Eighty Years After

Tucker is getting off the rails. War is war. It doesn’t matter if you submit your enemy with nuclear weapons, conventional weapons or even bayonets at the end of a rifle. People are still dead. There is no civilized way to kill other humanity to force a submission in war.

Tucker's opening sentence there proves he's an ignorant ass. I stopped paying any attention to this jerk years ago.

Carlson is full of crap.

The bombs saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides. The Japanese would have fought to the last man and woman. Truman had to make one of the hardest decisions that any man had to ever do but knew he had to give the go-ahead. RIP Harry.

On the basis of his first sentence, Tucker Carlson is a moral idiot. If Baby Boomer fathers--my father had already been drafted at age 17 by August 6 and 9, 1945, and would have gone to Japan in early 1946--had invaded Japan, casualties were expected to be huge on both sides. Gen. MacArthur's planners expected a half million American dead and several times that many casualties. The death in Japan, where the elderly and even children were going to fight, might have been twenty times as many as were killed by Fat Man and Little Boy. During the Second World War, the USA lost 407,000 killed, including my father's oldest brother. If President Truman had decided to invade Japan and eschew The Bomb, HE would have been the moral idiot. Thank the Lord he wasn't. He did what he had to do. He made the right decision, and millions of lives were saved, paradoxically by The Bomb. That's the way the cookie crumbles. It ended the bloodiest war in human history, with about 65,000,000 dead worldwide.

Was the sacking of Rome by "barbarians from the north" justfied even though they slaughtered the citizens and drove many of them into the swamps of Venice? Heck yes, Rome was an evil empire that visited death, destruction and torture on entire civilizations, including those barbarians. Yes, it was cruel. Yes, it fixed a big problem.

Sometime in the 1950’s Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, was in Tokyo at a military conference. By then a two-star general, Tibbets had become accustomed to answering questions about his role in the bombing of Japan. He was approached by a participant in the conference who told him there was a man who wanted to speak to him - a Japanese diplomat who had been one of the emperor’s aides during the war. Reluctantly, Tibbets agreed. When they were introduced, the Japanese diplomat stated he had always wanted to meet Tibbets, to tell him that he had done the right thing by dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. The diplomat told Tibbets he had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands on both sides, because every man, woman and child in Japan would have fought the Americans “with sticks and stones.” It was the right thing to do.

Neither of them was around when the bombs were dropped. I was. There seemed to be no solution to the war with Japan. According to a Brit author, the Brits had let the Japanese "roll up the countries and islands they occupied "like a rug". My cousin was aboard a Navy LSM that was first on the beach as we liberated Japanese-occupied islands and territories from the Philippines on up... Iwo Jima, Okinawa. We knew all the names. He later told us that the next stop was the Japanese mainland. The emperor had sworn they would never surrender They would fight down got there last man, woman, and child. He was a deity to the Japanese so the people had to obey. Then Truman ordered the bomb and it was over. It ended the War. It changed the world. I cannot regret it.

Carlson is to be pitied. Then ignored. Totally and forever. He engages in sophistry. He has never struggled, fought for anything. sacrified anything for a cause. He has no cause but he sound of his own voice. Pathetic. A few years ago he showed up on the scene with only a reputation as a dilettante. Whoever laid that on him was right.

I agree with those of you who are old enough to have seen or heard it from those who actually lived it. I’m a baby boomer too. Tucker has said that he is always armed, and that he would not hesitate to use the gun to protect himself and his family. He also has said - "It turns out, Democrats are not serious about protecting you or your family. That's why they defunded your police and called you a racist when you complained about it as your city collapsed," Tucker Carlson said. "What they care about deeply, more than anything at all is protecting themselves. That is why their bodyguards will continue to get any kind of magazines they want." "What's an 'assault weapon?' Any gun that Nancy Pelosi's bodyguards have that you're not allowed to have." Is he picturing his threat as coming from a lone gunman? How would he react if the threat happened to be from an armed female, or a man using a wife and children as shields in order to kill Tucker and his family, et cetera? How far would he go to save his family? Sometimes circumstances require unimaginably hard decisions. President Harry Truman found himself in a position of choosing the lesser of evils for the good of the many. His choice saved countless innocent lives at the horrific cost of the fewer. Does Tucker not think the enemy would have used that weapon to further its purpose, if it had been in its possession? How is it that he can see the good, for his family and others, in personally using a weapon to destroy the threat of evil against them, yet not see how this weapon had to be used to stop the certain continuation of carnage and save countless lives in a world war? Perhaps fewer deaths at a time is less shocking, but the loss is no less devastating. He should be thanking God that bomb was used for the sake of good instead of evil. The outcome would have been much worse for mankind. Perhaps even more so under the evil we are fighting today.

My dad, the father of 7 children, would very likely have been a casualty of any invasion of the home islands. He once told me that prior to the nukes neither he nor any members of his unit expected to come home alive. Also, one of HST's advisors is supposed to have said in their private conversations, "If we fail to use the bomb and the American people find out we had the means to end the war and failed to use it, none of us will survive." And remember, the Japanese started it. They were brutal towards any non- Japanese, considering them to be barbarians. They decided to fight a war of annihilation thinking the US and the Allies would have no stomach for it. We and our allies did not like it that way but knew they had to give the Japanese what they had decided would be the kind of war they asked for. The US and our allies turned out to be better at it and had more capacity for it than the Japanese could cope with.

BTW, if we had had better torpedoes in the first year and a half the Japanese war machine would have ground to a halt much sooner. We did not get reliable torpedoes until late 1943.

Re #12, mark that one down to Democrats in Congress. Torpedoes are expensive, complex devices and our USN torpedoe development engineers were never permitted to actually fire a live torpedo at a target and see if it would work....EVER, not even once before the war. So, all the design work was purely theoretical, never tested. It turned out the firing pins that the impact fuse used to set off the explosion would bend at impact with a ship, and all too often not move to detonate the primer. AND the 'backup' magnetic influence fuses were too sensitive, all too often detonating a perfectly fired torpedo 50 or 60 feet from the hull of the target ship....causing a big waterspout, and to the American observers a "direct hit"....which did no harm to the ship. And they ran six or eight feet deeper than the set depth, all too often driving under a ship, and never hitting it, even on a perfect shot. Congress....NO money for torpedo testing, so our torpedoes were elegant works of engineering, with serious flaws in them that took two years of war to discover and fix.

All gored oxen aren't equal.

It was the least worst option at the time and in latest parlance it was the original FAFO... Saves a million soldiers immediately and tens of millions over the years...

The answer has been over for me for years, The bombs ended the war and saved American lives. End of story.

Thousands more would have died if the war had continued, many more Americans. It was Japan attacking the US and not the other way around. Wake a sleeping bear and you get what you asked for. Thank God that America ended that war.

Couple of extra historical notes: 1.) The War Department estimated in early 1945 that if "Operation Downfall" (the planned invasion and occupation of the Japanese home islands) went forth, it would cost the lives of 1 million Allied soldiers (mostly Americans, but the Brits wanted in on the operation, too) and 10 million Japanese civilians. Two nukes vaporized nearly 150,000 instantly, and more died in the days and weeks afterward, taking the total near 400,000. It also caused Emperor Hirohito to step in and order unconditional surrender.... 2.) Had the US *not* used the nukes, the Soviets had plans to occupy Hokkaido island (the northern-most of the three main islands; Sapporo is there) and the northern part of the main island of Honshu. US military planners believed the Soviets would get to the outskirts of Tokyo before meeting any Allied soldiers or well-organized Japanese opposition. Thus absent the use of nukes; there would have been a Soviet-dominated "North Japan" and western-aligned "South Japan" just as we still have with the Korean peninsula. Because the nukes were dropped, the Soviets were dissuaded from continuing their invasion plans and they turned back to Russia. The small Kuril island chain north of Hokkaido remains disputed to this day, but Soviet-dominated "North Japan" never happened. One other note, from the 75th anniversary 5 years ago: Though entirely respectful of the commemorative event happening in their midst, a few young Japanese attendees privately expressed happiness that the nukes were dropped. Reason: Their grandfather was a kamikaze pilot scheduled to conduct a mission on the same day the nuke was dropped. His mission was canceled instead and he lived, got married a few years later and had children, who had grandchildren -- the same grandchildren at the event who were happy that their grandfather did not die in a kamkaze mission in 1945. But it took the dropping of the nukes to make that happen. I'm pretty sure they could give Tucker a nice Bronx cheer...

Tucker is determined to "Glenn Beck" himself.

Oh really, Tucker? Was it more "humane" to continue the firebombing of the Japanese? Does anyone else get the irony found in that iconic photograph of Hiroshima after the "Atomic" bomb (not nuclear!) was dropped? There's the famous domed building, aka, the "Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall with its "Genbaku Dome," surrounded by charred rubble... but wait! What's that masonry building doing still standing, while everything around it is ashes? Simply put, the Japanese built their residences and businesses from wood and rice paper. No wonder the fire casualties were almost worse than those of the explosion. In contrast, the mission codenamed, "Operating Meetinghouse," was the high-altitude B-29 Bombing of Tokyo which culminated as the, "single most destructive aerial bombing raid in human history" (oh, and Tucker, it was done using "conventional" bombs) My Father In Law, may he rest in peace, was a Marine in WWII and witnessed all three Flag Raisings on Mt. Suribachi. He witnessed many horrors as a Marine, but the worst one, he would finally reveal to me after living with it for 73 years. It involved the way Japanese Officers put two Enlisted men into camouflaged caves with a little rice and water, a machine gun and ammunition; they would then anchor them in place using locks and chains. There was really no way they could surrender, and Marine Flame Throwers would aim at them mercilessly to the screams and pleas coming from inside. He could still remember the stench of burned flesh. I believe he felt sorry for the poor, uneducated, Enlisted, who mostly came from rural farms whose families pray for their heroic return. I think my FIL saw a little of himself in them, as he came from a dirt poor sharecropper background in southwestern Oklahoma. The Japanese hierarchical, bushido culture had to be utterly destroyed, not merely mutated with intellectualism. It would NOT have changed without absolute and undeniable victory. And don't worry, Tucker, had the Japanese had "the Bomb" they would have used it on us too. Wars are ugly. There is no way to make them a gentlemanly affair.

#18 makes a good and often forgotten point about the threat of the Soviets in Japan in "aiding" the USA to win this last theater of war. FDR already gave away Eastern Europe to the Soviets so we didn't want to lose any portion of the Japanese islands to the Soviets.

I had forgotten that Japan & Russia were enemies and like E & W Germany, they would have split the country if not taken it entirely.

The Japanese Started the war, WE ENDED IT. GET OVER IT!