Never-Seen Photo's: Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Life Magazine)

[kpete]

HERE: http://www.life.com/image/first/in-gallery/46282/never-seen-hiroshima-and-nagasaki
via:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/54374

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/06/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-ph_n_672473.html
quite humbling on many levels, especially the letters,
kpete

[HCE SuiGeneris]

1. Brutal.

I will never understand how it is that we treat other humans, animals, and our planet, with such utter disrespect.

[indepat]

2. It's almost like the world is in a stupor in which man believes nothing man ever does, will do,

or can will ever have any effect on the earth's facility to sustain life for the billions of humans and other life: such does make for a good drunk should the patient live. :P

[Suich]

3. It's hard to wrap my head around some of the pictures.

I can't imagine what it was like on 8/6/1945.

[SharonAnn]

4. I was born 5 days before that. My dad was in Hawaii, preparing for the land invasion.

They were expecting enormous casualties and he was in a medical unit, training for battlefield casualties. He had been there for 6 months, treating casualties from the War in the Pacific.

Instead of participating in a land invasion, he spent a year in Occupied Japan.

After years of horror, my parents, at least were relieved it was over. Not glad, not happy, but relieved.

My father would never talk about the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I understood that to mean that there were no easy answers to war, weapons, killing, and death. He would never have anything to do with violence, weapons (including guns) after the war.

[applegrove]

5. If they had to do it they could have chosen an abandoned island of Japan. I don't think they needed

to pick small cities.

[hayu_lol]

6. At the end of the war, it was 6 of one and a half dozen...

of the other. Had it not been for the atomic bombs, Japan would have been essentially flattened by incendiary bombs and the resulting fires. Those culturally important cities would not have been preserved and protected(Kyoto for example).

Japan was prepared to fight to the last person alive with whatever weapons they had. The Japanese military machine was a very long way from being defeated. The death toll on our troops from an actual invasion would have been catastrophic.

Much info has been rewritten, modified, lied about, and thrown out there for public consumption. Some, who were not alive and conscious at that time tend to accept these revisions. Fact is that a Japanese home island invasion would have been horrific for the allies and the Japanese themselves.

Just for starters, the Japanese had fleets of those Kamikazi aircraft(Cherry Blossoms)waiting for the invasion along with subs. Every civilian had a position to take up with pre-prepared weapons and sites. Every Japanese was exhorted constantly to fight to the last person standing.

The industrial war machine was located in every city and many of the smaller towns...a cottage industry of munitions was part of this. There was considerable war manufacturing going on everywhere. There were military targets wherever there were people.

The naysayers won't like this piece...will never understand the joyful realization that the war was over and invasion was unnecessary...at least, a combat invasion. Those of us who were there and do remember have not forgotten the headlines and radio news on the last day of the war. The bombs were necessary to achieve the Emperor's surrender.

[Bigmack]

13. Nope...

Read the other threads on DU about Hiroshima.

Mine quotes all the top military brass that the war was over before the bombs were dropped and that it was not necessary.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

[Igel]

7. Why?

You'd think Hiroshima would have made the point. They knew how bad the devastation was.

They didn't really change their position.

Why would nuking a patch of uninhabited ground convinced them any more effectively?

With the bombing of Nagasaki, they changed their position. Still not unconditional surrender.

[swishyfeet]

10. No

There was no TV coverage, there was no internet. Using all our fissionable materials on uninhabited land would have been 100% wasted on the military leadership (and the people) of Japan. The military leadership was ready to fight to the death despite those bombs, and would have easily covered up the blasts.

Part of the reason they didn't surrender after the first blast was because they didn't think it was possible for the US to have enough highly enriched uranium to produce a second bomb (which was true). Fat Man was a more complicated plutonium bomb.

[leveymg]

11. If we had not demonstrated the utter terror of A-bombs on small cities, we would have surely used

them on the larger cities of Eurasia and Asia.

And, they on ours.

A demonstration without mass, terrible death would not have worked to deter the real thing.

[thebestsas]

8. a-bombs

The a-bombs droped on Hiroshimma and nagasaki were the worst bombs droped ofcorse there will still be new pics coming up

[Enthusiast]

9. Without the "bomb".

A possible worst case outcome could have been a Soviet Union occupying one half of the Japanese homeland. In retrospect I imagine the Japanese would have preferred the bomb.

[leveymg]

12. The worst case scenario would have been the US and USSR using them on each other, and the rest of

the world's cities.

No. Some things would be worse than a divided Japan, although that might well have led to World War III.

[Enthusiast]

17. The Japanese people might have

rebelled against the iron fist. Maybe. It's all speculative and that's a good thing.

[Bigmack]

14. Those pics are nothing...

When I was teaching I showed the film "Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945" to my classes.

The pics from Life are nicely sanitized to show damage to the town... not the people.

People with blast damage, radiation sickness, and the "shadow people" who were atomized along with the town.

See some of the pics from that film at: http://www.gensuikin.org/english/photo.html

Warning: Graphic

When I was stationed in Japan in the early 1960's, our Marine outfit volunteered to work at an orphanage on the hills outside of Hiroshima. Interesting perspective from that place. Hiroshima was in a bowl, and when the bomb air-burst, the blast was somewhat contained within that bowl. Nifty experiment in blast damage, huh?

Saw one of the nuns (apparently some Catholics in Hiroshima, and a lot more in Nagasaki... they even had a Cathedral there) was watching the planes when the bomb detonated. Had to be 5 or 6 miles from Ground Zero, but she was blinded.

We used to go to Peace Park to try to pick up Japanese girls, and the museum there impressed some fairly hard-bitten Marines.

[Hydra]

15. The bombs that never should have been

And the calculation that should never have been made. The idea was to scare the Soviets. Thanks to the fool in Los Alamos, they had their own arsenal in record time.

Insanity at its best.

[onethatcares]

16. and now we spend unbelievable amounts of money building

bigger and more efficient killing machines. We have sound weapons, heat weapons, probably some kind of neo atomic weapons that would make no sense to anyone with half a mind, but we keep making them and we keep killing others and somehow we can't afford to feed our people, or educate our kids, or provide medical care to the destitute.

Our legacy sucks.

Peace because the alternatives really suck.