The Pacific Part 9 Watch Along
Added 2024-02-26 17:22:02 +0000 UTCHoly Hell! What a hard episode to watch! Thanks for being here!!
xx
ames
Comments
Thanks for this!
Amalia Wolf
2024-03-01 06:12:15 +0000 UTCAmen to that. My Marine grandfather was set to be in the first wave of the ground invasion and he always said that as lucky as he had been to survive 3 years in the jungle up to that point, he knew he would never have come home if Truman hadn't dropped the bombs. On an even more personal note that is of no consequence to anyone but me and and my family, but my mother, my brother, my nieces, my kids and myself exist today only because Gramps did come back.
Robert Livingood
2024-03-01 04:06:25 +0000 UTCJapan began their war in 1931, and they killed 40+ million soldiers and civilians, while only losing less than 10% of that. And when it was over they were treated very well by us, with billions to rebuild their economy and our military to protect them, especially from China, where they had murdered tens of millions. I do not wish Japan or its people ill now, but I cannot be sorry my dad and uncles didn't have to invade and occupy them in 1945, nor can I feel much sympathy for the price they paid for their 14-year rampage.
Baron Imhoof
2024-03-01 02:06:12 +0000 UTCJust a note on the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reasonable minds can certainly disagree whether there was moral justification for doing it, but the US had realized that as dreadful as the island to island fighting had been on the march toward the Japanese mainland (Peleilu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa etc), actually invading Japan proper would have been far worse than anything that had already occurred. Realistic estimates suggested that at the very least 200,000 US servicemen would have died invading Japan and probably at least 300,000 Japanese would have perished, whereas the 2 nuclear bombs killed an estimated 125,000 and severely injured another 125,000. Unimaginable as it is to contemplate, it’s difficult to argue that the nuclear bombs didn’t actually save lives on both sides. Likely the first and only time such a statement can be made. In fact, the preceding three year bombing campaign of Japanese cities and strategic industrial sites killed, by most estimates several hundred thousand (mostly civilians) with other estimates reach nearly a million. Many believe that Operation Meetinghouse aka The Fire Bombing of Tokyo in March of 1945 using an early form of napalm was if anything even more nightmarish and, by some estimates, killed more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, though officially at least 100,000. In preparation for a ground invasion by Allied troops there likely would have been nonstop aerial bombing campaigns like this, which is partly why President Truman, bless him, made the decision he did to use the nuclear weapons instead and just try to end things imediately. War as they say, is hell, and none was more hellish than the war in the Pacific. It’s been said that in WW2 fighting the Germans was like a terrible heavyweight boxing match, brutal but within the bounds of convention with discernible rules generally adhered to by both sides. Wheres the war in the Pacific was a knife fight in the gutter to the death.
Robert Livingood
2024-02-27 14:08:11 +0000 UTC
