Just like 2011 - I expect it was their way of protesting about wartime austerity - probably led by Nick's grandad.

mother-in-law is an anagram of woman hitler

It isn't being overlooked, you just don't understand how it worked.

There could not have been a surrender conditional or unconditional without the Emperor accepting it. He wanted to come to terms more than his war council did. If he accepted terms he only had to order his council....Who were advisory....to accept them too.

Wasn't you aware it was the Emperor who put out the conditional surrender 'feelers' for the USSR to mediate?

The whole reason there was no resistance to the US troops was because the Emperor had ordered a surrender.

Edited by Stirlingsays (07 Aug 2015 4.45pm)

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

Whilst I have no real opinion one way or the other I do agree with this sentiment. I also agree with Jamiemartin when he says wars are there to WIN...after all that's what war is about.

The Voice of Reason In An Otherwise Mediocre World

If the choice of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was deemed acceptable by the US before and after the event given the fanatical nature of the Japanese fighting forces then why haven't they done it again since? Especially in places like Hanoi in the 60's and the Vietcong. Or Pyongyang in the early 50's? China didn't have nukes then.

Maybe they finally did realise the true nature of their horrible experiment and the results shocked even them.

Knowing what they know now and given an identical situation as 1945 today I believe 100% that they would not drop those bombs where they did.

i.e other ways would be found which did not involve that barbarity of loss.

Big chest and massive boobs

[Link]

Allow me to chuck my hat in on this one, my views on things as you may, or may not know, is simplified not because I myself am simple, but because I like to skip all the why's and what's and maybe's and go with actually happened.

The simple answer is Hiroshima was going to happen at some point some where, war produced an atomic weapon, and no one including the mad boffins who made it was entirely sure of it's yeald.

So it got used, it did end the war, at the cost of thousands of lives, but whose to say those lives wouldn't have been lost over an extended period of time had the war continued.

One last thing once the power of atomic weapons was realised by the dropping of the bomb at Hiroshima it sent out a stark warning of what would happen IF it happened again, so my view is it served as a warning as to what would happen if we ever dreamed of doing something so insane again.

"It's not the bullet that's got my name on it that concerns me; it's all them other ones flyin' around marked 'To Whom It May Concern.'"

As Truman gave the order.....I think it's churlish to suggest that full culpability isn't his and the hawks in his administration.

Churchill had no say on how the US conducted the war in the pacific.

Churchill's form on indiscriminate bombing isn't great but he was known to have bulked at mass civilian deaths from the Dresden bombing....Regarding it as over the top.

I would imagine if Churchill had been in control of the bomb then a conditional surrender would have least been on the table.

I'm a hawk myself......But deliberate civilian bombing isn't something I can justify.

The only real argument against me that I could consider as reasonable would be that I'm applying a modern day military mindset to another age.

That's true....But the sheer scale....And the fact that only unconditional surrender was acceptable makes the decision a war crime in my book.

A war crime.....In a war filled with them.....Unfortunately most are.

..................................................

I'm not taking sides about Hiroshima.I see both points of view. War is obscene,full stop.

But,the reality is that had I been out in SE Asia at the time like my uncle, knowing I was scheduled to "invade" Malaya to "take it back",I'd have been pretty relieved when the bomb dropped and he had no qualms about the decision .War brutalises people.Not very "right on",but there it is.

Had I been one of those who had got the British POW's out of the camps on the Burma railway like someone I knew,I'd have felt the same.

If I'd been blasted nightly in the blitz and by the flying bombs in 1944 as my family was (living near the docks in the East End),I'd have taken no end of pleasure in the bombing of Germany.

If I'd liberated a concentration camp as one of my old GP's had,I might have felt like machine gunning the guards who had surrendered on the spot,like he felt.

Sad but true.Not "morally right" but as I said,war can brutalise people and you have to look at these things through the prism of the time. Doesn't change the morality.But might change some of the judgementalism.

You mention Churchill's distaste for bombing civilians. We were the first to do it on his orders re the Germans,in 1940 pre-blitz.When we needed to show we were "still in the game" ,and not insignificantly for Churchill to up the ante so as to see off the appeasers.

It may be sad,it may be morally not right,but there it is.

Its worth pointing out again that morality/war crimes is not a concept that only bites when one big bomb has a massive effect as opposed to loads of smaller bombs having a massive effect or massacres like the Rape of Nanking.Truman may have had his finger on the button.But,if morally culpable,so was Churchill,who went along with it and agreed to it.Of course, Truman was morally culpable to the very largest degree,but the moral culpability of individuals isn't so easily divisible down to a level of zero as you might think.

Edited by legaleagle (07 Aug 2015 7.46pm)