairing the two together, it’s hard to say Truman did anything other than make the only possible decision. I mean, there were Japanese Gorilla soldiers fighting 29 years after the war ended that would only stop when relieved by their commanding officer… CRAZY!
Are you really taking up for Japan right now? The country that sided with Hitler. How many people died leading up to dropping the bombs? How many millions of civilians got killed before they dropped them. I would have dropped enough on them there would be no country left. I also know they were weakened before it and would have ended up surrendering to Russia and that wouldn’t have ended well either. Freakin pansy.
Civilian casualties, innocent or otherwise, have always been a part of war since its inception. The government is supposed to be the tool of the people and representative of the people. Governments acting against the will of the people set the stage for revolution. Given that the Japanese believed that their emperor was a deity, they supported its policies to include the atrocities in China, treatment of POWs, and science experiments such as live vivisection. Also people mention the atomic bombs, but we killed far more in the fire bombing of Tokyo.
Nobody believed we had bombs that big, we could have told them but they wouldn't believe it. They didn't surrender after the first one because they didn't think we had anymore. So after they second bomb, they knew we had capabilities to keep producing them. This is what I remember from some documentary . Could be remembering wrong.
General Dwight Eisenhower, in his memoirs, recalled a visit from Secretary of War Henry Stimson in late July 1945: “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose 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.’”
Perhaps this is a case of viewing things through a 2022 lens? I cant imagine anyone wanted to see civilians die. Esp after the holocaust. Think about, US didnt want to engage in the War. Remember, the day that would live in infamy.
