Erase One Major U.S. Event

[Whovian]

Most of this discussion over the atomic bombing of Japan is based on mistaken fact.

The exact reason, stated by Emperor Hirohito, that he overruled the Japanese cabinet and ended the war was because of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Had that bombing not taken place, the next step would have been a land invasion of Japan. The estimated death toll would have been a MILLION American soldiers, and that doesn't take into account the millions of Japanese soldiers and citizens that would have been killed. The dropping of the bombs at the end of WW2 saved millions of lives.

This. In spades.

 

[Whovian]

dropping 2 atomic bombs on japan was the first act of the cold war, it sent a message to russia. "hey look, we have these awesome bombs, and we're not afraid to use them. never mind how many innocent people die, we don't care!"

that is the most idiotic thing I have seen posted on this board. Congratulations. We are all dumber for having read that.

 

[Paschendale]

Oh, and to add my own comment here...

Slavery. And I don't just mean the decision to permit slavery to continue existing within the US constitution. I mean the moment the first abducted African was brought to our shores. The practice of slavery, especially racially based slavery, is unabashedly evil. And it was the single most dividing issue in our history. Without slavery, there would not have been a civil war, nor the continuing animosity between north and south that continues to this day. The incredible racism that the US has against blacks would never have existed, and we would be a more moral people for it. There would be no KKK, no lynchings, no Jim Crow. There would be no war on drugs, since a great deal of the drug enforcement policies are aimed specifically at investigating and targeting black drug users, despite drug use being relatively equal between middle-class, suburban whites, and poorer blacks.

A lot of our conservative and liberal conflict would not be here without slavery. The basic divide between liberal, city-dwelling Northerners and conservative, country-dwelling Southerners would never have happened. The notion that we should be split into two polarized groups would not have occurred. We would not have such strong political parties, if any at all, without slavery to divide us.

We would not have this partisan divide, we would not have had one of the bloodiest wars in history, we would not have a history filled with racism and violence against blacks. We would never have had the conflict that caused such unilateral power to be concentrated with the federal government.

In every way, we would be a more moral and freer people. All we had to do was not abduct people (or purchase people abducted by their neighbors), ship them across an ocean, and literally work them to death, and then do it again to their children.

 

[Paschendale]

that is the most idiotic thing I have seen posted on this board. Congratulations. We are all dumber for having read that.

Actually, the comment was partially true. Sending a message to Russia may not have been the primary reason for the race to be first with atomic weapons, but it was certainly on the list of reasons. It doesn't change the beneficial outcome of the bombing. Of course, one could really say that the real answer is simply for people not to start wars in the first place. But we're not quite that civilized a species yet.

 

[Le Marteau]

others did it so it was ok? what kind of logic is that?


the annihilation of native americans was systematic brutality. they had hitler beat, 20 million natives wiped out puts the jewish holocaust to shame.

Quoted because the other arguee when it was posted simply ignored this and changed the subject, due to lack of evidence to refute it.

 

[Andalublue]

Had that bombing not taken place, the next step would have been a land invasion of Japan. The estimated death toll would have been a MILLION American soldiers, and that doesn't take into account the millions of Japanese soldiers and citizens that would have been killed. The dropping of the bombs at the end of WW2 saved millions of lives.

No, this is a totally erroneous claim. A million US soldiers? Where do you get your calculations? The Allies invaded an entire continent the previous year and defeated a far stronger, just as committed opponent and it didn't cost a million lives. Germany invaded Russia and lost, but still didn't suffer a million casualties. You can make the argument that a land invasion would have been costly but you can't throw out ludicrous, unprovable figures that have a wonderful, apocalyptic roundness (like a MILLION!) and expect them to be taken seriously.

 

[BDBoop]

If you could go back in time and erase one major U.S. event what would it be? Why was that your choice? How do you think that incident changed America and how would America be different today had it never happened?

Kennedy would not have been assassinated. I'll have to get some sleep before I can say why I gave that answer.

Interesting thread concept.

 

[Tashah]

There are erroneous claims in this thread that some kind of aerial battle would have settled things in Japan. This is also untrue. Most Japanese cities had already been bombed with conventional weapons. These attacks did not stop the Japanese ability to make war, nor would more of it have achieved that goal.

This is just plain revisionism. The atomic bombs weren't required to end the war. They were an expediency. Every US Air Commander in the Pacific theater agreed that atomic bombs were not a tactical necessity. Even the commander of the Special Air Wing (the planes which dropped the atomic bombs were under his aegis) considered them unnecessary. Indeed, action required a pointed and joint directive from President Harry Truman and General George Marshall directly ordering the air commanders to proceed.

Japan was totally surrounded and isolated. Her remaining warships, troop transports, and supply ships were sunk or badly damaged in harbor, as were the civilian ferries. War-goods manufacturing plants were high priority targets and most were damaged beyond usability. Since most structures in Japanese cities were constructed mainly of wood, incendiary bombing was exponentially devastating. No imports of any kind were available and Japan was not rich in resources. Feeding the population was becoming a huge problem. Hirohito's palace was bombed which killed many of his servants and staff. Hirohito personally toured Tokyo in his Mercedes after a fire-bombing. He was dumbfounded at the destruction and his sedan had to constantly veer off the road to maneuver around mounds of corpses. Allied air and naval superiority was the reality. Allied air wings bombed Japan from aircraft carriers, from airstrips on the captured Pacific islands, and from mainland China. The Russians were approaching Japan from the north (they captured four Japanese islands and still hold them to this day).

Unlike the European theater which required a ground invasion, Japan was totally isolated and burning to the ground. The Allied air and naval assault could have continued indefinitely. Eventually, only two options would remain... surrender or face mass starvation and debilitating epidemics. The atomic bombs were strategically and tactically expedient, but not a military necessity.

 

[Cochise]

Really though, all kidding aside, I do see some differences I consider significant. A lot of the Jews that the Nazi's exterminated were German citizens. The Indians were given a choice: "Move to the Res or we'll force you to move to the Res... resist too effectively and we'll slaughter you." The Jews didn't get that choice. Their choices were to flee entirely beyond the reach of the Nazi's, or hide, or die. Once the Indians were beaten into submission and tucked away on the reservations, the US pretty much left them alone. Hitler intended to exterminate ALL Jews.... the US just wanted the Indians out of the way of colonial expansion.

Hitler’s regime did permit the expatriation of Ashkenazim at one point – about 60,000 departed for Palestine in the 1930’s, before WWII started and the Nazi regime’s official line was that the Ashkenazim had engineered it, at which point the Final Solution was put into effect. The transfer plan was called the Haavara Agreement. The same pattern of a willingness to tolerate departure from the territory that the aggressors wanted followed by an ultimate intention and program to eradicate resisters (like scalp bounties) was there in both cases. Also, while I realize that most Indians were killed by diseases that they were never exposed to before, that still leaves a pretty big minority to be potential victims of genocide (recent estimates of the pre-contact population of both continents and adjacent islands are between 50 and 100 million), and I do think the disease victims should be counted in some cases. Anne Frank died of typhus and is counted as a Holocaust victim.

Aside from that, a lot of your statements about Indian living practices are wrong. There was pretty significant agriculture in the Mesoamerican and Andean cultural regions where soil fertility and relatively bountiful native crops met, and this eventually spread to what’s now the eastern United States through the importation of maize, beans, and squash to the Mississippian Mound Builder cultures, who built things like Cahokia. I would say that nomadic hunter-gathering was a minority practice, and if it did become a majority practice, did so because of the diseases that were a result of white contact. So it would be a case of the medicine causing the illness.

 

[Erod]

Oh, and to add my own comment here...

Slavery. And I don't just mean the decision to permit slavery to continue existing within the US constitution. I mean the moment the first abducted African was brought to our shores. The practice of slavery, especially racially based slavery, is unabashedly evil. And it was the single most dividing issue in our history. Without slavery, there would not have been a civil war, nor the continuing animosity between north and south that continues to this day. The incredible racism that the US has against blacks would never have existed, and we would be a more moral people for it. There would be no KKK, no lynchings, no Jim Crow. There would be no war on drugs, since a great deal of the drug enforcement policies are aimed specifically at investigating and targeting black drug users, despite drug use being relatively equal between middle-class, suburban whites, and poorer blacks.

A lot of our conservative and liberal conflict would not be here without slavery. The basic divide between liberal, city-dwelling Northerners and conservative, country-dwelling Southerners would never have happened. The notion that we should be split into two polarized groups would not have occurred. We would not have such strong political parties, if any at all, without slavery to divide us.

We would not have this partisan divide, we would not have had one of the bloodiest wars in history, we would not have a history filled with racism and violence against blacks. We would never have had the conflict that caused such unilateral power to be concentrated with the federal government.

In every way, we would be a more moral and freer people. All we had to do was not abduct people (or purchase people abducted by their neighbors), ship them across an ocean, and literally work them to death, and then do it again to their children.

Idealistically, of course I agree.

But name the world powers of history that weren't built on the backs of slaves. There is no worthwhile currency in an upstart country, so without free labor, a country can not be built.

One of those horribly ugly truths about WORLD history, not just U.S. history.

 

[Erod]

This is just plain revisionism. The atomic bombs weren't required to end the war. They were an expediency. Every US Air Commander in the Pacific theater agreed that atomic bombs were not a tactical necessity. Even the commander of the Special Air Wing (the planes which dropped the atomic bombs were under his aegis) considered them unnecessary. Indeed, action required a pointed and joint directive from President Harry Truman and General George Marshall directly ordering the air commanders to proceed.

Japan was totally surrounded and isolated. Her remaining warships, troop transports, and supply ships were sunk or badly damaged in harbor, as were the civilian ferries. War-goods manufacturing plants were high priority targets and most were damaged beyond usability. Since most structures in Japanese cities were constructed mainly of wood, incendiary bombing was exponentially devastating. No imports of any kind were available and Japan was not rich in resources. Feeding the population was becoming a huge problem. Hirohito's palace was bombed which killed many of his servants and staff. Hirohito personally toured Tokyo in his Mercedes after a fire-bombing. He was dumbfounded at the destruction and his sedan had to constantly veer off the road to maneuver around mounds of corpses. Allied air and naval superiority was the reality. Allied air wings bombed Japan from aircraft carriers, from airstrips on the captured Pacific islands, and from mainland China. The Russians were approaching Japan from the north (they captured four Japanese islands and still hold them to this day).

Unlike the European theater which required a ground invasion, Japan was totally isolated and burning to the ground. The Allied air and naval assault could have continued indefinitely. Eventually, only two options would remain... surrender or face mass starvation and debilitating epidemics. The atomic bombs were strategically and tactically expedient, but not a military necessity.

You don't consider saving a million U.S. soldiers lives a "necessity"? Japanese people would not have surrendered if we had to invade the mainland. That would have potentially doubled the 55 million lives lost during WWII.

It also served a tremendous purpose in keeping the Soviet Union at bay for many years. They were a Nazi starter kit waiting to start the whole thing over again....until Japan went boom.

 

[Bodi]

Originally Posted by Helvidius
If you could go back in time and erase one major U.S. event what would it be? Why was that your choice? How do you think that incident changed America and how would America be different today had it never happened?

Before I would erase an American one, I would erase Pearl Harbor, Germany "electing" and supporting Hitler, The Russian Revolution, The Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, The French attempting to hang on to IndoChina, and a long list of other things...

No, this is a totally erroneous claim. A million US soldiers? Where do you get your calculations? The Allies invaded an entire continent the previous year and defeated a far stronger, just as committed opponent and it didn't cost a million lives. Germany invaded Russia and lost, but still didn't suffer a million casualties. You can make the argument that a land invasion would have been costly but you can't throw out ludicrous, unprovable figures that have a wonderful, apocalyptic roundness (like a MILLION!) and expect them to be taken seriously.

Casualty estimates were based on the experience of the preceding campaigns, drawing different lessons:

In a letter sent to Gen. Curtis LeMay from Gen. Lauris Norstad, when LeMay assumed command of the B-29 force on Guam, Norstad told LeMay that if an invasion took place, it would cost the U.S. "half a million" dead.

In a study done by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April, the figures of 7.45 casualties/1,000 man-days and 1.78 fatalities/1,000 man-days were developed. This implied that a 90-day Olympic campaign would cost 456,000 casualties, including 109,000 dead or missing. If Coronet took another 90 days, the combined cost would be 1,200,000 casualties, with 267,000 fatalities.

Operation Downfall - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1,000,000 casualties is a common term, and used by the History Channel, even last week they went over the invasion of Japan and this figure was repeated over and over by "experts" and historians... so take it seriously.

Originally Posted by Erod
It also served a tremendous purpose in keeping the Soviet Union at bay for many years. They were a Nazi starter kit waiting to start the whole thing over again....until Japan went boom.

The USSR had the Hydrogen Bomb within 3 years... they surrounded Berlin in '48, starting the Berlin Airlift and almost a war, they put up the Berlin Wall, they disallowed free elections like they said that they would... how is any of this kept at bay? They were in our face from the beginning...

 

[EnigmaO01]

The PT Cruiser

The Pacer!

 

[The Giant Noodle]

Christmas!!!!
or Rachael Ray
or the Iraq war

take your pick

 

[spud_meister]

Christmas!!!!

Hate to tell you, but that happened in Israel, not America.

 

[The Giant Noodle]

Hate to tell you, but that happened in Israel, not America.

Not the American version! Hey man, we have the Outback Steakhouse here but we said NO to Vegimite! Know what I mean?

EDIT: Nevermind.... thats was a crap analogy.

 

[Mr. Invisible]

If you could go back in time and erase one major U.S. event what would it be? Why was that your choice? How do you think that incident changed America and how would America be different today had it never happened?

ex: U.S. involvement in a war, an act of legislation/government program, etc

**Not looking for answers involving specific people/politicians. For example, nothing about how you wish so and so had never been elected President. Not looking for Civil War as an answer either.**

Hmmm... the assassinations of Malcom X, MLK and JFK. I honestly think that if those three hadn't been assassinated, the world would be a much different place