Burnt Orange Report

I was alive (barely) for LBJ's death.

However, based on what I've read, LBJ was more than just "hat". He was a true Texan -- warts and all.

Being born in Connecticut automatically disqualifies you from being a real Texan.

You Texans seem mighty proud of your killing ability. Bush and LBJ. What amateurs. You should make that great Democrat Harry Truman an honorary Lone Star citizen. He was able to kill 200,000 women, children and men in Hiroshima and another 140,000 in Nagasaki. Go America. USA! USA! You are number one!

Yeah, I suppose you would rather have had half a million dead Americans on the beaches of Japan or worse yet that and victory for the imperialists there. Harry Truman, as far as I am concerned, can be an honorary Texan- won WWII, the Marshall Plan, integrating the military, introducing universal health care into the Democratic Party platform, the Berlin airlift, telling Republicans to go to hell and most importantly for performing superbly in a job he never wanted. Hell yeah I'll make him a Texan.

Permit me to be a bit... analytical here, but it disturbs me that the nuclear attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima are seen as the penultimate atroctiy of World War II.

At least as many people died in the conventional fire bombings of Dresden (perhaps 100,000?), Hamburg(80,000?), Tokyo(180,000+), etc. as from the atomic bomb (340,000?). And I think it's pretty clear that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were higher-value military targets than either Dresden or Tokyo.

Moreover, the atomic bomb did two things fire bombing did not - it ended the war immediately (it's open to question what would have happened with another few months to a year; invasion? capitulation by other means? but clearly fire bombing alone wasn't working), and it put the Soviets on notice, perhaps forestalling the inevitable "next" great-power war.

Permit me to be a bit... analytical here, but it disturbs me that the nuclear attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima are seen as the penultimate atroctiy of World War II.

At least as many people died in the conventional fire bombings of Dresden (perhaps 100,000?), Hamburg(80,000?), Tokyo(180,000+), etc. as from the atomic bomb (340,000?). And I think it's pretty clear that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were higher-value military targets than either Dresden or Tokyo.

Moreover, the atomic bomb did two things fire bombing did not - it ended the war immediately (it's open to question what would have happened with another few months to a year; invasion? capitulation by other means? but clearly fire bombing alone wasn't working), and it put the Soviets on notice, perhaps forestalling the inevitable "next" great-power war.

It takes too much time to write it down here, but Bill Clinton had a great entry on his internet diary about the issue of being a Southerner and liberal/democrat and how this is a winning combination. He is right, just look at Edwards, he just gave Kerry the South on a silver platter.

He was able to kill 200,000 women, children and men in Hiroshima and another 140,000 in Nagasaki. Go America. USA! USA! You are number one!

Unfortunately, Japan after World War Two never underwent a process similar to the "de-Nazification" which took place in Germany. As a result, much of the post-war leadership was drawn from middle ranking officials who were part of the wartime government.
The post-war leadership and bureaucracy nurtured the myth that Japan was only a victim of the war. Even today, Japanese atrocities in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia in the 1930s and 1940s are either downplayed or ignored in Japanese history textbooks. More Chinese civilians were killed (one at a time) by the Japanese in the massacre known as "The Rape of Nanking" than civilians were killed at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As we say in the US, "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."
It is in the interest of both the extreme left and extreme right in Japan to portray itself as an innocent victim. Our Japanese friends would do well to remember that if there had been no Pearl Harbor, there would have been no Hiroshima.

What encouraged the use of the atomic bombs was the horrible death toll in the Battle of Okinawa in spring of 1945. 12,000 Americans, 107,000 Japanese soldiers and roughly 100,000 Japanese civilians died in the US invasion of Okinawa.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/okinawa-battle.htm

Okinawa is just one of Japan's 47 prefectures.
If the US had been forced to invade the home islands, and if Okinawa's casualities would have been the average per prefecture, the projected number of deaths in the invasion of Japan would have been: 552,000 Americans, 4,922,000 Japanese military, and 4,600,000 Japanese civilians.
Based on those figures, President Truman may have prevented over 10,000,000 deaths, most of them Japanese.

There may have been other options besides either dropping atomic bombs on cities or invading Japan. The war would have dragged on longer, but Japan would have been increasingly isolated to the point that diplomacy could have been used. There is probably always a better solution than slaughtering defenseless women, children and men. No matter what Hary Truman did regarding domestic policy, he will always be the only human being who killed more people in three days than any other human who ever lived.

I'm familiar with the revisionist history regarding the end of the war in the Pacific. None of it holds any water. It's based more on ideology and wishful thinking than on fact.

You remember Harry Truman the way it suits you.
I'll always think of him as the man who ended this planet's bloodiest nightmare.

Some observations --

Even *after* the atom bomb was used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, significant parts of the Japanese military wanted to continue fighting, to the point where they nearly deposed the Emperor (who made the decision to surrender). We were dealing with fanatics here; assuming they would have given up without a devastating show of force is probably false. Whether or not Tim Z's estimates (10 million?!?) are correct, it is probably sure that the Japanese military elite were willing to let another couple hundred thousands Japanese military and civilians die before capitulating.

(Also let's not forget that the Japanese were WARNED of their impending destruction months earlier by Truman at Potsdam -- after the fire-bombing raids! They knew we weren't kidding, and would wipe out hundreds of thousands of people to get what we wanted -- but didn't surrender.)

Additionally, I'd note that most of the a-bomb deaths were radiation-induced and occurred months or years after August 1945. If you stack it up, more people died in two nights of fire-bombing Tokyo than in two days of a-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki (also, hundreds of thousands of wounded from the fire-bombings).

I think it would be fair to say that Curtis LeMay's fire-bombing raids were at least equally bad as the a-bomb raids (if not worse). Take off the ideological blinders.

I loved LBJ and I am a Republican.