[samurai007]

Originally Posted by Tenchu

Samurai001,

All of what you said was pretty much true, but you are not seeing it right. The US was concerned about its economy. That might very well be the reason it chose such a cunning tactic. I did forget to mention I doubt the US would have stepped in if the rest of the allies had started winning the war alone anyway. Still, the real financial blunder for the US would be haveing Japan colonize Australia (which was its main target land) and Germany colonize Britan (which one can only assume would have happened if they were not stopped). In the style of war that was fought this tactic is easy to guess the outcome, so smart to use, if you can come up with the excuses for long enough. Also, the US was on its way developing the most powerful weapon ever made. Do you think that possibly delaying the war as long as possible until they were armed with damn hell would not have been a smart thing? You can brush what I am saying off as theory if you like. There are few people who can tell you what was said behind the closed doors of the US generals. But you can not deny it is possibley true. They were fighting 2 super powers who were attacking 2 important allies. They did the same thing twice, entered a room with an exhausted enemy and took a clean shot. I am trained to identify war and combat, you can call it coincidence, but if it was they are bloody lucky bastards!

Hatredcopter,

Dont be so silly. I dislike cowards, so what. You dont agree with me? The US turned down the option of a ground assault on Japan and roasted 2 cities full of women and children. Said it was 'better in the long run'. How? You tryin to tell me a US soldier cant tell the difference between a man and a child through his scope? Would they have killed even more innocents had they fought on the ground? That is even worse idea. Then they did the same thing in Vietnam, roasted civilians to cut off their enemies food supply, why? Because they could not win any other way, and would prefer the deaths of innocents over admitting defeat. And the shit they did in Afghanistan, I cant prove it, but I have trained alongside marines, and heard it first hand, and it is no better. And consider in Iraq much of what they did has been proved, I beleive the stories fro Afghan too. If you dont think this kind of thing is cowardly, then that may be why I dont like you. But it IS REAL. That you cant deny. And I dont like it, okay, so leave me alone. I am proud of who I am.

My degree (with Honors) was in History, with a specialty on WW2, so you may be "trained to recognize war", but I know history. You are simply wrong about your theories, and your evidence in faulty. For instance, you claimed that the US held off from going to war to give us more time to work on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. But the effort to build atomic weapons was not even started in the US until Dec 18, 1941, 11 days AFTER we entered the war! The Manhattan Project

And yes, invading Japan by land, sea, and air would have killed millions more Japanese and Americans. The Japanese were training civilians to fight to the last man, woman, and child. Operation Downfall - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A study done for Secretary of War Henry Stimson's staff by William Shockley estimated that conquering Japan would cost 1.7 to 4 million American casualties, including 400,000 to 800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities. The key assumption was large-scale participation by civilians in the defense of Japan.

The atomic bombs ended the war the fastest and with the least number of casualties for all sides. The Japanese govt was unanimous after Hiroshima to keep fighting, necessitating the bombing of Nagasaki. Even after Nagasaki, and the lie that the US would keep dropping these bombs (we had no more, and couldn't build any more for months because we needed more fissionable material), the Japanese govt was deadlocked on whether to keep fighting or surrender. The Emperor finally broke the tie (which is the only time he even gets to vote), and chose to surrender. If even 1 more Japanese official had chosen to keep fighting, the invasion would have gone ahead and killed millions. There's no way they would have surrendered without the bombs, at least not until we'd fought our way through Kyushu and most of the way up Honshu.