"Smithers" wrote in message
...
Joseph Gwinn wrote in
:

In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Nicholas Anthony" wrote in message
...

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
"Nicholas Anthony" wrote in message
...

Putting words in peoples mouths is wrong thing to do. Making
conclusions
as
such is wrong too. I am fed up with this BS and you lose
credibility yourself in doing so.

Those are YOUR words, and it appears that you're now trying to
weasel
out
of
them by pointing the finger elsewhere.

Shape up, Nicholas. If you say something, either stand behind
your words or bow out. You're sounding like Greybuns.

--
Ed Huntress

I stand by my words and dont appreciate people making assumptions
from them as they have.

No no no no no. You're not getting away with that. Here are your
words again:

"Hold up Ed. The act of cowardness was attacking inocent civilians
that wont or cant fight back under the circumstances."

That covers a lot of territory. As anyone who knows history is well
aware, you've just defined our attacks on Dresden, on Hiroshima, on
Nagasaki, and many other places. We made a big splash with it early
in the history of modern warfare, when Sherman marched to the sea and
burned Atlanta.

Dresden: Payback for the London Blitz, and an industrial center to
boot.


Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Use of atomic weapons allowed WW2 to end
without requiring the physical invasion of the island of Japan.

Contemporary estimates were that, based on the scale of fighting
required as the Allies retook the Pacific islands one by one, taking
Japan itself would cost at least one million Allied dead. Civilian
deaths would have been far higher, at least ten million, as Japan has
about the population of the US compressed into an island the size of
California. And most of Japan would have been devastated, causing
agriculture to collapse, causing mass starvation. All this would have
made Normandy and Lenningrad look like picnics.

In the most basic terms, compared to a full-scale invasion, atomic
attack was a *very* good deal for the Japanese population -- it cost
only two smallish cities and 200,000 dead.

And a very good deal for the Allied soldiers, the million who would
have died.


Atlanta: Sherman's objective was not terror, it was strategic, to
destroy the South's economy and thus her capacity to make war.
Sherman did things like tearing railroad tracks up, to block shipping
between the interior and the port of Atlanta. It worked.


Joe Gwinn


Pretty much everything you said is either puffed up or untrue. The
Russians were about to invade Japan right at the end of the war. They
declared war on Japan about a week before we dropped the bombs. Had we
not done so they would have invaded Japan from the north so they could
have taken land from Japan they lost in 1904, and then occupied Japan
like they did Europe. All the trumped up estimates of the cost of not
dropping the atom bombs was grossly exaggerated to justify their use. We
wanted the war over quickly so we wouldn't have to contend with Russian
troops in Japan. Oh, and the targets picked were intended to kill mainly
civilians to instill terror in the Japanese. Unfortunately, our military
didn't factor in that the Japanese war leaders didn't care if we killed
everyone. They weren't going to surrender. It took the emperor to
overrule their recklessness.

Hawke


Notice you said we attacked the civilians to instill terror on the Japanese
who didnt care if we killed everyone. Evidentally it worled cause look at
how it unravled. I am not going to get into the symantics of our choices at
the time just the outcome cause its all hindsite and has many spins
depending what you choose to believe.