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stealie72 posted:And like so many people in the US, my grandpa was on one of those boats heading toward Japan, so I'm never going to be impartial about the nukes. Maybe in another generation. If the War Department didn't believe their estimates, we wouldn't be issuing old Purple Hearts today.
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Aug 7, 2023 20:16
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| # ? May 23, 2024 23:48 |
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The bombings were justified and effective. They were only necessary if you believe that minimizing overall suffering was necessary. (So IMO they were necessary)
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Aug 7, 2023 20:17
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If we didn’t nuke Japan we wouldn’t have gotten anime or ramen.
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Aug 7, 2023 20:22
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Ramen may have been work while but anime was a price too steep
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Aug 7, 2023 20:23
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A.o.D. posted:If operation downfall would have happened, everyone's grandfathers would have been on those boats. Edit: Came back from the war unscathed other than being deaf as gently caress for the rest of his life.
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Aug 7, 2023 20:24
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Also makes one wonder how much longer / more bitter a postwar occupation period would have been if US soldiers had spent a year or two fighting on the mainland. Without the bombs I imagine you would have had a real mess of some places capitulating and others needing to be effectively killed down to the last person resisting.
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Aug 7, 2023 20:27
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stealie72 posted:And like so many people in the US, my grandpa was on one of those boats heading toward Japan, so I'm never going to be impartial about the nukes. Maybe in another generation. It is the same for me. Mine was on the Idaho, a battleship, and would 100% have been there.
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Aug 7, 2023 20:29
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go
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Aug 7, 2023 20:41
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Nick Soapdish posted:https://twitter.com/capitalweather/status/1688578557507743744?t=l_iCQrbLWjYuYbK3Ynv3Tw&s=19 Heh, we got authorized an hour leave to GTFO early. Still currently bright and sunny out. We'll see what happens. P.S. for nuke chat, ask around in South Korea some time if dropping them was worth it. Buckle the gently caress up for some of the responses though.
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Aug 7, 2023 20:46
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A.o.D. posted:If operation downfall would have happened, everyone's grandfathers would have been on those boats. Not true, my grandfather would’ve been flying a glider I think that would’ve been worse…
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Aug 7, 2023 20:51
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MrMojok posted:It is the same for me. Mine was on the Idaho, a battleship, and would 100% have been there. My paternal "Grandpa" transfered off of Arizona just before Pearl Harbor, and was a merchant mariner in the pacific theater. My actual Grandpa was building planes for Boeing and banging my Grandma on the side. I inherited "Grandpa's" Navy memorabilia from the War, as the only other Navy sailor in the family. Maternal Grandpa was drafted in after he graduated college, and was busy building the Bomb at Oak Ridge, as an engineer. So my one Grandpa may have well saved the other.
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Aug 7, 2023 21:06
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My Grandpa wasn't conceived yet.
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Aug 7, 2023 21:07
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My maternal grandpa flew B-26s in the European theater. My paternal grandpa was an Army Engineer that got sent to New Guinea. Paternal Grandpa would certainly have been hitting the Japanese beaches if Downfall happened. He was part of the occupation forces and did a lot of reconstruction work over there. He said they played a lot of baseball with the locals.
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Aug 7, 2023 21:11
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Granddad was 82nd/17th Airborne and as far as I can tell they weren't explicitly earmarked for the first waves into Japan, but probably would have ended up there eventually. At least in Aug 45 he was busy in Berlin as part of Eisenhower's guard unit.
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Aug 7, 2023 21:18
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Elviscat posted:My paternal "Grandpa" transfered off of Arizona just before Pearl Harbor, and was a merchant mariner in the pacific theater. My actual Grandpa was building planes for Boeing and banging my Grandma on the side. I inherited "Grandpa's" Navy memorabilia from the War, as the only other Navy sailor in the family. The Merchant Marines had a higher casualty rate per capita than any actual military branch during the war, so your not-Grandpa didn't exactly skate out of harm's way. At least a Navy ship has a chance to shoot back effectively. I'm not sure where I'd have rather been, given the choice between the two. E: Mom's dad was a navigator instructor in Kansas teaching Navy pilots not to get lost flying PB4Y-2 Privateers. Dad's dad was barely old enough to go to boot camp in a "go to war or go to jail" deal* when the war was ending, but spent time in the occupation of Japan in '46. He almost certainly would have been cannon fodder during an invasion. * At his wake, an old friend from his youth showed up unexpectedly to pay his respects. When he found out Grandpa had been a deacon at his church, he was heard to say "Curly, a deacon? Hell, I'd have thought if Curly ever stepped inside a church it'd fall down around his ears!" Clearly there were some stories that Grandpa had kept close to the vest. E2: Okay, I do have to add that Grandpa actually got thrown out of the Army for marrying an Army nurse without permission. Grandpa was enlisted as gently caress. E3: That nurse was not my grandmother. Lemniscate Blue fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Aug 7, 2023 |
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Aug 7, 2023 21:29
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My dad worked with an old timer who, as he told it, was in the brig for throwing hands at an officer, then got yanked out and thrown on firefighting/dc when the alarms sounded. Over the course of the next couple of November days he had two or three ships sunk out from under him and was pulled from the water of Iron Bottom Sound and thrown right back onto aa guns or impromptu dc crews. Wild stories, who knows how true they were but he was deaf as gently caress.
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Aug 7, 2023 21:35
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armpit_enjoyer posted:You know, if this was the way I'd have to go, I think I'd die happy quote:buried beneath countless wheels of parmesan-style hard cheese He’d be pissed that the news media used the bastard French name for his Italian delicacy.
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Aug 7, 2023 21:36
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That Works posted:Also makes one wonder how much longer / more bitter a postwar occupation period would have been if US soldiers had spent a year or two fighting on the mainland. Without the bombs I imagine you would have had a real mess of some places capitulating and others needing to be effectively killed down to the last person resisting. Yeah, the book Embracing Defeat is a fascinating look at postwar Japan and the occupation. Definitely worth your time to learn stuff like: -Japan had so little concern for their men that they weren’t sure where hundreds of thousands of them were at the end of the war, so they didn’t have a fun time getting home. -Japanese had to rely on the black market for basic nutrition, one guy tried to only eat his legal allotment & promptly starved. -for an ultra conservative nation their constitution is surprisingly progressive giving legal equality between men and women, as an Austrian-American Jewish woman Beate Sirota Gordon was on the drafting committee and made sure that got in. -fascinating info on some die hards who had thought the Emperor was divine doing their own research & realizing how stupid and wasteful the war was.
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Aug 7, 2023 21:41
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Lemniscate Blue posted:The Merchant Marines had a higher casualty rate per capita than any actual military branch during the war, so your not-Grandpa didn't exactly skate out of harm's way. At least a Navy ship has a chance to shoot back effectively. I'm not sure where I'd have rather been, given the choice between the two. I have maybe surprising news about the fate of the USS Arizona
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Aug 7, 2023 21:53
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Attention judge: Brandon is being mean to me so the DOJ's protective order is bad https://twitter.com/GrahamKates/status/1688659463811616769 facialimpediment fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Aug 7, 2023 |
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Aug 7, 2023 22:12
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Yeah, the book Embracing Defeat is a fascinating look at postwar Japan and the occupation. Definitely worth your time to learn stuff like: Thanks for the rec, sounds like something I'd enjoy.
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Aug 7, 2023 22:13
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Soul Dentist posted:I have maybe surprising news about the fate of the USS Arizona I meant Merchant Marine vs Navy in general, but I can see how that was unclear in my post.
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Aug 7, 2023 22:19
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bird food bathtub posted:P.S. for nuke chat, ask around in South Korea some time if dropping them was worth it. Buckle the gently caress up for some of the responses though. im guessing those responses are "two were a good start why did you stop"
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Aug 7, 2023 22:31
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Merchant marine had a rough rear end time in the Atlantic, I’m not sure if they had a higher casualty ratio than the marines did in the pacific though. They of course got utterly hosed on pay and benefits.
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Aug 7, 2023 22:34
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FrozenVent posted:Merchant marine had a rough rear end time in the Atlantic, I’m not sure if they had a higher casualty ratio than the marines did in the pacific though. I had meant to include a quote from the book I mentioned earlier, but couldn't find the Kindle. Now that I have, and that I read this post, I also found this quote I'd highlighted in there: quote:The number of Merchant Marine personnel who were killed in action, died of wounds, and died while prisoners of war during World War II is approximately 9,521, or 1 in every 26, as opposed to the next closest group, the U.S. Marines, which suffered 1 in every 34 to these three categories, and the Army (including the Army Air Force), which stood at 1 in 48. Anyway, the quote about the invasion I meant to include in my first post is this one: quote:To put it bluntly they had figured us out. Colonel Hattori Takushiro (twice chief of the Army General Staff’s Operations Section and secretary to the war minister, General Anami Korechita) not only told U.S. Army interrogators in 1945 that they expected the initial invasion to be launched on Kyushu in October 1945 but also named the precise locations of the landings. Instead of a grinding war of attrition, the American military hoped for a less-costly battle of maneuver, but what Hattori told the Sixth Army’s Intelligence chief Col. Horton V. White just after the surrender indicated that this had not been in the cards, and it must have made the intel officer’s hair stand on end: Also quote:Okinawa represented the first coordinated effort by Japanese pilots to use cliffs and hills to foil U.S. radar. The size of the island and the distances to be flown from Japanese air bases, together with the fact that the Japanese had only just begun to experiment in this area, initially limited the usefulness of such tactics, but successes were nonetheless numerous.54 The literature is replete with references by sailors, in ships that were close ashore, to kamikazes appearing so suddenly that even fully alert crews had little time to respond. And lastly quote:One matter that set off urgent alarm bells within the U.S. Navy in the war’s very last days was that the Japanese had begun to launch kamikaze attacks of a type for which there was no effective defense. Japan’s naval air arm had inadvertently stumbled upon the fact that the thousands of largely wooden trainers that they had redesignated as combat aircraft were functionally invisible to radar, and now that they had the night-qualified pilots to fly them, the Japanese had the ability to stealthily attack U.S. warships before few, if any, guns could be brought to bear on the aircraft. OK I promise I will shut up about the book now.
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Aug 7, 2023 23:01
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facialimpediment posted:Attention judge: Brandon is being mean to me so the DOJ's protective order is bad I want the judge to go with this. If this is "thinly veiled", Trump's tweets must be public admissions of guilt.
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Aug 7, 2023 23:04
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Ah yes. Very nice. https://twitter.com/willcarless/status/1688668692677275648?t=YdR1E_cZpYI1qG-B_8Fltw&s=19
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Aug 7, 2023 23:11
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60% is better than I’d expect
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Aug 7, 2023 23:15
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Tiny Timbs posted:60% is better than I’d expect 
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Aug 7, 2023 23:17
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The people under tremendous pressure to get as many people into the military aren’t disqualifying enough recruits? Shocker.
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Aug 7, 2023 23:18
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A.o.D. posted:If operation downfall would have happened, everyone's grandfathers would have been on those boats. IIRC we finally ran out of 1945 Purple Hearts in the early 2000s.
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Aug 7, 2023 23:26
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Lemniscate Blue posted:
Sounds more like an E-1 to me!  Vincent Van Goatse posted:IIRC we finally ran out of 1945 Purple Hearts in the early 2000s. NEVERTHELESS
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Aug 7, 2023 23:29
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A.o.D. posted:NEVERTHELESS No, their larger point is absolutely right. It takes some doing to wrap your head around the fact that the atomic bombs might've in fact been the least bad way to force Japan to surrender because we've got 80 years' worth of nuclear terror coloring our understanding of the bombings.
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Aug 7, 2023 23:35
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That Works posted:Thanks for the rec, sounds like something I'd enjoy. ...lesser known info re: Operation Downfall....After the Hiroshima bombing and the absence of an immediate response from Japan, Tibbets had submitted a request for an additional 15 or 16 bombs directly to Truman. The request was approved prior to receiving Emp. Hirohito' s capitulation after the Nagasaki bombing, which had exhausted the supply of bombs on hand. The zinger was that radiation poisoning was not yet well understood. Had those additional bombs been used prior to or in support of the invasion, the one-million plus invasion force would have been exposed to potentially lethal doses of radiation along with the Japanese population. Hirohito called it quits when he realized that continued resistance would ultimately result in the extinction of the Japanese culture. His decision, while not universally popular with his countrymen, was fortunate for everyone.
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Aug 7, 2023 23:37
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:No, their larger point is absolutely right. It takes some doing to wrap your head around the fact that the atomic bombs might've in fact been the least bad way to force Japan to surrender because we've got 80 years' worth of nuclear terror coloring our understanding of the bombings. That was indeed the point I was making.
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Aug 7, 2023 23:37
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A.o.D. posted:That was indeed the point I was making. Yes, I agree. It was.
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Aug 7, 2023 23:41
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Yes, I agree. It was. It's so nice when we can get together and agree on something!
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Aug 7, 2023 23:46
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I have my beliefs on the bomb, but I don't feel qualified to try and sort the morality of it in the moments, if that makes sense.
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Aug 7, 2023 23:53
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bulletsponge13 posted:I have my beliefs on the bomb, but I don't feel qualified to try and sort the morality of it in the moments, if that makes sense. The best I can do is say that it was a very bad thing that may have been in the service of a good thing, but then again, perhaps not.
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Aug 7, 2023 23:55
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My Lizard brain likes the bomb because booms are cool and bigger booms are exponentially cooler My conscious brain has very different feelings about it
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Aug 7, 2023 23:59
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