Monday, August 9, 2010

Guess where.

Guess where the 0bmama world apology tour is headed now.

Yeap, Japan.

You see, 65 years ago on August 6th and 9th, the US dropped two Atomic bombs. These finally forced the Emperor himself to bring Japan to the peace tables and thus ended WW2. On a side note, this brought the Emperor within a whisker of being assassinated by the Japanese military class so they could continue to wage war.

But while everyone is all up in arms about Michelle's European Vacation, Barry is slipping an ambassador off to Japan to say sorry and other grovelling sounds. And the self-loathing liberals are loving it. In fact some leftist talk shows are calling the bombings equivalent to a holocaust.

Okay I blogged about this before, but the bombings actually saved lives. You see the US military planners ran the numbers and figured that there would be anywhere from 500,000 to 1,000,000 casualties if the US was forced to invade mainland Japan. And military planners being the efficient souls they are, they went ahead and ordered enough purple hearts to cover the expected casualties. The result being that every purple heart awarded from August 1945 through to today has come from this one order. That includes Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

You get that. That was the expected US casualties. That does not include the Japanese military and civilian casualties.

You see, when the US invaded Okinawa, which most saw as a practice for the invasion of the mainland, the US faced 155,000 Japanese military and 500,000 civilians. Of these, more than 150,000 would eventually become casualties. Or a third of all Japanese on the island. So, run those numbers for mainland Japan, and you're looking at 1/3 of approximately 70,000,000. Or about something like 20,000,000 Japanese casualties.

So, half a million US casualties plus twenty million Japanese casualties. Compare that to the estimated 250,000 casualties the bombings cost.

Was it a holocaust? In my opinion, no. If we had invaded Japan, that would have been a holocaust. To both countries.

But we still owe them reparations you say. Well, to that I would point you to the reconstruction of Japan after WW2 through the 60's. The US shipped food, material, expertise, and men to the island and loaned (some of which were forgiven and erased) or outright gave millions to Japan to get them back on their feet.

Yes, the cold war and Japan's proximity to China and the USSR had a lot to do with that. But we could have just declared it the 49th state (Alaska and Hawaii weren't states in 1945), put bases there anyway and not bothered with all those factories and farms.

I said before that some generals like Patton understood that spending the blood up front saves lives and trying to be too protective will just cost you more in lives in the long run. Would you rather have racked another 25,000,000 onto the rolls for WW2, bled both Japan and the US white with that generation or would you have lives saved, yes SAVED, on both sides.

Thank God it wasn't our current regimes choice.

4 comments:

Alan said...

Brought to you by the same people that want to disarm victims to save criminals.

Exact same screwed up reasoning but on an international scale.

Mike W. said...

Thank god indeed. If they had gone ahead with a full-scale invasion my grandfathers (on both sides) might have died.

As it was both survived the war, came home, and had kids.

Old NFO said...

Remember the 'revisionist' history they tried to pawn off when Enola Gay was trotted out??? sigh...

Brandon said...

Good post. Thanks for the info about the Purple Hearts -- I didn't know that. Like the gentleman in the article said, "everyone understands a half-million Purple Hearts."