History Is A Weapon-Josh Braley

Josh Braley

  4/8/09

 

 The Descision to Use Atomic Weapons
A People's War?
Howard Zinn

         Still, the vast bulk of the American population was mobilized, in the army, and in civilian life, to fight the war, and the atmosphere of war enveloped more and more Americans. Public opinion polls show large majorities of soldiers favoring the draft for the postwar period. Hatred against the enemy, against the Japanese particularly, became widespread. Racism was clearly at work. Time magazine, reporting the battle of Iwo Jima, said: "The ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing .. . indicates it." ....      
        The bombing of Japanese cities continued the strategy of saturation bombing to destroy civilian morale; one nighttime fire-bombing of Tokyo took 80,000 lives. That is a lot of death for one night. -Braleyboy1 4/8/09 6:25 AM And then, on August 6, 1945, came the lone American plane in the sky over Hiroshima, dropping the first atomic bomb, leaving perhaps 100,000 Japanese dead, and tens of thousands more slowly dying from radiation poisoning.  that is crazy, one plane carrying one bomb killing more than 100,000 people.-Braleyboy1 4/8/09 6:26 AM Twelve U.S. navy fliers in the Hiroshima city jail were killed in the bombing, i'm sure they did not plan on hitting them and killing our own people -Braleyboy1 4/8/09 6:28 AM a fact that the U.S. government has never officially acknowledged, according to historian Martin Sherwin (A World Destroyed). Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, with perhaps 50,000 killed.  I wonder why there wasn't as many dead during the second dropping?-Braleyboy1 4/8/09 6:29 AM 
       The justification for these atrocities was that this would end the war quickly, making unnecessary an invasion of Japan. Such an invasion would cost a huge number of lives, the government said-a million, according to Secretary of State Byrnes; half a million, Truman claimed was the figure given him by General George Marshall. (When the papers of the Manhattan Project-the project to build the atom bomb- were released years later, they showed that Marshall urged a warning to the Japanese about the bomb, so people could be removed and only military targets hit.) These estimates of invasion losses were not realistic, and seem to have been pulled out of the air to justify bombings which, as their effects became known, horrified more and more people. it would be kind ofhard to tell how many people died if the atomic bomb completely disinagrated things. -Braleyboy1 4/8/09 6:38 AM Japan, by August 1945, was in desperate shape and ready to surrender. New York Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, shortly after the war:

The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made on July 26.
       Such then, was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 
       Need we have done it? No one can, of course, be positive, but the answer is almost certainly negative.

       The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, set up by the War Department in 1944 to study the results of aerial attacks in the war, interviewed hundreds of Japanese civilian and military leaders after Japan surrendered, and reported just after the war:

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

       But could American leaders have known this in August 1945? The answer is, clearly, yes. The Japanese code had been broken, and Japan's messages were being intercepted. It was known the Japanese had instructed their ambassador in Moscow to work on peace negotiations with the Allies.  Japanese leaders had begun talking of surrender a year before this, and the Emperor himself had begun to suggest, in June 1945, that alternatives to fighting to the end be considered. they may have considered surrendering but they hadn't yet. Also they killed Americans when they bombed us so they needed to be bombed back. -Braleyboy1 4/8/09 6:58 AM On July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: "Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace.. .." Martin Sherwin, after an exhaustive study of the relevant historical documents, concludes: "Having broken the Japanese code before the war, American Intelligence was able to-and did-relay this message to the President, but it had no effect whatever on efforts to bring the war to a conclusion."
       If only the Americans had not insisted on unconditional surrender- that is, if they were willing to accept one condition to the surrender, that the Emperor, a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place-the Japanese would have agreed to stop the war.
       Why did the United States not take that small step to save both American and Japanese lives? Was it because too much money and effort had been invested in the atomic bomb not to drop it? General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, described Truman as a man on a toboggan, the momentum too great to stop it. Or was it, as British scientist P. M. S. Blackett suggested (Fear, War, and the Bomb), that the United States was anxious to drop the bomb before the Russians entered the war against Japan?
       The Russians had secretly agreed (they were officially not at war with Japan) they would come into the war ninety days after the end of the European war. That turned out to be May 8, and so, on August 8, the Russians were due to declare war on Japan, But by then the big bomb had been dropped, and the next day a second one would be dropped on Nagasaki; the Japanese would surrender to the United States, not the Russians, and the United States would be the occupier of postwar Japan. In other words, Blackett says, the dropping of the bomb was "the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.. .." Blackett is supported by American historian Gar Alperovitz (Atomic Diplomacy), who notes a diary entry for July 28, 1945, by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, describing Secretary of State James F. Byrnes as "most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in."
       Truman had said, "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians." It was a preposterous statement. Those 100,000 killed in Hiroshima were almost all civilians. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey said in its official report: "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population."
       The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has ever been able to explain why it was dropped. Was it because this was a plutonium bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb? Were the dead and irradiated of Nagasaki victims of a scientific experiment? Martin Shenvin says that among the Nagasaki dead were probably American prisoners of war. He notes a message of July 31 from Headquarters, U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces, Guam, to the War Department:

Reports prisoner of war sources, not verified by photos, give location of Allied prisoner of war camp one mile north of center of city of Nagasaki. Does this influence the choice of this target for initial Centerboard operation? Request immediate reply.

The reply: "Targets previously assigned for Centerboard remain unchanged."
       True, the war then ended quickly. Italy had been defeated a year earlier. Germany had recently surrendered, crushed primarily by the armies of the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, aided by the Allied armies on the West. Now Japan surrendered.

 

JoshB - American Empire

American Empire

Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in the year 1897: "In strict confidence . . . I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."....

There was heated argument in the United States about whether or not to take the Philippines. As one story has it, President McKinley told a group of ministers visiting the White House how he came to his decision:

Before you go I would like to say just a word about the Philippine business. . . . The truth is I didn't want the Philippines, and when they came to us as a gift from the gods, I did not know what to do with them He didn't want them but after the "Gods" just gave it to him he had to take it and do what he wanted. -Braleyboy1 4/14/09 9:39 AM. . . . I sought counsel from all sides -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- but got little help.
       I thought first we would only take Manila; then Luzon, then other islands, perhaps, also.
       I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way -- I don't know how it was, but it came:
       1) That we could not give them back to Spain -- that would be cowardly and dishonorable. I agree, you can't give something that you've already taken -Braleyboy1 4/14/09 9:41 AM 
       2) That we could not turn them over to France or Germany, our commercial rivals in the Orient -- that would be bad business and discreditable.
       3) That we could not leave them to themselves -- they were unfit for self-government -- and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was; and
       4) That there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed and went to sleep and slept soundly.

       The Filipinos did not get the same message from God. In February 1899, they rose in revolt against American rule, as they had rebelled several times against the Spanish. Emilio Aguinaldo, a Filipino leader, who had earlier been brought back from China by U.S. warships to lead soldiers against Spain, now became leader of the insurrectos fighting the United States. He proposed Filipino independence within a U.S. protectorate, but this was rejected.
       It took the United States three years to crush the rebellion, using seventy thousand troops -- four times as many as were landed in Cuba i am suprised that it took that many Americans to defeat them. -Braleyboy1 4/15/09 11:44 AM -- and thousands of battle casualties, many times more than in Cuba. It was a harsh war. For the Filipinos the death rate was enormous from battle casualties and from disease.
       The taste of empire was on the lips of politicians and business interests throughout the country now. Racism, paternalism, and talk of money mingled with talk of destiny and civilization. In the Senate, Albert Beveridge spoke, January 9, 1900, for the dominant economic and political interests of the country:

Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever. . . . And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. . . . We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. . . .
       The Pacific is our ocean. . . . Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer. . . . The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East. . . .
       No land in America surpasses in fertility the plains and valleys of Luzon. Rice and coffee, sugar and cocoanuts, hemp and tobacco. . . . The wood of the Philippines can supply the furniture of the world for a century to come. At Cebu the best informed man on the island told me that 40 miles of Cebu's mountain chain are practically mountains of coal. . . .
       I have a nugget of pure gold picked up in its present form on the banks of a Philippine creek. . . .
       My own belief is that there are not 100 men among them who comprehend what Anglo-Saxon self-government even means, and there are over 5,000,000 people to be governed.
       It has been charged that our conduct of the war has been cruel. Senators, it has been the reverse. . . . Senators must remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans. We are dealing with Orientals.

       The fighting with the rebels began, McKinley said, when the insurgents attacked American forces. But later, American soldiers testified that the United States had fired the first shot. After the war, an army officer speaking in Boston's Faneuil Hall said his colonel had given him orders to provoke a conflict with the insurgents.
       In February 1899, a banquet took place in Boston to celebrate the Senate's ratification of the peace treaty with Spain. President McKinley himself had been invited by the wealthy textile manufacturer W. B. Plunkett to speak. It was the biggest banquet in the nation's history: two thousand diners, four hundred waiters. McKinley said that "no imperial designs lurk in the American mind," and at the same banquet, to the same diners, his Postmaster General, Charles Emory Smith, said that "what we want is a market for our surplus."
       William James, the Harvard philosopher, wrote a letter to the Boston Transcript about "the cold pot grease of McKinley's cant at the recent Boston banquet" and said the Philippine operation "reeked of the infernal adroitness of the great department store, which has reached perfect expertness in the art of killing silently, and with no public squalling or commotion, the neighboring small concerns."
       James was part of a movement of prominent American businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals who formed the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898 and carried on a long campaign to educate the American public about the horrors of the Philippine war and the evils of imperialism. It was an odd group (Andrew Carnegie belonged), including antilabor aristocrats and scholars, united in a common moral outrage at what was being done to the Filipinos in the name of freedom. Whatever their differences on other matters, they would all agree with William James's angry statement: "God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles."
       The Anti-Imperialist League published the letters of soldiers doing duty in the Philippines. A captain from Kansas wrote: "Caloocan was supposed to contain 17,000 inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native." A private from the same outfit said he had "with my own hand set fire to over fifty houses of Filipinos after the victory at Caloocan. Women and children were wounded by our fire."
       A volunteer from the state of Washington wrote: "Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted to kill 'niggers.' . . . This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces."
       It was a time of intense racism in the United States. In the years between 1889 and 1903, on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs -- hanged, burned, mutilated. The Filipinos were brown-skinned, physically identifiable, strange-speaking and strange-looking to Americans. To the usual indiscriminate brutality of war was thus added the factor of racial hostility.
       In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported:

The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog. . . . Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.

       Early in 1901 an American general returning to the United States from southern Luzon, said:

One-sixth of the natives of Luzon have either been killed or have died of the dengue fever in the last few years. The loss of life by killing alone has been very great, but I think not one man has been slain except where his death has served the legitimate purposes of war. It has been necessary to adopt what in other countries would probably be thought harsh measures.

       Secretary of War Elihu Root responded to the charges of brutality: "The war in the Philippines has been conducted by the American army with scrupulous regard for the rules of civilized warfare. . . . with self-restraint and with humanity never surpassed."
       In Manila, a Marine named Littletown Waller, a major, was accused of shooting eleven defenseless Filipinos, without trial, on the island of Samar. Other marine officers described his testimony:

The major said that General Smith instructed him to kill and burn, and said that the more he killed and burned the better pleased he would be; that it was no time to take prisoners, and that he was to make Samar a howling wilderness. Major Waller asked General Smith to define the age limit for killing, and he replied "Everything over ten."

In the province of Batangas, the secretary of the province estimated that of the population of 300,000, one-third had been killed by combat, famine, or disease.
       Mark Twain commented on the Philippine war:

We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag.
       And so, by these Providences of God -- and the phrase is the government's, not mine -- we are a World Power.

       American firepower was overwhelmingly superior to anything the Filipino rebels could put together. In the very first battle, Admiral Dewey steamed up the Pasig River and fired 500-pound shells into the Filipino trenches. Dead Filipinos were piled so high that the Americans used their bodies for breastworks. A British witness said: "This is not war; it is simply massacre and murderous butchery." He was wrong; it was war.
       For the rebels to hold out against such odds for years meant that they had the support of the population. General Arthur MacArthur, commander of the Filipino war, said: " . . . I believed that Aguinaldo's troops represented only a faction. I did not like to believe that the whole population of Luzon -- the native population, that is -- was opposed to us." But he said he was "reluctantly compelled" to believe this because the guerrilla tactics of the Filipino army "depended upon almost complete unity of action of the entire native population."

Weekly Post 3

This week I liked watching all of the videos, it really gave me a good idea of what it was like in the war.  Videos really do a good job of showing all the details of war and how they did things.  I thinik that we should watch a full movie some class so that we can get a better idea of what went on.

Book Portfolio 3

    Stand Firm Ye Boys From Maine
Book portfolio
Josh Braley

    "Stand Firm Ye Boys From Maine" by Thomas A. Desjardin is about the truth of the 20th Maine Regiment and of the entire battle of Gettysburg during the civil war in 1863.  The theme in this book is stand together in a time of crisis.  On July 2nd 1863 the boys from Maine stood strong and had a powerful impact on the war, if they had fell apart then the war may have had a different outcome.  The role of perspective in the book is historical.

    The title of this book is pretty much the theme for it as well.  "Stand Firm Ye Boys From Maine" is fairly close to the theme, stand together in a time of crisis.  In the battle, the 20th Maine Regiment had a group of musicians, when times got rough and men got thin some of the players fought and some of them acted almost as a medic, carrying stretchers with wounded men on them.  The men in the army were not all people who wanted to be there, but they decided that they would and they were needed so they went along and helped the cause.  Without those men sticking together and standing strong
    The twentieth Maine regiment took part in the Battle for Little Round Top and in this battle they came together as a unit and kicked ass and won.  The soldiers took part in a great down hill bayonet charge to become one of the most famous thing happening there in the battle of Gettysburg.  All of the men in each regiment came together to fight as one army.  By doing so they came out victorious because they stood strong.  This was very important because if this had not have happened then we (north) may have lost the civil war and Gettysburg.
    Standing strong in a time of crisis is a very good thing, good things can happen during bad times.  At the beginning of World War II everyone came together and went to war whether they wanted to or not.  The women went to work making tanks and guns and all of the necessities needed for war.  This was a good thing because it ended the depression by lowering the unemployment rate that before this was at 25%.  In this world people need to stand together and come as one more often, the world would be a much better place to live because one person is weak but billions of people together as one is very strong.
    Stand strong in a time of crisis.  In a time of crisis like the civil war the 20th Maine Regiment stood strong as one and overcame the task at hand.  If people never came together in life then nothing good would ever come.  It is important for coming together as one because we are stronger that way.

Weekly post 2

This week i missed Mondays class, but Wednesday and Fridays classes went well.  I liked the debate between the teachers.  I think that helps me to learn about something because I get two perspectives instead of just one. 

Class post 1

The first class this week i did like the way it was done, i didn't mind the whole sit in circle discussion thing, even though i hate talking in front of people, but i do like to have a visual as well as sound.  I think it is hard to just listen to a recording with nothing to look at.
Today's class was good.  The slide show and having you talk about it is a good way to teach, because then we have what you say about it and then a hard copy to go look at for studying.

Qt. 3 Exam Essays

Essay # 1

    Ending the Cold War was a good thing.  It was a sign that the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union was coming to an end.  Also it was a telling who had the better government, communism was taken down by Ronald Reagan.  He was able to do something that the other presidents before him could not do.
    To end the Cold War Ronald Reagan boosted our military, he made sure everyone would know that we were not to be messed with.  The conservative republican president spent money on something that was vital to our Nations success from the beginning, our armed forces.  We as a country had a very strong national defense so this made the Soviet Union back down.
    In the above paragraph I stated that Reagan did this and that to end the war, though this is not all that ended the war.  The Soviet Union had troops in Afghanistan, the cost of having them in this country was not that cheap.  They were being effected by the spoils of war.  The economy factor of the Cold War is where America wins and the Union loses because they could not afford it.