I'm handing out some free red pills on this "infamous" 80th anniversary:
-FDR was informed about the attack on Pearl Harbor well in advance but just let it happen because he was in bed with Stalin, and he'd let his whole state apparatus get infested with hordes of commie roaches. Conveniently, all the most important assets like aircraft carriers were off on a training exercise that day. He repeatedly snubbed requests from Japanese diplomats for a meeting in the preceding days.
-Japan definitely overplayed their hand, it must be said. Who knows what political landscape we'd be living in if they'd simply declared an end to their imperial ambitions and settled for the territories they held at the time.
-The atomic bombs had basically nothing to do with Japan's surrender years later. The US had already razed 58 large cities with plain old fire over the summer of '45. What difference would razing 2 more cities with special fire that also causes cancer make in that situation? Japan surrendered because Stalin declared war and threatened their western border while they were entirely deployed in the south and east. All they were hoping for was something better than an unconditional surrender. Good thing they sided with US.
-WWII was nothing like the comfy morality tale they sell normies in high school.
-At least we got anime, which is now one of the last remaining beacons of western civilization.
Edit: I'm glad this generated some friction. My mind isn't changed, but my thanks to everyone who brought differing opinions.
Those two bombs cost about 30 billion USD in 2021 dollars. How many more do you think the war-torn US economy could have come up with on short notice, especially cloaked in total secrecy?
Japan was basically out of well-trained pilots and instructing their noobs to just smash into ships with plain old TNT.
It's a cool story that may have saved the world from communism, but it's time for the rest of us to grow up and reevaluate the facts.
So Japan could build airplanes but they had not the faintest idea of the current state of nuclear physics?
If I was an SJW I'd call you racist.
This dumb troll doesn't even realize that the question he's trying to ask has nothing to do with nuclear physics and is instead a matter of espionage.
Don't engage. Just downvote and move on.
It was like 30 years after Marie Curie's second Nobel prize (which wasn't handed out in secret last I checked). Every literate society at the time had some idea of radiation and the atomic model of matter.
By all means please refrain from "engaging" me further.
show me a calculation of the area under any parabola you'd like and I'll consider taking you seriously.
Otherwise you can maybe answer your own question about how small and large objects are related in our universe, but I kind of doubt it...
Edit: Ouch those downvotes. Seems like calculus did you guys pretty dirty. PM me and hopefully we can get that cleared up.
Not very kind of you, but I suppose those were the terms.
The dollar amounts are an exaggeration, but they absolutely did not know how many bombs the US had. The more militant faction of their government wanted people to die honorably by the bomb and was hoping that more cities would disappear under the glorious flower of a mushroom cloud, while the Emperor's faction was convinced to end the war primarily because they didn't want any more cities to suffer the same fate. The firebombing of other cities like Tokyo did more damage but the extremists were still ready to hold out in caves forever. It took the psychological impact of the atomic bomb to end the war when it did. (at least the first one, the second one was probably unnecessary and the Emperor had already made up his mind)
Of course they didn't. America provably knew more about the contemporary state of nuclear physics because they were the ones who knew how to build an atomic bomb.
Reality often matters less than what people perceive to be reality.
If there's one thing the US was not, it's "war-torn." It suffered a single attack on an isolated harbour.
I agree that was a poor choice of words on my part. Maybe "strained?"
Strained? You mean booming. We were turning out Shermans and Mustangs like mad and selling material to the allies.
Haha, OP read Howard Zinn and thought it contained 'red pills'.
Historical ignorance, and its retarded cousin 'knowing stuff that's wrong', is the plague of our time.
It gets on my nerves ever time this comes around that people still push that long debunked conspiracy. And while its true that Roosevelt and a lot of the high command had been told there was a strong possibility that AN attack would come somewhere (the US Navy knew that Kido Butai was gone pretty much the moment it left Yokohama), but almost all intel said that the most likely target would be the Philippines.
After all, who would be dumb enough to try and sail all the way across the Pacific, hit a target, and then sail all the way back across, and do it without getting caught on the way in and back out?
And worse, there is absolutely no excuse to be that way other than willful ignorance and/or politically or ideologically charged retardation.
We have the collective knowledge of humanity at our finger tips, and access to information from alternative points of view with dozens of experts or self-taught historians talking about the matter. And yet some people chose to be the way of OP. sigh
Also, on the note of OP:
How about the fact that one plane with one bomb wiped out an entire city? Every other city they destroyed took hundreds of planes dropping thousands of bombs. You can see an air fleet like that coming. You can HEAR it coming. One plane can easily slip past every defense you have. And now that one plane can destroy EVERYTHING by itself. Which was the moment that finally snapped a lot of the Japanese high command out of their zeal and showed them just what kind of power they had fucked with, and now it wanted them to die. And even then, you STILL had a not insignificant amount of the Japanese military screaming "Death before dishonor!"
"It wanted them to die" is a bit strong. Based on what I've read, they would have very much preferred for Japan to surrender. The war department even considered demonstrating the bomb to intimidate Japan, but ultimately decided the risk of US POWs being moved to the test site was too high.
True, but like another thread in this topic said, there is an issue of perception vs. reality. The reality was that the War Department was hesitant to actually nuke Japan. But as far as the Japanese were concerned, one moment Hiroshima was there, and the next it was gone, and it took them hours to even figure out what the hell happened. And as far as the Japanese were concerned, the US had just Thanos-Snapped an entire city with literally no warning. What conclusion are they supposed to draw other than "If we dont surrender, they will kill every last one of us!"
They knew there was an attack coming . They were goading for it. https://imgbb.com/BwwJ6M6
Seems legit
You get an A+. Good boy. Be sure to support the "Green New Deal" in homage to your hero.
Good response that makes it obvious that you really know what you're talking about... when repeating the myths of the suspected communist party member Howard Zinn.
SUSPECTED? He clearly was a commie shit.
Very subtle put down here.
I would have tried harder if there was any substantive refutation. All I see is "nuh-uh. You stupid."
Even many leftists agree that the "bomb scary" story was merely the least embarrassing for both parties. It's a simple Google search away. And even I will concede that it might have been necessary at the time.
I believe there's a rather pessimistic adage regarding invading Russia in the winter that goes back at least a few years before WWII, so I'm uninclined to believe that was what compelled Franky in his heart of hearts to once again violate the Monroe doctrine.
You must have missed my first comment, because I pointed out quite a few things that you conveniently left out.
The irony is that I don't even disagree with you that much. You want to create moral ambiguity by saying that the Allies were also bad. I don't believe World War II was fought for 'morality', but for reasons of security. It just so happens that the less bad side won. But you're just plain wrong on the facts.
Are you really doing the "GOOGLE IT YOURSELF, SHITLORD"?
22 June is literally the start of summer, not winter. And by all accounts, everyone from Halder to Stalin to Roosevelt thought that the collapse of the USSR was imminent. Stalin even later admitted that the USSR would not have survived without American aid.
What do you think the Monroe doctrine is?
OP is the definition of a midwit. Dude knows just enough to think he knows something, but doesn't actually understand it.
What about going to war with Japan violates a doctrine about preventing further colonization in the western Hampshire? Doesn't preventing the Japanese empire from conquering more land uphold the Monroe Doctrine if you extend it to the entire world?
I assume he normally goes off about the Monroe Doctrine to other people who don't know what it is, who nod respectfully towards him.
Counterfactuals are always hard to answer, and even harder to decide if they are reasonable. The US was demanding that Japan withdraw from China - failure to do which was what led to the oil embargo on Japan. Just stopping further conquests would not have cut it. In retrospect, it would have been quite smart (even after the war with the US started), because the war in China was tying up a lot of resources and manpower, but hindsight is 20/20.
I have wondered what would have happened if Japan had only attacked the European empires and not the US.
Quite unlikely. The only reasonable prospect was an intervention by Japan to attack the USSR in the east. But because of its losses in earlier skirmishes with the USSR, it never dared, and made a treaty with the USSR - which freed up vital Siberian legions which stopped the German onslaught.
One plane accomplished with one bomb what once would have taken a hundred destroyed planes and seven hundred dead airmen. It was a staggering increase in destructive capability; if the Japanese military hoped for a heroic last stand, the atom bomb instead promised that they would be exterminated like cockroaches.
Japan's air capability was long since crippled and it took roughly 15 billion US dollars (2021 adjusted) to manufacture an atomic bomb at the time.
It could cost a trillion dollars and every bomb would have been worth it. We were the only country with nuclear capabilities. That put us far above any "peer" nation and would have allowed us to demand anything we wanted from anyone else as long as we had sole ownership of the technology.
Too bad that didn't last long.
'Anything' is an overstatement, as the US got rolled by the USSR big time even before 1949.
But yeah, it's pretty useful to have.
They cracked it like 3 years later we didn't really have a lot of time to leverage anything.
Plus FDR wasn't a nationalist.
Truman was the guy.
He wasn't a nationalist either. Now if we had a guy like Patton...
Days later? I think your timeline is a bit off.
Years after Pearl Harbor. Maybe I could have worded that better.
Wow. Everything you just said was both wrong and communist propaganda.
It's likely worse than that.
There is good evidence that the entire thing was planned by one of his underlings. It is a matter of historical record that fdr was very interested, and actively pursuing, methods to change public opinion and enter wwii. It was likely part of that plan from inception that "plausible deniability" could always be claimed if they ever got caught. Very similar (identical in most important respects) to 911.
I recommend giving oliver stones "untold history of the united states" a whirl. Also please remember that history is a collection of stories!
https://imgbb.com/BwwJ6M6