Do we negate all the positive contributions to our world by Islam in mathmatics and art, in order to stop the brutality of their mad dogs leaders with their 7th Century mindset?

They did neither. Math was known, it just was popularized by Islamic Scholars (many who were Christian Dhimmis). The zero was not invented by Islamic Scholars, but by Indians.

Algrebra principles were known well before Islam and Christian Monks of the region knew of them and studied them in their monasteries.

Art? Their art pales in comparison to both Middle Ages and Renaissance art of Europe. Mostly, because they were not allowed to paint “idols”

I think that it is also important to realize that had the Japanese not surrendered and the invasion was launched on November 1, 1945, McCarther would have had 7 atomic bombs at his disposal to be used against the defenders. Marshall considered this recomendation that originated from the Manhattan people, but nobody then had any idea of the residual effect of radiation and fallout, especially these weapons would have needed to be ground bursts to kill the bunkers and tunnels.

We would have lost many thousands of troops due to radiation poisoning had the emperor not surrendered.

Vermin, your name is John Edwards.

His plane was part of the last wave and he said that by the time they approached target that there was such a conflagration going on below that when they opened the bomb bay doors to drop their load, burning cinders blew up inside the aircraft.

Firsthand accounts from survivors on the ground yielded descriptions of running people catching fire like matchsticks.

There was a downdraft wind that prevailed off the coast of China over Japan, the Shinto “wind-god” that had once saved Japan from invasion by China years before, that this time turned the burning napalm into an 1800 degree F downdraft over almost the entire city.

The US Government actually studied the bombing of Tokyo because it turned into a man-made meteorological event.

That original napalm admixture, invented by a Harvard scientist, killed many multiples more Japanese than the two atomic bombs.

It is also necessary to understand the Japanese factory system at that time — a lot of their war machine was done piece meal, at home. It was a situation where the head of a household would report to a factory and be given some parts to assemble and would take the parts home, assemble them and deliver, whereupon more parts would be doled out. This transformed the so-called civilian living areas into actual factories where war materials were created. Entire cities were therefore factory sites that turned out every manner of war materials for the Japanese war machine.

That, and surrender had to be unconditional.

It was the Japanese military and their young emporer, a death cult if ever there was one, who refused to come to terms with that situation, blindly raving that the Japanese people should die in order to win. Sound like a familiar situation?

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georgej on May 28, 2007 at 3:56 PM

Thanks for your excellent post. I pray we don’t repeat history’s mistakes.

One of the areas that is not as well known, but should be, is the firebombing of Japanese cities which, overall, wrecked more death and destruction than the atomic bombs.

Before the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, under the command of General Curtis LeMay, United States B-29 planes firebombed (using napalm — a jellied gasoline) 67 Japanese cities.

Shortly after he assumed control of the bomber groups based in the Marianas in January 1945, Gen. Curtis LeMay prepared for night-time firebombing of Japanese cities.

Things did not immediately improve, though. The damage the bombers did was considered to be too little, and the losses to high. In February of 1945 he changed tactics. Instead of the planes simply carrying bombs, they started to carry a mix of incendiaries and fragmentation bombs.

The first test of this was Kobe, a major shipyard city. 159 tons of firebombs and 13 tons of high explosives were dropped, resulting in the destruction of 1,000 buildings and severely damaging two of the shipyards. The next attack was a complete failure, though, as the Nakajima plant in Ota was bombed with 47 of the 97 bombs dropped being duds.

So it was time to change tactics again. This time they decided to give the bomber crews intensive training and napalm was picked as a substance to be used during the bombings. A test of this was an early bombing of Tokyo, and the results were about a square mile of the city being destroyed. LeMay decided to have the planes carry heavier bombs and fly at a lower altitude.

The testing of the new tactics began with the bombing of Tokyo on March 9. 334 B-29s took part flying far lower than ever before on a bomb run. Pathfinder planes dropped napalm bombs every 100 feet to make an “X” on the ground, a target for the rest of the planes to attack. The attack itself took over three hours.

From the June 4, 1945 issue of Newsweek, a report on the firebombing:

“Six weeks ago Tokyo had a population of nearly 7,000,000. Last week the Japs cried that Tokyo no longer existed as a city. Using new techniques and new bombs, the largest fleets of B-29s ever to take the air and turned most of the Japanese capital into ashes in two great strikes on May 24 and 26….For 105 minutes the Superfortresses filed over and dropped 700,000 incendiary bombs. … Two nights later a force of more than 500 B-29s struck the Marunouchi district, the business heart of the Japanese Empire. … On a target area of approximately 9 square miles the B-29s dropped 4,000 tons in one hour. The wind did the rest.”

The Japanese later listed over 83,000 dead in the attack; over 40,000 wounded and a total of 15.8 square miles of the city were burned to ashes with the destruction of 265,171 buildings. The intensity of the fire was so much that the water in the rivers reached the boiling point.
The bombing was continued and within ten days 32 square miles of Japanese cities basically ceased to exist. Bomber losses decreased during the process. By the end of April, 11 more square miles of cities had been destroyed. One and a half square miles of Yokohama, three and a half square miles of Kawasaki joined the areas destroyed.

In May Nagoya became a target with the loss of four square miles of the city. Tokyo lost seventeen more square miles. Nine square miles of Yokohama were wiped out towards the end of May. Osaka faired no better with the loss of over 136,000 homes, 4,200 factories and almost 4,000 casualties.

Smaller targets were also hit. Toyama, a small urban area of 128,000, was 100% destroyed. From May to August , U.S. planes firebombed fifty-eight Japanese cities. Four cities, though, were kept off the firebombing list; those included Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Niigata and Kokura.

In July of 1945 the U.S. dropped leaflets on some Japanese cities, warning them that they could end up being firebombed. The next day six of the cities were. This was repeated. The general effect, of course, is to try and demoralize the enemy population by showing the Japanese just how totally helpless they were, and that their own military could not prevent Japanese cities from being attacked directly and bombed, something that had not happened on any scale ever in the entire history of Japan.

What is astonishing is that, despite the incredible losses and the fact that there was virtually nothing Japan could do to stop the bombing, the country kept fighting. No matter how many square miles were destroyed, no matter how many civilians died, the military wanted to keep fighting.

It is interesting to speculate on what would have been done with the firebombing if a physical invasion of the islands had actually taken place. Firebombing would not have reached any deep bunker defenses, so some of the army would still have been able to fight. On the other hand, firebombing a swath of land maybe fifty or sixty miles wide coupled with firebombing all the farm areas could possibly have cleared an area enough that the U.S. military could have gotten a beachhold without horrible casualties.

Still, though, that beachhold would have eventually have had to been extended further and further. Perhaps intense firebombing of adjacent areas and all crops could possibly have allowed the U.S. military to eventually conquer Japan, but the loss in civilian lives would have been almost unimaginable. It might have prevented the need for using the atomic bomb, and on the other hand it might not have. It’s one of those historical questions that can never really be answered.

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Silky Pony needs to go back to the stable.

Patriotic John.

??

Idiotic John!!

Saying that, they had a word for his type during WWII.

“feather merchant”

I hope the democrats give this loser the nod. Hid pandering to the koskrowd will turn off mainstream voters. He is very beatable.

Indeed. However, i’d rather have two candidates who can actually govern properly if the need arises, instead of an idiot we think we can beat. That idea could easily backfire.

I think in those terms its probably obama on the dem side id want, vs. fred! or rudy.

I watched the PBS “American Experience” show on the end of WWII this past week.

Frankly, I was amazed. I have never before seen a PBS show unequivically justify the use of the two atomic bombs on Japan to end the war. On the issue of the bombs, PBS always previously attempted to “tell the other side” (the anti-nuke side) of the story.

Not this time.

The show portrayed how the leaders of the Japanese government cynically attempted to gain advantage and leverage by the use of Kamikaze and the defense of Okinawa for better terms to end the war. It quoted Adm. Nimitz as saying that he almost wished that he hadn’t invaded Okinawa when he tallied up the final cost.

The video explained, point by point, starting with the difficulty in taking Okinawa (a “home island” of the Japanese people) and the 1/3 casualties resulting in the invasion, including the casualties onboard ships struck by the Kamikazes, to the cynical use of young men “warrior gods” to fly their aircraft into US ships, to the public prounouncments promising a fight to the death, while at the same time the Japanese government was working to retain power, retain the emperor (and his symbols of power), after the inevitable loss of the war.

As the planning for the Nov 1, 1945 invasion of the southern home islands proceeded, the estimates of the size of the defending forces continued to grow until, instead of being outnumbered 3 to 1, they would have outnumbered our invasion forces, making it a certainty that our invasion force would have suffered catastrophic casualties as a result.

So much was the worry, that General George Marshall asked McCarther (the invasion commander), whether he could move the invasion to the northern islands instead.

Truman (like Marshall) realized that only shifting the paradigm of victory could prevent the coming bloodbath that an invasion would bring — that the Japanese government and their emperor were counting on for their personal survival. That paradigm change turned out to be the use of the only two nuclear weapons we had in our arsenal at the time.

When Gen. Curtis LeMay’s firebombing campaign of Tokyo, which killed 100,000 Japanese civilians and left one quarter of the city destroyed, the government and the emperor were unmoved. Litterly. It bothered them not one bit.

It took repeated destruction of two entire cities by ONE BOMB, days apart, with the promise of more to come until the Japanese war cabinet’s promise of war to the death of the Japanese people would become reality, to make the emperor blink and agree to the Potsdam terms of unconditional surrender.

I mention this because I was immediately struck with today’s situation in fighting the Islamofascists in Iraq and Afghanistan. The situation that John Edwards hopes to exploit to bring him to power.

Our enemy has promised us millions of “Islamist Kamikazes.” Our enemy has promised that they will never give up and live in peace with us because their God demands total victory or death — just like emperor Hirohito, descendant of the gods, did right up until August 10, 1945, when he announced unconditional surrender.

So, today, we face the same situation, but compounded by traitors like Edwards and the other Democrats who are willing to give bin Laden the victory he can’t win — and so very much unlike Democrats FDR/Truman who refused to give any victory to Hirohito.

We need a paradigm change.

We need something to litterly shock the mindset of Islamists everywhere.

We need to impress upon them that pissants like John Edwards and the rest of the Democrat Party, the Treason Party, WILL NOT PREVAIL or deter us from victory. We need to make it clear that Edwards, et. al., DOES NOT SPEAK for America.

We need to make them see that not only will their goal not be met, that stalling won’t give them victory, but that we will destroy them if they persist. Just like we made the emperor of Japan see that we really would destroy his country down to the last man, woman and child, (as he claimed he wished), if necessary, in 1945.

I really am at a loss to see what this paradigm change would require. should we nuke Iran and destroy a country of 55 million mostly innocent civillians? Should we nuke the tribal territories of Pakistan? Should we be be as brutal to the terrorists as they are brutal to the innocents they kill? That is what we did in WWII to both the civilian populations of both Germany and Japan, after all. We took the war to them and not just to their military forces.

Do we smash all of Islam down, so hard and so completely that what few muslims survive will never recover their place? Do we negate all the positive contributions to our world by Islam in mathmatics and art, in order to stop the brutality of their mad dogs leaders with their 7th Century mindset?

Oh, Lord, I hope it is not necessary to do that.

But other than giving them utter destruction, how do we make the Islamists quit?