That We Should Have Dropped the Nukes

[FritzDerochebrune]

2) Accept the damage, and order the attacks.

As said in my edit, Allied bombers didn't bomb cities because they wanted to destroy the production-chain of german ground units, but because they wanted to lower the German moral, in wich they failed miserably. They only managed to increase the faith of the people in the Führer.

 

cya

 

Fritz

[poopgoblin]

WRONG. The ninja had a weapon wich could reach America, and even bomb its cities. What it was? Simple, it wasn't a rocket, or even a plain. It was the common balloon. You see, there is a favorable wind for Japan to use these weapons. It will take a balloon from Japan straight to the west coast of the US. However, Japan did not use these balloons to attack cities.

Think. Would a balloon really be an effective weapons platform? True, there is a good wind, but how would you keep on course? There'd be little if any room for instruments on board, not to mention food and water for the trip over. Also, you seem to be heralding the Japanese as great humanitarians, saying that they chose not to attack cities. Did you forget about Bataan? How about Manila? Nanking? Or the brutal treatment of Allied POWs?

 

 

No, you are wrong again. Not everybody was a soldier. Did the civilians at the bombed cities have arms? Did they

have a chance to defend themselves? And if they where soldiers, why didn't the ninja send them of to fight? It is true about the 'no surrender' part, but not everybody was as willingly to do that. You can say much, but if the Japanese army was crushed, no 400.000 would keep up the fight with 'whatever weapon they would get'. Japanese beliefs says a soldier never surrenders, not that civilians have to do idiotic things.

Soldiers in the sense that they were ready to fight if there was an invasion, not in the sense of get shipped off to some island.

 

The nuclear attack wasn't the only thing that could break this situation. The rules of wartime always have been the same, no changes had to be made. The nuke could have been used on a Japanese held island, with only soldiers on them, but no, bombing civilians showed the US was capable of penetrating Japanese airial defences, only to show how 'powerfull' the US was.

Yes, but then how would the Japanese government know that we even had the weapons in the first place?

 

And if the Allied command was so 'concerned' about their men, why would they use the Sherman throughout the war, though it had been proven it was no match for the best german armor. 10 shermans to take out one tiger was good use of materials. After all, the Shermans could be replaced... and the men too.

Do you realize how long it takes to design, test, and produce a new weapon? Even if the Allies were to introduce a new tank, it would have been to late to be able to make a difference. Also, the Sherman worked fine in North Africa, so, given that they needed to save all the funds and resources that they could, why would they replace a weapon that got the job done?

 

I´ve been studying the second world war for six years now. I know what I´m saying, since everything I´ve added in my post has two seperate sources. You can´t disprove it.

Kind of like, "I'm older than you, therefore I am right." Also, may I please see those sources?

 

===============================================================================

 

@Peregrine, I was saying that Allied crews weren't trying to hit civies on purpose, not that it was easy.

 

@Fritz's edit:

You are assuming that ALL Allied pilots didn't care about innocents or that bombing major cities was their choice. Okay, civies were hit on purpose to try and lower morale, I never said they weren't, I'm sorry if it came across as I did. I was saying that hitting the enemies factories would be more strategic than civies.

 

As for the not heavy losses, yeah right. The USAAF lost more men than any other branch of the Armed Forces.

 

And that hate you talked about was fostered by Hitler. the people were very patriotic on both sides. However, had the German people known what Hitler was doing with the death camps, they probably would've overthrown him.

[Peregrine]

The only reason the Japanese didn't attack an American city was the simple fact that they couldn't. They just didn't have anything with the range to get there even if they wanted to (which they did). So it wasn't some act of mercy involved.

WRONG. The ninja had a weapon wich could reach America, and even bomb its cities. What it was? Simple, it wasn't a rocket, or even a plain. It was the common balloon. You see, there is a favorable wind for Japan to use these weapons. It will take a balloon from Japan straight to the west coast of the US. However, Japan did not use these balloons to attack cities.

 

Are you actually serious? Do you have any idea what the accuracy of a balloon weapon would be? You aren't attacking a target like a city or factory, you'd be lucky if you even hit the continent you're aiming for. Even if they managed to reach the west coast, they'd be just as likely to fall in the middle of a city as to hit a "legitimate military target"... or just fall in the wilderness somewhere. Of course anyone with even a basic knowledge of the physics involved would realize this and cancel the project before it could waste resources better spent on realistic weapons.

 

No, you are wrong again. Not everybody was a soldier. Did the civilians at the bombed cities have arms? Did they have a chance to defend themselves? And if they where soldiers, why didn't the ninja send them of to fight? It is true about the 'no surrender' part, but not everybody was as willingly to do that. You can say much, but if the Japanese army was crushed, no 400.000 would keep up the fight with 'whatever weapon they would get'. Japanese beliefs says a soldier never surrenders, not that civilians have to do idiotic things.

 

Clearly you don't understand your history. The culture at the time was you die for the emperor, period. You do not ever surrender. If you are a civilian and you only have a pointy stick, you attack with your pointy stick until you die. Every plan for a traditional invasion of Japan involved massive casualties on both sides.

 

While you might argue in hindsight all you want, at the time, as far as anyone involved in planning the invasion knew, an invasion of Japan would be a fight to the death for EVERYONE.

 

The nuclear attack wasn't the only thing that could break this situation. The rules of wartime always have been the same, no changes had to be made. The nuke could have been used on a Japanese held island, with only soldiers on them, but no, bombing civilians showed the US was capable of penetrating Japanese airial defences, only to show how 'powerfull' the US was.

 

Bombing soldiers wouldn't have the required shock value. Japan had to know that to continue fighting would be the end of Japan, not just more dead soldiers.

 

And if the Allied command was so 'concerned' about their men, why would they use the Sherman throughout the war, though it had been proven it was no match for the best german armor. 10 shermans to take out one tiger was good use of materials. After all, the Shermans could be replaced... and the men too.

 

A few reasons:

 

1) Tank vs. tank battles are not the only thing that matters. The Sherman was a good design for other purposes, and a good design as a whole.

 

2) Allied (US) production had to be shipped by sea. A heavier tank would have been easy to design, in fact they were, but shipping it and landing it on the beaches would've been far more difficult.

 

3) Eventually, the Sherman DID have 10v1 odds.

 

 

And they wouldn't take heavy losses. The B-17 isn't called the flying fortress for nothing. Especially after the allies won the air-battle, since the only thing to stop them was FlaK, manned by children because all adult men where at the front. The American air forces lost 1.61% of all pilots or crews who entered service. The total amount of pilots and crew-members who entered service was 3 400 000. What about that, heavy losses, eh?

 

Note that this number does not refer to the B-17 missions only. It's an average of all pilots (maybe even including non-combat pilots), over all missions, for the entire war. Bomber losses, especially in some specific missions, were very heavy. Again, pick up a good WWII flight sim, and tell me how easy bombing is.

 

As for the "flak manned by children", that's just stupid. The allies didn't win the air war until late in the war. For most of the strategic bombing campaign, they were opposed by a very much intact German air force. The B-17 didn't carry all those guns just for decoration, you know.

[Karasuman]

"And if the Allied command was so 'concerned' about their men, why would they use the Sherman throughout the war, though it had been proven it was no match for the best german armor."

 

Possibly because it's all they had? You act as though the Allies sat around not attempting to develop better weapons. The British used around 20 different tank types during WW2. Problem was, many of these were even more ineffective than the Sherman. At least the Sherman was maneuverable. Other types developed were both un-maneuverable and had completely ineffective firepower against the Tigers. The Shermans were the best tanks available to the British on such short notice. Is it really that hard to grasp that in war, some nations will have better weapons in certain areas than others?

 

By your rationale, why did it take so long for the Germans to develop a plane that could out-maneuver the Spitfire in aerial combat? The war lasted 6 years. How easy do you think it is to just develop an effective tank in a short amount of time, especially considering how advanced the opposition was in that area? The Germans caught a lot of people by surprise with their level of weapons advancement when the war began. Much of the world was so far behind in certain areas that it took almost the whole 6 years just to catch up.

 

If you think it was such an easy proposition to develop a tank superior to the Tiger, you're wasting your time here. You ought to be in weapons engineering, what with all your genius about the subject.

 

It almost sounds like you would've preferred an Axis victory.

 

 

EDIT: Another reason for the lack of better tanks is that by 1944, when the Germans were on the retreat, it was far better strategy by that time to use aerial attacks against German tanks rather than wasting a bunch of money and time developing tanks which could combat the German Panzer units. All that would've done is draw out the war even longer, which nobody was really keen on doing. Aerial bombings could take out an entire field of Tigers with one attack.

[FritzDerochebrune]

Well I'm not going to quote you since my last post with quotes was a bit to long.

 

Balloons: Does accuracy matter if you bomb a city? If you bomb one building or another, it still gets the same. In fact, there have been several balloonraids on america. Just not on cities. As I said, I only use arguements here if I have two individual sources who can back eachother up. And those sources state I Japan made a mass-fleet of balloons, they would be able to bomb cities in America. Have you ever seen the Hindenburg? Then you'll know how powerfull balloons can be. Although the Hindenburg was a zeppelin, the concept remains the same.

 

Japan's culture: who's a ninja here? You don't really think civilians would attack fully equiped soldiers with a stick do you? As said: honorable death, not being an idiot. Women and children won't do such a thing. Even today in third world countries, child soldiers still get a gun to fight.

 

Tanks of WW2: Oh, but the Americans did have a better tank. the M26 pershing to be precise. It could handle the Pz. V Panther and the Pz. VI tiger. The only German tank that the M26 couldn't destroy was the Pz. VI ausf. B. Köningstiger. And do you know the nickname for the Sherman? Tommiecooker. I think that states enough. And even if the allies had air-superiority, not every tank could be destroyed by them. Think about it: how else could the Germans get entire panzerdivisions at the west front without the allies knowing this? Forest are great cover for tanks. In addition to that, every panzercorps had a FlaKPanzercorps in de neighborhood. 4x20mm Wirbelwinds or 37 mm Ostwinds could easily take out attacking fighterbombers.

 

And there is a big difference between develloping a tank and develloping a fighter. Tanks are constantly being captured. Fighters are most blown to bits either by aerial combat or the crash. How can you make something to counter someting you don't have an example of? The Allies had enough panzers to examine, and the Americans even enjoyed data about tank clashes of British forces.

 

And about landing heavy tanks at the beaches: of course that can't be done. Shermans would be fine to support landings at beaches, but not as main battle tank.

 

The thing the sherman was most effective in, was cooking it's crew as stated in the nickname above. Quote from a German: On the Eastern front, the T34 and JS tanks ripped through us. On the western front, we had nothing to be afraid about, our panzers could take attacking Shermans down easilly. Ask any WW2 tank crew, they would chose a german Panzer above a Sherman.

 

Nuclear bombing: That's a true American statement: Just destroy an enemy's country to destroy the enemy. Do you know Nazi's thought that as well?

 

How would Japan know of the bombing? Well, it's quite strange if an entire island suddenly doesn't respond to radiocontact anymore, no? Especially if there is no enemy fleet in the neighbourhood. That should be a good enough warning before bombing cities.

 

Normal Bombing: I've flown WWII flight sim IL2 Sturmovik, and I'll tell you: it is nothing near real-life bombing. It's a game. Bombers had acurate tools with them on their flights. They could easilly hit a target. I saw a program last week with a WW2 veteran-bombadeer. Even he could, while being 80 year old, hit a target nearly perfect. A factory would be easy to hit. Try looking for veteran-accounts in stead of games to state your arguements.

 

Luftwaffe & FlaKwaffe. Look up newsreels from 1944 and 1945: you'll see children manning the FlaK-guns. There are some simple reasons why the Luftwaffe couldn't defend the fahterland.

1 They had Jets. This might seem a good point, but they came to late. They only added new problems: +New runways had to be made out of concrete, since the old ones where to short and the asphalt would melt by the high temperature.

+Jets needed protection from other fighters during take offs and landings, since it took them much longer to do them as normal fighters. This decreased the amount of fighters even more

2 Lack of fuel. Germany's fuel depot was shrinking every day. More and more jets and fighters had to stay on the ground to save fuel. Hitler saw the tanks as his wonderweapon wich would change the war.

3 Lack of experience: the long fighting on the Eastern front killed many aces who had gained experience from 1936 until 1941.

4 amount of Allied fighters. The allies had much more fighters, because they had mass-production

 

As for FlaK: it did take down some bombers. And it is true some missions costed much. But the losses where replacable. And that was all that counted during WW2, since the axis couldn't do that, but the Allies could.

 

Should the Axis win the war? Germany - Hitler and Nazi's = Yes.

 

If Germany (not Nazi Germany) won the war, we would probably have a stable empire now, not with terrorists and wars, since the entire world would be one country. But the US won and since 1945 there has been nothing but war.

 

cya

 

Fritz

[Peregrine]

Balloons: Does accuracy matter if you bomb a city? If you bomb one building or another, it still gets the same. In fact, there have been several balloonraids on america. Just not on cities. As I said, I only use arguements here if I have two individual sources who can back eachother up. And those sources state I Japan made a mass-fleet of balloons, they would be able to bomb cities in America. Have you ever seen the Hindenburg? Then you'll know how powerfull balloons can be. Although the Hindenburg was a zeppelin, the concept remains the same.

 

Read the damn post. You can't hit a city accurately with balloons. You'd be lucky to even get a majority of them to hit the right country. The simple fact is that un-guided balloons have such a massive inaccuracy over such a long distance that the vast majority of them will do absolutely nothing, landing in the ocean/wilderness/failing to detonate/etc. Of the few that do, they're just as likely to hit civillian targets as military ones.

 

And read your history. The Hindenburg was entirely different. The balloon-bomb proposals I've seen involved unguided balloons, just left to drift free in the general direction of the target. In other words, a complete wase of resources and time, and abandoned for good reason. Even if they were Hindenburg-style zeppelins, they would be a slow, massive target and pathetically easy to shoot down. There's a good reason that tactic wasn't tried either.

 

Japan's culture: who's a ninja here? You don't really think civilians would attack fully equiped soldiers with a stick do you? As said: honorable death, not being an idiot. Women and children won't do such a thing. Even today in third world countries, child soldiers still get a gun to fight.

 

You don't understand the Japanese culture of the time. The emperor was their god. And plans had been made to do exactly that, to use every last person and every possible weapon (which is not much, seeing as Japanese industry was pretty much a pile of rubble at this point) in a fight to the death.

 

 

 

And there is a big difference between develloping a tank and develloping a fighter. Tanks are constantly being captured. Fighters are most blown to bits either by aerial combat or the crash. How can you make something to counter someting you don't have an example of? The Allies had enough panzers to examine, and the Americans even enjoyed data about tank clashes of British forces.

 

You're right. Developing a (good) fighter is massively harder. Speaking as a soon-to-be aerospace engineer, the design problem is MUCH harder for a flying vehicle than for one that sits safely on the ground. There's a very good reason we had land vehicles long before we mastered the art of flying.

 

And about landing heavy tanks at the beaches: of course that can't be done. Shermans would be fine to support landings at beaches, but not as main battle tank.

 

Have you ever looked at a map of Europe? Compare the location of the factories to the location of the fighting. Compare the location of the German factories to the location of the fighting. Now note that having a tank that can't be carried on a beach landing forces you to capture a port intact before you can even think of bringing your tanks into the fight, a problem the Germans didn't have. The Pershing's lower weight made actually getting it to the fight much easier. And a mediocre tank that you actually have is much better than an excellent one that you don't.

 

How would Japan know of the bombing? Well, it's quite strange if an entire island suddenly doesn't respond to radiocontact anymore, no? Especially if there is no enemy fleet in the neighbourhood. That should be a good enough warning before bombing cities.

 

The point was it had to be a morale blow. Killing soldiers wouldn't do anything, they were already prepared and eager to die for their country. The US had to demonstrate that their sacred homeland could, and would be destroyed without any chance of defense if they didn't surrender.

Normal Bombing: I've flown WWII flight sim IL2 Sturmovik, and I'll tell you: it is nothing near real-life bombing. It's a game. Bombers had acurate tools with them on their flights. They could easilly hit a target. I saw a program last week with a WW2 veteran-bombadeer. Even he could, while being 80 year old, hit a target nearly perfect. A factory would be easy to hit. Try looking for veteran-accounts in stead of games to state your arguements.

 

Are you flying with full realism? No real-time map, realistic physics, etc? Bombing from high altitude with full wind effects (if they're even in the game?)? With no digital display, only the various dials and gauges for your instruments (here's a hint: unless you cheat, in IL-2 you don't get the exact ground speed number you need for accurate bombing with a B-17). How about while under attack, without the knowledge that it's just a game and you are really going to die?

 

And I don't really need the game anyway, I just use it as an example that you can understand without needing to know all the physics behind it. The simple fact is that WWII technology was far from modern levels of accuracy. Destroying just a factory without any collateral damage would be literally impossible, civilians are going to die no matter what you do.

 

But don't trust me. Look at the actual damage reports from the real attacks. Note how even in large raids, misses were common, and many targets took several attacks to finally do the job.

Luftwaffe & FlaKwaffe. Look up newsreels from 1944 and 1945: you'll see children manning the FlaK-guns. There are some simple reasons why the Luftwaffe couldn't defend the fahterland.

 

Again, late-war. I'm talking about early war, where this whole bombing cities thing started.

 

1 They had Jets. This might seem a good point, but they came to late. They only added new problems: +New runways had to be made out of concrete, since the old ones where to short and the asphalt would melt by the high temperature.

+Jets needed protection from other fighters during take offs and landings, since it took them much longer to do them as normal fighters. This decreased the amount of fighters even more

 

Both true, but the big problem was the lack of high-quality alloys available to German industry by the end of the war. The engines suffered from short lifespans and high failure rate. In actual combat, they were essentially un-beatable. Deploying the jets was one of the few good decisions of the war, the only mistake was not focusing on them earlier.

 

As for FlaK: it did take down some bombers. And it is true some missions costed much. But the losses where replacable. And that was all that counted during WW2, since the axis couldn't do that, but the Allies could.

 

So you agree that your quoted loss rates are completely misleading?

 

Should the Axis win the war? Germany - Hitler and Nazi's = Yes.

 

If Germany (not Nazi Germany) won the war, we would probably have a stable empire now, not with terrorists and wars, since the entire world would be one country. But the US won and since 1945 there has been nothing but war.

 

*laughs*

 

This is a joke, right? You're utterly delusional if you think a German victory, even without the nazis, would have turned the world into some glorious peaceful empire. These wars since 1945 have had nothing to do with the US, they all have their origins in local conflicts which would be there regardless of whether the US was involved or not. The only question is whether Germany would have followed a similar path in getting involved... and if you think a German empire that just conquered all of Europe would suddenly turn isolationist and stay out of it, you're even more delusional than I thought.

 

 

Of course it's an irrelevant point, since Germany had zero chance of actually winning the war. The only question up for debate is whether they could've made the war drag on long enough for Berlin to disappear under a mushroom cloud. The combination of dominating American industry backed by the near-invulnerability provided by two oceans and supported by massive natural resources is just too powerful for a German victory to be even remotely realistic. The absolute "best" case scenario would be an isolationist America and German control over most of western Europe.

[ninja_lord666]

There's also another very important reason it was good we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We needed the knowledge of how devastating it was. During the Cold War, the only reason USA ans USSR didn't launch all they had was because they remembered Hiroshima and Nagasaki; they remembered the devastation and didn't want that to happen again. If those bombings never happened, USA and USSR would have definitely gone all out and launch every nuke they had.

What's worse? 400,000 Japanese deaths or millions of American and Soviet deaths?

[FritzDerochebrune]

this will be only a short notice. Our PC is having huge errors. It can restart at any second, without there being a reson for it. Tomorrow we will take he PC to the store where we bought it, and as soon as it is repaired I'll reply again.

 

sorry for this inconvinience

 

cya (i hope)

 

Fritz

[Switch]

Karasuman's last two posts removed. Flaming/trolling. Please try and debate without resorting to being quite so hostile.

[Karasuman]

"Karasuman's last two posts removed. Flaming/trolling. Please try and debate without resorting to being quite so hostile."

 

That's fine, as I respect the moderators and don't wish to make their jobs harder, so I will apologize for my hostile stance. I'm also going to shed some light as to where it came from:

 

"They used Nanking civilians for bayonet practice, buried them alive (a method they used to bury people alive was to get the victims to each dig a hole, and the first one in line to jump into their hole and the next person fill in the dirt, and then he jumps in his hole so that the next person can fill in his dirt and the cycle continues), buried them to their neck, fed them to dogs, carved their organs. They held killing contests, hung men from the wrists or ankles until the joints snapped off. They used live men to conduct experiments, cut off men's penises...

 

They also raped women from ages 8-60... They forced sons to rape their mothers, sisters etc. They forced women to post pornographic actions. They stuck fire crackers into women's vaginas. They took out fetuses from pregnant women's wombs. They gang-raped women on streets and did not care who was there. They cut off women's breasts and pinned them on the wall...

They first tried to bury all the bodies, but soon found that to be ineffective. They then just threw bodies into the Yangtze River. Lakes and rivers were stained with blood and turned bright red. In 7 weeks they had killed more than 300,000 people.

 

After the war, they denied all that. Even today many people don't know about this forgotten holocaust."

 

"Of all the 1931 to 1945 Asian-Pacific War deaths, approximately 87 percent were Asian victims of Japanese aggression, one percent were Western Allies, and 12 percent were Japanese."

 

 

How many Chinese civilians were killed by the Japanese with such methods and others during WW2?

 

"Wikipedia says 3.9 million," with other sources claiming similar tolls. This includes those killed by massacre methods only. By war's end, 8 to 9 million Chinese civilians would ultimately die as a result of Japanese aggression.

 

I'd rather be nuked.

 

 

 

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

http://www.japanww2.com/chapter1.htm