August 6, 1945. Could we have at least afforded them a demonstration detonation offshore beforehand? They still would not have surrendered, but we would have met a certain moral obligation. -nvp
Thanks to Dr. Mazza for the following:
“…the use of the A-bomb on the Japanese cities
in 1945 was immoral. Too many civilians were
killed in comparison with the military objectives
gained. Some…argue that by killing so many
civilians our armies terrorized the people…to
surrender…more lives were spared than were
destroyed by the bomb. But such an argument…
results in a bad means to a good end.”
–Fr. Francis J. Connell, Dean School of Theology, CUA,
Outlines of Moral Theology, 1958
As for the eight priests who miraculously survived at Ground Zero (ICYMI):
Fr. Hubert Schiffer had just finished Mass, went into the
rectory and sat down at the breakfast table. He had just
sliced a grapefruit and put his spoon into it when there
was a bright flash of light. His first thought was that it was
an explosion in the harbor (this was a major port where
the Japanese refueled submarines.)
Then, in the words of Fr. Schiffer: “Suddenly, a terrific
explosion filled the air with one bursting thunderstroke.
An invisible force lifted me from the chair, hurled me
through the air, shook me, battered me, whirled me ’round
and ’round like a leaf in a gust of autumn wind.”
…
To the doctors’ amazement, Father Schiffer and the other priests had no
radiation or ill-effects from the bomb. When asked to account for this
incredible situation, in which he and his companions were spared, he
said: “We believe that we survived because we were living the message
of Fatima. We lived and prayed the Rosary daily in that home.”
He felt that they received a protective shield from the Blessed Mother,
which protected them from all radiation and ill-effects. (This coincides
with the bombing of Nagasaki, where St. Maximilian Kolbe had
established a Franciscan Friary which was also unharmed because of
special protection from the Blessed Mother, as the brothers, too, prayed
the daily Rosary and also had no effects from the bomb).
Father Hubert Schiffer died on March 27, 1982, 37 years after that fateful
day. He gave his account of the Hiroshima bombing at the Eucharistic
Congress in Philadelphia in 1976. At the time, all eight members of the
Jesuit community from Hiroshima were still alive.
Glory to God in the highest!
Power of rosary and Mary’s protective mantle.
Same thing like the first Crusade: you were just entering the war and unjust on how you fought it. There is no simple “yes, it was wholly just” or “no, it was unadulterated evil”.
Other than vengeance, what was the real need to do this? “But a million US troops would have died to take the Home Islands!” is the argument. Why did we need to invade? They had no air force and no navy. Strategic bombing could have prevented any rebuilding of their offensive forces. Starvation would have led to surrender. Invasion not needed, nuclear atrocity not needed.
Even worse, the Japanese were already negotiating an end to the war with the U.S., so the idea that they would never surrender, because “honor,” was already demonstrably untrue.
The problem was that the U.S. didn’t want a simple end to the war, they wanted a COMPLETE and TOTAL surrender under which Japan would be completely subjugated and agree to nearly anything the US imposed on them. The war was an investment, and the US Capitalists and Imperialists wanted to squeeze everything they could from it. This meant hurting Japan beyond what was necessary.
The investment in the A-bomb also needed to be tested in a real exercise. And was also a live demonstration to the world about US dominance, especially the Soviet Union, who like the US, also saw Japan as a strategic location of national security interest, and planned to invade and occupy Japan too.
Those US bases exist in Japan until today for a reason. Japan is a forward operating base against Russia and China, and the Japanese all know that the US presence there serves as their nuclear deterrent, whilst also making them a target of nuclear retaliation, despite the country officially possessing no nuclear weapons of their own. Something the anti-nuke Japanese view as an inherent hypocrisy of the country’s no-nuke stance.
A lot of people have no idea what they’re talking about with this subject.
It isn’t as black and white as anyone would want it to be.
It’s really easy to say what they should’ve done 80 years later. It’s really hard when you’ve got after action reports from the Pacific Theater on your desk, and have a fresh group of 18 year olds being drafted.
For starters, Nagasaki was a secondary target after bad weather spared the primary target. They couldn’t see the target through the clouds so they moved on. It had nothing to do with Catholics in that city. They needed cities that hadn’t been heavily damaged in bombing, and Nagasaki was on that list.
We would’ve invaded had we not had the nuke. That was a given like it or not. That would’ve been horrible, or maybe not, it didn’t happen, so there’s no point in wasting time on it.
On some level we should be grateful we got and used the bomb when we did. Ten years earlier, 1935, and WW2 would’ve gone nuclear, ten years later, 1955, and the Cuban missile crisis would’ve gone hot.
War is deciding between two horrible choices, and then living with the consequences.
The non-nuke bombings, of civilian targets too, were already doing a fine war-crime job of getting the Japanese to surrender, and all the generals admit that fact. This wasn’t some fog-of-war theater report worry, as they were already actively negotiating with the Japanese behind the scenes, the latter trying to save face as best they could.
The Japanese public was already desirous of wanting the war to end. The U.S. would air drop leaflets warning them of the coming aerial bombings. The public reason was due to pushback over the fact of civilian area bombings the UK and US introduced, which at least forced many to evacuate; but the primary motive was never out of concern for Japanese lives, but primarily intended as a psychological campaign to increase the impact of the bombings; impressing on the population that Japan had effectively lost, the Japanese government was helpless to stop it, and the U.S. was right on their shores. This would therefore speed up the surrender negotiations and weigh the negotiating power heavily in favor of the U.S.
The reason for hurrying up the negotiations was also never to spare the lives of American soldiers, it was because the Soviet Union was preparing to invade, had plans to take Manchuria from Japanese control, and therefore the U.S. wanted Japan in their possession before the Soviets got any further there and take any of it for themselves.
The Japanese airwaves did continue to proudly declare and insist to it’s people that they’d never surrender, but it was a broken record by propaganda office bureaucrats running on automatic and nobody on either side believed it any more than they believe the propaganda mainstream media today; which is not to say there weren’t die-hards amongst the Japanese and it’s upper ranks who were fully committed to fighting to the end, some even attempted a coup d’etat at the potential of surrender, but they were a minority with no realistic proposition of achieving anything. The fact is that Japan was already trying to surrender. It was a matter of the terms.
The Japanese knew the Soviets were also coming, and between them and the Americans, the jig was up. Better to surrender to either the U.S. ASAP than have the country carved up between two occupying powers. The Emperor was also awaiting replies from peace offers to the Soviets after Russia abandoned the Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact months earlier.
When the U.S. issued ultimatums to Japan, it made clear that it would bomb and destroy cities, but atomic weapons were never mentioned, though naturally the project was a secret. Japan was rejecting all these ultimatums because they deliberately didn’t bother to address Japan’s minimum demands – that the present government under the emperor remain in place, that Japan not be occupied, and any terms of disarmament, demobilization, and punishment of alleged Japanese war criminals be carried out against Japan by Japan’s own government; the U.S. wanted nothing but total and unconditional surrender, guaranteeing nothing and no assurances other than that one day the Allies would withdraw from Japan once they were satisfied with the conditions of post-war Japan which would be allowed to rebuild and restructure itself on the Allies’ terms, which were very broad and very vague.
There was never at that point any legitimate reason to further invade Japan, other than to achieve the objective of total surrender for hegemonic ends, which was precisely why the U.S. antagonized Japan to convince the public to enter the war in the first place. Occupation, not peace, was the point.
Europe was going to fall, but America wasn’t getting involved out of kindness. The US soldiers may have believed in the rightness of the cause, but then as well as now, their lives are always being squandered for evil purposes which are the true motivations behind it all. So if invasion was going to happen one way or another, it had nothing to do with the Japanese unwilling to surrender.
When the U.S. dropped leaflets on Japan, listing cities they intended to bomb, Hiroshima was never named in any of them, although it included the caveat in the text that the U.S. could not promise that only those listed cities would be among those they chose to attack. While there are reports that leaflets were dropped early in Hiroshima, Hiroshima was never listed as a specific target, and the various U.S. had a listings that included up to 33 cities. Nagasaki, however, due to it’s shipyards and wartime production, was a listed target, and had already been bombed conventionally.
After Hiroshima, Truman hammered Japan with messages to surrender immediately, or else it’d happen again. It did happen again, at Nagasaki. And it was following this that Japan dropped their conditions to only one – maintaining the authority of the Emperor, which the Allies implied they would agree to in principle.
A similar situation is happening today with regards to the Ukranian war in Russia, but in reverse as in this scenario, Russia holds the cards. Russia had given very concrete terms earlier in the Minsk Agreement, which was then violated by Ukraine, the US, the UK, Germany and France. Now that Russia has been forced to fight and has gained more territory, it is now the one dictating terms, and those terms effectively spell out that the Western NATO forces have lost the war by admitting to them, and having to make further concessions. Trump and co. refuse to lose face. This could well lead to Ukraine’s utter destruction and capture. But since Ukraine and Ukranian lives are expendable, NATO does not care. As commenters with their heads on straight like to remind the U.S. – this isn’t World War II anymore, and the pressures they could expend on Japan and Germany will not work, as the Russians possess the strategic advantage and the more powerful arsenal of technologically advanced hypersonic nukes and intermediate range missiles and wartime production power, and are a large land mass and not an island in the middle of the pacific. They do not need to fly or sail all the way over to the U.S. in order to destroy it significantly. They can comfortably do so in under an hour from precisely where they are. As this war is of an existential nature to Russia, whether from NATO encroachment or nuclear retaliation, they have no other choice but to fight to the very end. There will be no surrenders or negotiations after that. Simply mutually assured destruction.
Interesting that there was a high Catholic population there. And today the majority are Shinto.
Nagasaki was the epicenter of Catholicism in Japan.
The last thing the powers wanted was Catholicism to fill the void a dethroned Hirohito would create.
I remember being taught in (public) junior high and high school that the atomic bombing of Japan during WW2 was a good thing because it ended the war. I was also taught that the French Revolution was a good thing and that even the Russian Revolution had good intentions at first.
It’s seriously hard to believe the lies we were fed.
Truman was so overrated. He did all these awful things like establish the CIA, drop the world’s only 2 known nukes, found NATO, Cold War & Korea War.
Then he wrung his hands, complained of how he was railroaded into these things & regretted them. Yet his legacy is taught as “The Buck Stops Here”, because, supposedly, he made big difficult decisions.
Anytime a leader caves into the Deep Staters and commit monstrous crimes for them, their media & academia will praise that leader revoltingly as tough, nuanced, responsible, deep, true statesman, yadda yadda.
During the fad of Truman adulation, with the one-man show “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry” touring theaters, I recall that a couple of American humorists would have none of it.
Garry Trudeau had his Doonesbury character, the hustler Duke Harris, haranguing a faint-hearted accomplice saying, “As Harry Truman said, ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get the hell out of Nagasaki’.”
In Will Vinton’s claymation short “The Great Cognito” Douglas Mac Arthur says, “I shall return.” The head of Truman pops out of his pipe, says “Oh no you won’t!” and pops back down as the pipes emits a mushroom cloud.
There were a lot of POW’s that were saved from summary execution due to the dropping of those bombs.
In addition more civilians were killed by the fire bombing of other Japanese cities than were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So our fire bombing of Tokyo was also morally licit? Good to know.
“It wasn’t as horrifically bad as this other atrocity” is a helluva defense
We were also sold lies in getting involved in Europe in WWII. Frank Capra made a series of propaganda films called Why We Fight, to convince the American public to get involved, which they vehemently opposed doing. The Capra films intentionally omitted a number of facts about the Soviet Union and its involvement for fear that it would dissuade American support for the war.
There were a lot of sales pitches before and after dropping the nukes (none of which hold water, morally speaking) that involved a lot of mind-reading and precognition like you’d see in Minority Report. “The Japanese are going to XYZ if we don’t nuke them.”
How many times have we heard this in the last 25 years to justify unjust wars? It didn’t start after 9/11.
My grandfather was a radio operator on a medical ship off the coast of Japan. The justification that I wouldn’t be here if the U.S. didn’t nuke Japan is consequentialist, and likely just a scare tactic and justification for dropping the bomb.
sorry, that’s Jeff 0
Now that many are taking another look at history of WWII, the official narrative versus the official forbiddeness of unofficial historians such as David Irving, it is increasingly clear that the Western powers were completely willing to committ unnecessary War Crimes and commit atrocities that even Hitler wouldn’t, from Churchill’s bombing of German civilian cities to the US doing the same to Japan. The same propaganda is repeated today about Palestine, Iran, Russia, etc. as the West burns everything to the ground and cover-up their complicity in civilian targeting, assassinations, terrorism, rape and torture and more, censor and punish anyone for exposing it, and when exposed, justify it as absolutely necessary for XYZ reasons.
Little wonder that Our Lady of Fatima didn’t pick any “good sides” in the great wars she prophecied, nor mention any “holocaust”, as her sceptics and critics once argued to downplay the Apparition. Her message was simple and succint.
The “purely coincidental'” bombing of the highest Catholic population concentrations in Japan certainly has nothing to do with Harry Truman being a 33rd degree Mason.
And just two years earlier, 33rd degree Freemason FDR bombed San Lorenzo in Rome where the remains of Pius IX were interred (PIX was the Masons most hated pope).
Pius IX was also the pope who canonized the 26 Martyrs of Nagasaki… just to bring it all home.
Our war with Japan was planned by FDR. He moved Navy HQ from San Diego, which was out of range of Japanese fighters, to Pearl Harbor, where they were sitting ducks. Then he provokes Japan and ignores solid Intel on a major attack.
Why did he do this? Probably to get out of the Great Depression, as nothing he did worked, and to find an excuse to enter the European theater.
Truman of course was worse. This guy not only nuked Japan, twice, he lost China, lost Korea, lost our nuke secrets to the USSR thanks to the Roseburgs, and because he was a dispensationalist, recognized Israel which is now a theater in the 3rd world War.
Let’s leave it at “those directly responsible for it need many prayers”.