Here is possibly some of the worst and most sanctimonious, malevolent of BBC reporting you’ll ever see…
The ‘sanitised narrative’ of Hiroshima’s atomic bombing
The conventional wisdom in the United States is that the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war, and because of that it was justified – end of story.
Is that really the end of the story?
It’s certainly a convenient one. But it is one that was constructed after the war, by America’s leaders, to justify what they had done. And what they had done was, by any measure, horrendous.
Americans were told a sanitised narrative of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: that a great scientific endeavour had brought quick victory, and saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides.
How about that ‘told a sanitised narrative of the bombings‘ Really?
How is it then that this news reel from the time tells of the ‘dramatic story of destruction and terror that followed in the wake of the first atom bomb…30% of the city’s population was killed, some by radioactive gamma rays, some by the heat of radiation that showed its intensity in many freakish ways [images of casualties]…in a city of rubble and destruction…a year later it’s still a city of the dead’?
Or how about this film that tells of ‘the effects of the death dealing atomic power’ where ‘the devastation speaks for itself’.….
Or how about ‘a new and revolutionary increase in destruction’...
So did the Americans get a ‘sanitised’ narrative of the bombings or is that just a prejudiced and ignorant BBC narrative that allows the reporter to then go on and use it to spin a tale of American war crimes?
So there you have it, the BBC is going to revise history for you and tell us that the bombs did not end the war abruptly saving hundreds of thousands of Allied casualties. It can be no coincidence that Japan surrendered almost immediately the two bombs were dropped but as with the ‘Religion of Peace’ the BBC doesn’t like to make the obvious links that destroy their narrative. A BBC reporter, Rupert Wingfield–Hayes, who wasn’t born back then, wasn’t having to fight his way to Japan island by island in a very bloody war, who didn’t see his mates blown to pieces beside him, who didn’t have to write the letters of condolence to the parents of the killed soldiers, who wasn’t indeed one of those parents who received a letter telling them their son was dead, can blithely denounce the American effort to end the war quickly and say saving those American lives, and probably many civilian lives as well, was not worth while. Perhaps he should ask his Japanese wife what she thinks.
Curious that he has this blinkered attitude when he has previously admitted in this, again anti-American, piece that the invasion of Japan would have been bloody if Okinawa was anything to go by…
There is deep bitterness here, in particular about how their overlords from the “mainland” sacrificed them at the end of World War 2.
“Okinawa is the only place in Japan that experienced battle on the ground,” says Satoru Oshiro “We cannot forget the tragedy, the horrible past.”
And it was unspeakably horrible.
On a hilltop just outside the capital Naha, I find Takamatsu Gushiken digging for human remains.
“When I find the bones of child and woman together, I cannot help but think that must be a mother and child and think about which died first,” Gushiken says. “I heard of lots of babies sucking their mother’s breast after she has died. Was it like that or did the child go first and the mother hung on to the baby? It makes it very hard for us to see sights like that.”
All the more so when you realise that many of the victims he unearths did not die in battle but killed themselves on the orders of Japanese military commanders.
The carnage wrought by this policy is terrible to think about…Perhaps a quarter of a million people died here in three months of slaughter from April to June 1945.
He makes no mention of the 14,000 allied soldiers that died, or the 50,000 injured, taking what was the relatively tiny island of Okinawa….multiply that up for the invasion of mainland Japan and the consideration that the defence would have been even more fanatical and the casualties may have been vastly higher. I imagine the soldiers were extremely grateful not to have to fight their way into Japan…in fact you don’t have to imagine you can read it in many of their compelling and bloody and very unglorified accounts written direct from their own experience of combat against the Japanese …but what do they know, a BBC journalist is willing to sacrifice them for his own smug, sanctimonious narrative. Like to see him storm a beach with 50lbs of kit and bullets coming his way or patrolling inland with the constant threat of attack from all directions , or being pinned down under relentless artillery and machine gun fire for days on end and then tell us what he thinks of the need to end the war and whether he’d be so ‘gung ho’ about soldiers’ lives.
A real historian said this of people like Wingfield–Hayes who rewrite history from a modern perspective…..
“This is really a post-Hiroshima analysis, growing with more fervor as the distance from Hiroshima grows, about the moral legitimacy and the moral justifications for the act, and not about understanding the decision-making leading to the act.”
The decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn’t taken quickly or lightly and was in fact informed by the casualties taken on Okinawa.
The Japanese were known to be massing their troops for the defence of the mainland and it looked like any invasion would face at least an equivalent number of Japanese forces as the allies could muster when the acknowledged ratio for success was three to one in favour of the attackers…- ‘“not the recipe for victory.”…. New intelligence indicated that American casualties would reach over 600,000 during an invasion. ‘
Rupert Wingfield–Hayes‘ opinions are naive, simplistic and pathetically grovelling and apologetic, no doubt due to having very close and personal associations to the land he must now call home.
Perhaps the BBC would like to rewrite some other Japanese history.
In 1937 the Japanese attacked the Chinese city of Nanking killing up to 300,000 of its inhabitants according to the Chinese, 200,000 according to the International Military Tribunal For The Far East...and they didn’t die well... ‘burial societies and other organizations counted more than 155,000 bodies which they buried. They also reported that most of those were bound with their hands tied behind their backs. These figures do not take into account those persons whose bodies were destroyed by burning, or by throwing them into the Yangtze River, or otherwise disposed of by Japanese. ‘
Will the Japanese be holding a memorial service for the dead, will the BBC be reporting it as a Chinese war crime?
What of the many millions of victims of Japanese militarism during and before WWII? Will the BBC be reporting their fate in sombre, accusatory tones?
The Japanese mass murdering started long before WWII with the…
‘……Japanese seizure of Manchuria earlier. It really began in 1895 with Japan’s assassination of Korea’s Queen Min, and invasion of Korea, resulting in its absorption into Japan, followed quickly by Japan’s seizure of southern Manchuria, etc. – establishing that Japan was at war from 1895-1945. Prior to 1895, Japan had only briefly invaded Korea during the Shogunate, long before the Meiji Restoration, and the invasion failed. Therefore, Rummel’s estimate of 6-million to 10-million dead between 1937 (the Rape of Nanjing) and 1945, may be roughly corollary to the time-frame of the Nazi Holocaust, but it falls far short of the actual numbers killed by the Japanese war machine. If you add, say, 2-million Koreans, 2-million Manchurians, Chinese, Russians, many East European Jews (both Sephardic and Ashkenazy), and others killed by Japan between 1895 and 1937 (conservative figures), the total of Japanese victims is more like 10-million to 14-million. Of these, I would suggest that between 6-million and 8-million were ethnic Chinese, regardless of where they were resident.’
The Japanese were brutal, fanatical and ruthless. They killed millions, millions, of people by many different savage methods, not just shooting but by torture, starvation, crucifixion, bayoneting, beheading, burning, burying alive, chemical and biological attacks, or just working them to death.
The Japanese soldier rarely surrendered, preferring to fight to the death taking with him as many of his opponents as possible. The Allies experienced this ruthless fanaticism during the war as they fought their way towards Japan. This experience informed the decision to use the nuclear bombs on the Japanese mainland in order to make a powerful statement to the Japanese leadership that all such resistance was entirely hopeless and would lead to the destruction of Japan.
Wisely the Japanese recognised this and surrendered preventing the deaths of maybe hundreds of thousands of Allied troops had they been forced to invade Japan.
The BBC thinks that saving those Allied lives and the subsequent effects on their families was the wrong thing to do, that the lives of Japanese civilians were somehow more valuable than American or British soldiers, never mind that they had fully backed the Japanese military expansionism of the past decades. Why does the BBC not ask the families of the US soldiers whether they are happy that the war ended as it did and their sons came home from the war?
The BBC prefers to ask an American student of the present day whom the BBC reporter thinks is ‘remarkable’….
I met a remarkable young man in Hiroshima the other day. His name is Jamal Maddox and he is a student at Princeton University in America.
Standing near the famous A-Bomb Dome, I asked Jamal whether his visit to Hiroshima had changed the way he views America’s use of the atom bomb on the city 70 years ago. He considered the question for a long time.
“It’s a difficult question,” he finally said. “I think we as a society need to revisit this point in history and ask ourselves how America came to a point where it was okay to destroy entire cities, to firebomb entire cities.
“I think that’s what’s really necessary if we are going to really make sense of what happened on that day.”
What if Jamal had visited Nanking or the Solomon Islands or Okinawa where so many American soldiers lost their lives? Would he still have reservations about the use of the bomb? We shall never know because that’s not on the BBC agenda. It is incredible how ‘Jamal’ is now the BBC poster boy, one man’s opinion, taken on the hop, being used to rewrite history and erase the real narrative behind the necessity for the use of the nuclear bombs in favour of the BBC’s preferred one of trying paint the Allies as the real war criminals in order to justify the BBC’s continued assault against the West, its history and its place in the world as it seeks to relativise everything and sell us a narrative that says there are no good or bad societies, no good or bad ideology, no good or bad cultures. We should not judge how other people want to live their lives, unless you happen to be white and western, then it’s open season for the BBC.
This approach plays out back in the UK where Islam is given a free pass. It is not intolerant, oppressive, authoritarian, misogynist, homophobic, violent, backward or unpleasant, it is a lovely, tolerant, peaceful and spiritual religion despite all the evidence being that it has never been that, and certainly isn’t today. Mishal Husain feels free to denounce Christianity as backward and unpleasant on the Today programme but no such vilification for her own religion.
The BBC’s hand-wringing, angst driven approach to reporting the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is motivated by its anti-Western agenda, its hatred of what it sees as the European/US, white dominance of history, its kneejerk cultural cringe and guilt-ridden fawning towards other races and cultures by its white reporters and a gleeful free for all from its ethnic reporters who take a great deal of pleasure in attacking the West and its values whether they have lived here all their lives or not like a school child being rude to their teacher.
The BBC of course would be entirely sympathetic to the notion that Japanese war criminals were in fact victims themselves..how often have we been peddled this exact same narrative for terrorists and criminals by the BBC?…
‘Many Japanese reacted to the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal by demanding parole for the detainees or mitigation of their sentences. Shortly after the San Francisco Peace Treaty came into effect, a movement demanding the release of B- and C-class war criminals began, emphasizing the “unfairness of the war crimes tribunals” and the “misery and hardship of the families of war criminals”. The movement quickly garnered the support of more than ten million Japanese. The government commented that “public sentiment in our country is that the war criminals are not criminals. Rather, they gather great sympathy as victims of the war, and the number of people concerned about the war crimes tribunal system itself is steadily increasing”.’
Thank you for this long and considered piece.
I think the counter-narrative, the revisioned history, that many would like to be true (but which isn’t) is this:
* The Japanese government were about to surrender, knowing that their position was hopeless.
* They were in the process of appealing to Soviet Russia, to intervene with the Allied opponents.
* The US, in particular, was aware of this, but instead of welcoming it, was more interested in taking what would be a unique ‘opportunity’ to cold-heartedly test the fearsome weapon they had created, in the dying days of a situation of ‘total warfare’, where anything went.
* They (the US) therefore deliberately ignored the fact that they were winning anyway, and went ahead with an unbelievably inhuman ‘live test’.
* The proof of their utter disregard for any shred of humanity is Nagasaki, three (?) days later, which by any logic was unnecessary.
* Thus, the Japanese were used as a ‘laboratory of horror’, every bit as much as Josef Mengele’s victims were in that other theatre on the other side of the world.
Now, I don’t believe this. I don’t believe it for a moment, despite believing completely in the iniquities of the ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ so bravely admitted later by President Eisenhower.
However, I do think it is important to state clearly and comprehensively what is being insinuated and hinted at by those who wish to distort history for their own purposes. Every one of those points above is either blatantly wrong, or misses out, as you say, vital parts of the story which were obvious to all at the time.
However, to those who have never taken the time to find out what was actually the case; taken together, unchallenged because not spelled out, and in isolation from the overwhelming counter-context, they do make a narrative.
This is why it is vital to expose those underlying claims, challenge them, and provide the truthful counter-narrative for a younger generation, a generation encouraged to live by lies and comforting fantasy. Thank you for taking the time to do this.
A good reply to Alan’s excellent piece. He is right to highlight the pre war decades of Japanese brutality that rivals in death and gruesomeness the Nazi regime. You mention Mengele but the Japanese had their own death camps (e.. Unit 731) where experiments rival anything the Angel of Death did (not excusing it!); I wonder will the BBC have a nice article about that.
The only point I would slightly disagree was the 2nd bomb, anniversary today: back then communication was slower, it took almost 2 days for nuclear experts to confirm what had actually happened at Hiroshima. Even after Nagasaki surrender took a week: this wasn’t from pig-headed ‘no surrender’ (even if some officials said this) but simply a question of the time needed. Despite thinking this, I am not saying it shouldn’t have been dropped: the war needed ending, ironically Nagasaki wasn’t even the main target, it was the secondary ‘last ditch’ on the way back out target (Kokura was the target).
Thank you, I did not know about either Unit 731 or the time sequence following Nagasaki. It is hard nowadays to look back just 70 years and appreciate how the world has changed, both in terms of communications, and the behavioural protocols whose observance was required, both internally to organisations and institutions, and extraordinarily, as ‘niceties’ between deadly enemies. I believe the ‘modern’, and extremely short, way the Soviets had of dealing with their foes were somewhat of a social affront to the manners of the Western allies: astonishing, in the middle of all that mayhem and utter brutality..
Nagasaki was not a ‘last ditch’ target it was built in the plan for the mission as a second choice should the weather conditions, thick cloud obscuring the primary target, make the accurate aiming of the bomb impossible. At that time aircraft navigation both with thick cloud cover or in darkness, was largely a hit and miss procedure. If you couldn’t see landmarks you had to hope the calculations were right and that both the planes speed and the speed and direction of the wind were exactly as had been predicted.
Even in WW2 communications were not so slow that it took a week or more to get a message the length of a country, something which, at the most extreme, would take only a few hours, if that. The Japanese Military Command would have known very quickly the extent of the destruction in both cities even if the didn’t know the precise details. Even in Victorian times a message could be sent by telegraph in a very short period over several hundred miles or even from one side of the Atlantic to the other.
Even when the Emperor had decided to announce the surrender there were those in the Military who were strongly against it, but once the announcement was made they had no option but to obey the Emperor who, at the time, was considered a semi, if not a fully, divine being.
LOL. You seem to be trying too hard:
“Nagasaki was not a ‘last ditch’ target it was built in the plan for the mission as a second choice…”
Correct, which is why I wrote secondary target (which is exactly what it was). ‘last ditch’ I put in quote marks as this was exactly what it was (look at a map!); the plane barely had fuel to make it to Okinawa (as against Iwo Jima where it should have landed)…hence ‘last ditch’.
Re communications: read what I wrote; I am well aware of what the military are recorded as saying/wanting.
A question, looking for opinions (and I guess I have to repeat that IMHO the war needed ending quickly): if there was no 2nd TYPE of bomb, would there have been a 2nd bombing?
There is a simple explanation why Japan was making claims to Stalin, by the use of various routes, that they were about to surrender. Stalin had always insisted he would not entertain, despite being requested to do so on several occasions, joining the war against Japan until the war against Germany had been won.
The Japanese, knowing full well the war in Europe was about to end had every reason to try to persuade Stalin that making plans to attack the Japanese Army in Manchuria would be an expensive waste of his time and effort because by the time he got Red Army troops from one side of Russia to the other there would be no war for him to fight. In effect the Japanese were simply trying to stave off, or at least delay, Russia attacking them. Had they really intended to surrender in the immediate future all they had to do was make that public knowledge and offer their immediate surrender, something they manifestly did not do.
The Japanese military leadership were so determined that they would not surrender, even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that the recording made by Emperor Hirohito had to be smuggled out of the Imperial Palace in order to ensure they did not intercept the recording and stop it’s broadcast to the Japanese people. Once the Emperor’s message was broadcast there was no way they could justify disobeying it and certainly not without Losing Face before the whole Japanese Nation and I doubt, had they tried to disobey the Emperor they could be certain that their subordinates would follow their orders to act against the Emperor’s decision.
Once WW2 ended and the Cold War slowly started the Soviets, and their Fellow Travellers on the Left, happily spread the myth of the Japanese wanting to Surrender and that the two bombings were unnecessary because, along with other similarly Leftist motivated Revisionist Versions of the end of the war against Japan, it was a useful anti-Western propaganda tool with which demonise both Britain and the US.
Even now certain media outlets are pushing the Poor Japanese picked on by the nasty Americans version whilst avoiding like the plague the massive amount of Japanese atrocities against civilians which had been happening for nearly a decade before the attack on Pearl Harbour throughout South East Asia. The number of civilians the Japanese slaughtered during the Rape of Nanking, after that city had been subdued, exceeds the deaths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and that is just one incident in one city and the butchery there was not done for any military reason but purely out of pure, evil vindictiveness.
Japanese laboratory of horror! Quite obviously people who dare to write such things have absolutely no conception of the brutality meeted out to the Prisoners. both Men & Women-Some of my family suffered very badly, many good family friends along with thousands of others died horrible deaths, unimaginable in the extreme-these evil far eastern creatures in many cases could be considered worse in their treatment of people than the Nazi’s.
So why should the BBC or anyone else offer some sly meaningless apology. The BBC must enusre that it covers the celebration of VJ Day in blazing colour-those that suffered & their memory deserve our prayers at least just for one day.
Thank you Span Ows, Amounderness Lad, and tarien – I am trebly informed, and reinforced in my views.
Excellent summaries and comments by Alan & Beaker.
The BBC/Left hate Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons.
The BBC/Left hate America.
This combination creates their need to change history.
The imperialist ambitions and crimes of IS will be next for sanitisation by the BBC.
..
The BBC/Left hate Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons being in the hands of any other than the left.
Is their no way that what is now called the BBC can be re-invented to sing the great many attributes the United Kingdom has brought to this world-most of what is now taken for granted was invented by British poeple, including the BBC. The White Northern Christian is still the dominant race/cuture in the UK-but from the BBC standpoint it appears to be not.
The BBC is beyond redemption and should be got rid of. It is extremely biased towards any and all leftist views and anti anything that goes against these views. It has no moral scruples at all when it comes to distortion , suppression and outright lies. It relies on UK tax payers to fund it but actively tries to undermine what a majority of these people believe in. How we ever allowed the BBC to become so anti British is beyond me. Far from being a national treasure it is a national disgrace.
A poignant ‘Asian’ message to ‘AliBaba telly’ from the Forgotten Army of the past who are no longer with us……
“When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say,
For Their Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today”
Sadly the A bomb came too late for them.
An excellent piece by Alan exposing the sheer evil of the BBC.
Why is it that the BBC hate the, as they describe it, ‘hideously’ white civilized society. They cannot and do not try to hide their contempt for the Nations which advanced civilization in their home territories and progressed it globally to the highly mechanized and productive world we have today. It is true that these countries initially exploited many parts of the third world, but it is also true that they sought to bring some kind of order and morality to the these countries initially in the form of Christian values (also hated by the BBC) and then in the mid part of the twentieth century attempting to establish a degree of self sufficiency by proper utilization of the abundant natural resources found in many of those countries. Particularly in the African continent this has, once the colonial powers have handed governance back to the indigenous population, failed even in those States where civilization and self sufficiency were advanced ( e.g. Rhodesia, South Africa). Corruption and lack of an engendered work ethic is returning those States to a situation where natural resources are not being managed and their economies are also failing due to lack of management. In may States it is solely due to a reliance on the Western powers for aid that more of their population do not starve.
Meanwhile in North Africa the huge oil resources are being squandered on lavish life styles for the privileged while the population lives in squalor and their evil so called ‘religion’ drags them deeper into a life of medieval poverty, vengefulness and violence. Yet despite this the BBC justify what is happening and promote the view of an evil white western culture. ‘Black – good, White – evil.’
I have digressed from the original substance of this thread but the anti American view expressed by the BBC regarding America’s actions to end the horrific war is indicative of their mindset. The last throws of the war was being waged on western civilization by a thoroughly ruthless regime aided by a seemingly endless supply of hordes of dangerously brain washed fanatical zealots set on laying down their lives to slaughter as many allied soldiers as possible even though the main protagonist and their ally had been defeated and they could not win. The view expressed is an example of the irrational hate of western society which oozes from our National Broadcaster.
Message to AliBaba Telly.
Thank God we got to the ‘bomb’ before the Germans and the Japanese.
Simple !
Succinctly put, agree totally. Corruption and lack of an engendered work ethic is where Africa fails and will always fail-even my small time in West Africa on business showed quite defintely that a corrupt regimewas the order of the day leading to the vast majority into enslavement, and as a result of this, unstoppable hordes mostly of one culture are heading towards Europe. No matter how much aid/money is provided by the Western countries, if not spread to where it is most needed & under the direction of mostly white officials, it will just be swallowed up by the corrupt governments in power.
Saw the clips above-and thanks for posting them.
“Sanitised” eh?
As opposed to Savile, cost of the EU, asyum scams in Calais and child abuse by Muslims throughout the nations childrens homes?
Which the BBC fearlessly have documented so that all future generations might learn from where liberal compliance postures end up in?
These documentaries above dwarf anything the BBC have produced since the 50s…and, unlike the BBC,they`ve not lied or glossed over what happened…and leave us questionning the consequences.
As opposed to the BBC who question nothing but UKIP,Israel, Tories and the likes of Sarah Palin and Katie Hopkins.
Have a listen to the Jap Sap who gave us “The Archive Hour” last night on Radio 4.
Racist, condescending, patronisng and guilt ridden poxy PC crapola.
Basically, those WW2 vets were all wrong, Yoko personifies anti-Japanese feelings in the West, and Alan Whicker was scared of karate.
Utter tripe-was only waiting for the woman on the Mastermind game package to be approached as to why her sushi bar failed to take off-that`d be racist too!
Crap-crap and crap again.
All the BBC DO is sanitise…and Savilise as well 24/7!
A great and informative article that really says it all, thank you! The sad thing is that an article like this should be the exception rather than the rule, which shows the enormous reality deception of the massed ranks of the media.
Great argument there Alan.
But trust the Lefty oafs like the BBC to ape Hirohitos economical abuse of the understatement.
“Events have not necessarily gone to our advantage” being the Emperors jist after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated.
Very Labour-very BBC…and shows us how Rochdale, Oxford,Savile and mid-Staffs would be massaged by them in later years.
‘I met a remarkable young man in Hiroshima the other day. His name is Jamal Maddox and he is a student at Princeton University in America……standing near the famous A-Bomb Dome, I asked Jamal whether his visit to Hiroshima had changed the way he views America’s use of the atom bomb on the city 70 years ago. He considered the question for a long time.
“It’s a difficult question,” he finally said. “I think we as a society need to revisit this point in history and ask ourselves how America came to a point where it was okay to destroy entire cities, to firebomb entire cities.
Nothing at all ‘remarkable’ in his view – it’s the overwhelming consensus amongst his contemporaries and the generation that went before, their opinions shaped by the left-wing historical revisionism of American higher education.
But ‘remarkable’ adds weight to his opinion which, coincidentally, fits nicely with the BBC world view.
I haven’t read the whole of Alan’s piece. Just the first few words and the example of BBC bias brought to mind a dimly remembered film that I watched not long before I gave up on TV and which, IIRC, was seen on BBC. Pre- 2005, then.
Do I not recall there was a Hollywood-made or made-for-TV movie about the Manhattan Project? Or am I imagining it?
I seem to recall the film appeared to me to follow faithfully as much as I have been taught and know about the historical events both of the Project and the war. That was included in the film via dialogue among the scientists concerning news brought to them from the White House & Washington via its administrators. No sanitised narrative there, I recall. Can anyone help my dim memories, please, and/or correct where necessary?
The BBC do appear to be very bad at watching & listening to material they broadcast and remembering it even sometimes weeks & months later, let alone a few years. The educate, inform & entertain, doesn’t appear to work for them.
UP2Snuff
I think the film was The Shadow Makers. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097336/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_16
Think you could be right. I’m surprised it was that old and assumed when I saw it that it was not long past the 3 year hiatus period for showing mainstream films on TV. Don’t remember Newman in it either.
I do remember the sequence when a gung-ho scientist, demonstrating how safe nuclear material is picks up two pieces, smacks them together, gets a reaction and dies from burns & radiation sickness a few days later. Can’t see who that was from the Wiki page. I also remember the film seemed to convey the moral conflicts & doubts that scientists, military & politicians were having over the use of the weapons.
It also should be remembered that until late in the war, the Allies did not know that Germany had not made significant progress to a nuclear weapon and also, once Germany was conquered, the Western Allies were uncertain what knowledge and capability the Russians had. It is not as straightforward as perhaps the BBC appear to have been assuming in its Hiroshima & Nagasaki coverage.
I haven’t got time to return in detail right now to Richard Morris’ biography of Leonard Cheshire which I read over Boxing Day > New Year 2015 but chapters 11 to 13 cover Cheshire’s involvement as an observer with the first use of nuclear weapons.
There are little bits of historic information in there, which a good researcher at the BBC could & should have found. Cheshire’s involvement was a well-known fact through his celebrity and later life.
Funny how quickly Dresden has been forgotten by the BBC.
Seem to recall they made quite a fuss over that about three years ago.
Partly the reason for the nuclear bombs were the use of Kamikaze pilots by the Japs .
If they did that at sea , what would they do in the homeland ?
Kamikaze? There’s another group of religious nut-jobs who do the same today.
Their name escapes me at the moment…
..
That’s correct, Kamikaze was a factor. The other problem was that Japan and the Japanese were not as well known and understood as they are now. I was looking for the correct Japanese words for shame & honour and came across this interesting Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_society
This reinforced what I was always taught (yes, I’m too young to have been noting current affairs then) as being a pressure to use the nuclear weapons.
There would have been those in the Japanese military especially, but also in the Government and the Emperor’s circle, who would, given a choice, have chosen to fight to the death as a matter of honour. You can only imagine the conflicts there. Russia & Britain had been fought almost to exhaustion in conquering Nazi Germany and were having to deal with the camps and the colossal refugee problems in Europe.
That left the Americans. What else could they have done? Bred like rabbits and waited thirty years to fight a conventional war to overcome and occupy? Risked the ships & aircraft & men that they had for a far from certain outcome?
Do I recall correctly that in 1944/45, the Japanese started bombing the American mainland? If so, that would have been another factor as the Americans are very sensitive about American soil.
Once again an excellent article Alan. You have excelled yourself this week and the BBC would do well to offer you a full time position of Director of News. 🙂
There’s lots to like and dislike about the Americans; They have never been shy about making a quick dollar off someone else’s misery (read obsolete destroyers only recently paid off) and sanctimoniously giving their opinion on World affairs.
However they are largely a peace loving nation and ever charitable to those countries in need. The many nations in Africa run by American hating despotic thugs whose populations are fed with grain supplied by the USA through the UN agencies.
The one thing about them is that they take direct attack really badly. Japan made the fatal mistake of attacking them. The USA had one objective after that and it was total annihilation. We saw the same reaction after 9/11.
Being a young nation they have not had the experience of the likes of the UK who have been fighting wars since the year dot. War for the British has always been fought in a gentlemanly way where all the avenues are always explored.
The “ultimate option” was the only way to end WW2. The American population would never have stood for the kind of casualties that would have been experienced by an invasion of mainland Japan.
The sequel of events since has been interesting. Both antagonist powers have done very well out of WW2. japan has been the World’s leading economy longer than the US and Germany has had the leading European economy.
……………and after the War the US (with some Allied support) took control of both Germany and Japan, rehabilitatng both countries but inserting proper democratic structures.
Am a huge fan of America…the only beacon in the world that`s preventing the deluge in my opinion.
They get it wrong-but we tend to find that out pretty quickly when they do.
Obama has been a disaster that we will learn to rue very soon-for the life of me, I don`t understand how a country of its talent and size can only give us political pigmies as leaders.
Loved the States-everything that bloody Canada is not!
No surprise then, that the BBC hates Americans in general-and loves Canada so long as they bin Stephen Harper-the only man who`s kept that country from being a cultural haven for the Lefties.
God Bless the USA….we owe them everything, even the crap stuff!
“However they are largely a peace loving nation and ever charitable to those countries in need. The many nations in Africa run by American hating despotic thugs whose populations are fed with grain supplied by the USA through the UN agencies.”
Large numbers of young Americans go to Africa every year, not for a gap year of travel or the vacation of a lifetime but to serve various communities there with education, medicine, building, etc., projects.
Can you imagine how much the BBC loathes you guys for revealing the poisonous propaganda disguised as news and history?
Change comes one mind at a time.
Keep it up.
Harry Truman was a Democrat , they can`t blame the GOP for dropping those 2 bombs ,thank God .Or can they ?