The Ship Model Forum

it really blows my mind when people vilify the use of atomic bombs against japan as being some kind of atrocity equal or worse to what the japanese did throughtout and before ww2.

1) what was th alternative to the a-bombing?
a) invasion. yeah. this would have turned out well for the millions of japanese civilians who dutifully followed their emperor's orders to fight to the death, not to mention the countless allied soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who would have died.

b) continue the blockade and bombing campaign. yeah. this would have worked out well too for the japanese... the usaaf would have burned every population center to the ground and the population/country would have suffered famine (i hear that's generally bad for kids, and who doesn't love the kids) as well as being sent back to the stone ages. and that's assuming they would have surrendered w/o a followon invasion.

2) fer pete's sake. the japanese gummint was as bad as the nazis. iris chang's stories about how they used to stake chinese pows out in fields and then mortar them to give physicians in training live trauma training, as well as vivisect other pows, is on par with anything mengele and his fellows abominations did.

being of chinese origin, i may be a bit biased, but imo, the western allies would have been justified in nuking japan into extinction if the capability and need had existed.

There was an opinion shared by a large number of the scientists at Los Alamos that the Japanese should be given fair warning of the power of the weapon in the form of a demonstration. The reverse of this opinion was, in the event of failure, it would probably give them a propaganda advantage. Remember, Hiroshima's "Little Boy" gun-type weapon had never been tested at all. (Well, it was almost accidently tested).

In the context of fall 1945, the US was already geared up to deliver several bombs a month until Japan surrendered. There was a tremendous political pressure to demonstrate the expenditure was not a Democratic Party boondogle. Republican political pressure on the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations had been increasing since mid-war, especially through agents like the Chicago Tribune, and Congress was holding hearings, public and private, on the conduct of the war. Criticism in inner circles started with the hearings on the 7 December attack in 1942 and never really ended, despite what text books told you.

What is interesting is that despite fairly accurate predictions on the number of casualties, the political leadership of the USA was unprepared for what they saw in reports back from the front.

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If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

-- "A Nation at Risk" (1983)

Hmmm, do other Chinese agree with your proposition that there is strong correlation between being Chinese and being "a bit" biased?



Considering Chinese under Mao and his old school communist party kill many more people than ever did either the Japanese or the Germans, would you suppose the western allies would have been justified in nuking China into extinction? Provided the capability and need had existed, of course?

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Assessing the impact of new area rug under modeling table.

not sure why exactly you're baiting me here besides that you're chuck, but regardless of my bias, i believe the quickest (and yes, most humane) resolution to the pacific war involved nuking japan. do you agree or disagree? answer that and justify instead of making cracks about my admitted biases.



i think the chicom government is not the legitimate government of the one china. if the western allies had been at war with the chicoms, and they had committed atrocities such as the afore-mentioned vivisection of humans, the rape of nanking, etc etc, then yes, i am not so attached to my multitudes of ethnic chinese brethren that i would not have been against nuking them too.

unfortunately for your >>snipped<< scenario, we were never at war with the chicoms in anything other than a "police action" in korea, now were we?

Don't shift the point of the debate. What you said was not merely nuking parts of Japan to gain a tactical advantage. What you said was nuking Japan to extinction. That offends me.



If I may point out the obvious, that is a disgraceful hedge. You specifically name the exact crimes of the Japanese as if those and only those would become worthy of nuclear retaliation, as if the fact that "Chicomes" killed 70 million people between 1921-1979 is considerably less serious a crime than the atrocities the Japanese perpetrated on perhaps 10-20 million.

Regardless of whether you think the Chinese communist government is "legitamate", it is as much a government as any others in the world, has been for over 50 years. It is also a widely recognized, and decidedly more powerful and influential government than all but an extremely small handful of governments in the world. So one does not gain credit by throwing up such transparent attempts at smoke screen as by saying it is "illegitimate". What is much more to the point is "multitudes of ethnic Chinese brethren" taken together is what produced this government that in the first 1/2 of its life killed more people than any other government in history, just as the multitude of Japanese which you were eager to "nuke into extinction", taken together, is what had produced a government that had penetrated vivisection of humans and the rape of Nanking. So don't be so eager to condemn an entire people and cultural lineage in theatrically vitriolic terms, bandying about worlds like "extinction", when the hands of one's own side, not to mention one's own compatriots, are not nearly as clean as one could have wished.

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Assessing the impact of new area rug under modeling table.

Now, now. I want both of you to pledge to use May 24th to remember all those who so gallantly gave their lives to keep China British.

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If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

-- "A Nation at Risk" (1983)

and it "profoundly offends" me that you attribute to me the belief that the japanese are inferior based on my statement. perhaps i need to spell out my thought process completely - based on what i've read, i believe that the japanese military, which had the potential to absolutely control the emperor, could conceivably have resisted beyond initial 2 nukings (as evidenced by the attempted coup). in a case like that, i believe that the western allies would have been justified in nuking the japanese to extinction. not because i consider the japanese to be sub-human.

but hey, again, thanks for reading my mind!



again, thanks for attributing the desire to nuke the japanese into extinction to me. please read the above (apparently much needed for you) clarification.

regardless, i'm confused. are you referring to a specific attempt to wipe people out, a la pol pot's and the khmer rouge's activities? or are you just referring to a systematic failure of idiotic governmental policies? because i'm actually not aware of the chicom government being involved in a massive program of attempting to wipe people out (their past and current cultural genocide of ethnic groups in china not-withstanding).

translation - it's kind of hard to argue with you when i have no idea what the hell you're talking about. please be more concrete in the accusations of the chicom government, which i don't particularly feel is defensible to begin with.

hmm. what event are you referring to?

Empire Day (Queen Victoria's Birthday).

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If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

-- "A Nation at Risk" (1983)

hah, ok.

Except for Hongkong, I don't believe any part of China had ever been British. So perhaps not enough people gave their lives for the day to be worth commemorating.

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Assessing the impact of new area rug under modeling table.

Hey Winston,

Good to hear from you again. It's been a couple years since we spoke in Hartford.

I'd like to see some figures...I have my doubts that the Chinese Communists killed any more people than Stalin did.

One of the guys I worked with in CT is married to a Chinese woman. I was shocked when he told me that Chinese schoolchildren were presented with an image of Americans as heros for their role in ridding China of the Japanese. He was referring to the American Volunteer Group in particular (the Flying Tigers).
All the more remarkable when one considers that these people were working for Gen. Chiang, who at the time was involved in a three-way conflict against the Japanese and the Communists.

It is pretty hard these days not to equate a nuclear attack with annihilation. The situation at the end of WWII did not really call for a limited nuclear strike, as the attempted coup by the Japanese military prove. I remember a few years ago, a British woman who was a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore was asked what she thought of the nuking of Japan. Her comment:" It's just a damn shame you only had two bombs!"

I'm sure LeMay would have gladly launched a massive nuke strike, walking his way north up the islands with multiple nukings, if he only had enough warheads.

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Les Foran
On the Oregon Trail

Les, most scholars put Mao's toll at around 60 millions. He's in a league of his own. (I guess proportionately that's like being the "Saddam Hussein of China").

Of course not all of those deaths are "executions", but they were in the execution of his policies, particularly the "Great Leap Forward", and the "Cultural Revolution."

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If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

-- "A Nation at Risk" (1983)

So much for morality in demanding appologies from the Japanese.

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"Build few and build fast,
Each one better than the last"
John Fisher

It would be nice to imagine his score will stand as the low water mark of inhumanity, but the spread of nuclear weapons make it probable more civilians will be murdered in the 21st Century than in the 20th.

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If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

-- "A Nation at Risk" (1983)

I have a hard time imagining anyone more bloodthirsty than Stalin...or more infamous for killing his own people.

At least the Japanese victums weren't their fellow countrymen. In most instances, anyway.

The Allies were motovated by a desire not to have Japan partitioned in the manner of Germany. By then, the Soviet's true motives were obvious.

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Les Foran
On the Oregon Trail

It seems quite probable that Stalin ordered many more people executed than did Mao. The number of people the Chinese communist party actually executed is actually quite low by comparison, the estimates range from under a million to may be 2-3 million. I've seen estimates of 5 million executed by Stalin.

However, Mao accepted many more deaths as a foreseeable consequence of his policies than did Stalin. Mao is heard by no less a witness than Nikita Krushchev to have said that he is perfectly willing to accept several hundred million deaths in his effort to build up China. In the end demographics show there had been 30 million excess deaths in China just between 1958 and 1963. That's more than all non-WWII related excess deaths in the USSR under Stalin. The total number of people thought to have died as result of the policies of the Chinese communist party ranges from 40-100 million, depending on who you ask, and whether you include the consequence of the Chinese civil war which the communists fought and won. No other government yet formed can match even the low end score.

But let's point out that the high estimate of 2-3 million Chinese actually executed by the Chinese communist party exceeds most estimate of the total number of Chinese civilians who were executed by the Japanese. Let's also point out that the single largest loss of Chinese lives during the Sino-Japanese war was infact inflicted by not the Japanese, not the Chinese communists, but the supposedly good guy Chinese nationalists. In 1938, to slow the advance of the Japanese, they intentionally blew up dikes around the Yellow river in a densely inhabited area, drowning 800,000 Chinese, 3 times more than died in Nanking.




And that's a good thing? I would rather blood thirsty regime restrict themselves to killing their fellow countrymen instead of foreigners who really were totally innocent of putting them in power.



When the US decided to prop up the scions of Japanese war criminals, it was already the mid 1950s, long past any danger of Japan being partitioned.

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Assessing the impact of new area rug under modeling table.

This is why I despise any over the top shows of indignation by any one nation at the sins of another.

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Assessing the impact of new area rug under modeling table.

<deleted - unnecessarily rude and snarky>

It is really quite twisted logic to dismiss deaths by starvation or policy like Mao's and Stalin's (Ukraine) with a wave of the hand, and then compare a quite similar policy decision taken in wartime by the Nationalists to the more personal "executions".

If I order a million dead by starvation or a bullet, does it matter?

Furthermore, since Communism is a dead regime in Russia we have access to their records. China has in no way accounted for the millions it put down with a bullet for not being the best Communists.

Since the ratio of males/females in many parts of China is 1.5/1.0, we can assume the extra female deaths in this case to an imposed policy forcing a survival choice on the parents. Then, of course, there are the anecdotes of the local party official visiting the new mother and taking her second child away from her and drowning it in the field.

Of course, the murder of little girls is probably overstated today. The Communists have discovered a way to retail their surplus girls to Westerners who waited too long to have children of their own.

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If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

-- "A Nation at Risk" (1983)