Click, if you, as an American, are represented by empire-maintainers over 2000 miles from the mainland, well, you aren't an American in the tradition of Washington and Jefferson.
Are you suggesting the founding fathers wouldn't have approved of miltary force projection?
Then I feel you must explain yourself in relation to Jeffersons handling of the Barbary Pirates.
Letters of marque and sending Marines against
pirates obstructing the flow of American-owned goods?
That is not what the military was doing in Hawaii. They took it over by military force and political intrigue because it made a great strategic and economic launch pad. Would the Japanese have attacked if the U.S. military did not have an embargo on the Japanese, and if the U.S. military had not taken over Hawaii?
The two events and their roots are grossly unrelated.
Click, I cannot point out how the civilian population of Nanking or a family of picnickers was a valid military target, because it was not. Did I ever say that it was? I merely wished that the U.S. government could have restricted its attacks to military targets.
I suspect more with every post that you know very little about the war. In this case, the Japaneese practice of domesticated manufacturing that made it impossible to seperate civilina and military targets.. as well as the technology in use at the time which made our current understanding of precision attacks impossible in that era. The very thought that you suggest of conducting a war such as WWII and being able to selectively target civilian and military belies you complete lack of understanding of the conflict..
not to mention the very fact that the Japaneese themselves trained such that there was no seperation between military and civilians. The plans to repell a US invasion of the homeland underscore this to a shocking depth.
I must admit, I have very little understanding of the necessity to destroy entire cities. I have, in my apparently limited studies about the war, heard about the alleged Japanese cottage war machine. As it is, I am in some good company with other people who also did not understand the necessity of such actions:
Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz: "I felt that that was an unnecessary loss of civilian life...We had them beaten. They hadn't enough food, they couldn't do anything."
Admiral Halsey: "The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment...It was a mistake to ever drop it. Why reveal a weapon like that to the world when it wasn't necessary?...It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before."
"Hap" Arnold: "it always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse."
Carl Spaatz: "That was purely a political decision, wasn't a military decision. The military man carries out the orders of his political bosses."
Curtis LeMay: ""obvious that the atomic bomb did not end the war against Japan. Japan was finished long before either one of the two atomic bombs were dropped..."
General Eisenhower (yes, he was ETO) "[T]he Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
And finally, MacArthur, who said, there was "no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier...if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."
http://www.doug-long.com/thad103.htm
But then, I suppose I'm not in step with the myriad bomber crew vets and their supporters, who keep telling themselves, "It saved a lot of American lives," parroting that line over and over again. Because they have to tell themselves over and over again. People who do evil things tend to do that.
But, in your strategic view, is it possible for an island nation to sustain, for any practical length of time, a substantial wartime production when its supply and raw materials ships are constantly destroyed by a vastly superior navy, while they are both coming and going along their supply and material routes?
Ever been to Hiroshima?
Well, I have. A couple of times. Go to peace park. They have a great museum there. It details quite well why Hiroshima was hit.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit for no other reasons than a sadistic, glorious grand finale to 5 years of American military and civilian frustration, and to scare the tar out of the Russians.
-Sans Authoritas
