Enola Gay, heroism or insanity?

VBF-13 said:

Really, it's hard to blame even that generation. These weren't a bunch of schoolyard bullies. These Nazi leaders were psychopaths, and a propaganda machine. The population was given a race to kick around for their troubles, because they were deep in the hole, just like everywhere else. Think of the kind who go along with that, and who relish it. There were a few. But the vast majority were simply scared to rock the boat.

It happened in Germany, it happened in the Deep South, it can happen anywhere.

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What are you talking about when you say 'it happened in Nazi Germany and the Deep South' ??

There is zero connection.

GrauGeist said:

On the contrary...Americans with German or Italian heritage were assigned to the PTO early in the war.

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Two of my uncles, first generation German-Americans, joined the services right after Pearl Harbor, as in, they went down to enlist the day after. One went to England with the 97th Bombardment Group in 1942 (a B-17 gunner), the other participated in Operation Torch. Both were German speakers and carried a fairly obvious German last name. They have never mentioned any specific systemic animosity by the service towards themselves, although they have discussed individual prejudices. Further, they knew other people of German descent in their units.

Also, I have spoken with many Italian-Americans (my hometown is largely of Italian descent) who served during WW II, in Europe.

I am certain that at some level there were regulations, spurred by such things as the Enemy Alien Control Program and Executive Order 9066. Almost certainly even some documented cases of nationality based prejudicial assignment. But at a real working level German-Americans or German descended Americans were allowed in essentially every job type and every unit of US forces in every theater. You simply can't say that about Japanese-Americans.

GrauGeist said:

And if you think that all Japanese that were interred were docile, innocent people, guess again. Tule Lake was not so much an internment camp as it was a detention facility for incorrigables and Imperial loyalists. There were many instances where a person was interred there and the Japanese prisoners suspected them of being a U.S. collaborator or anti-Emperor and murdered them.

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I don't think I said that at all.

I am pretty sure what I said was that the majority of the Japanese interned (over 60%) were US born, US citizen, Japanese-Americans. While essentially all of the German internees were either German born transplants, at best Naturalized US citizens, or non-citizen Germans. That was my primary point, I said nothing about sympathies or alignments of the interned in either case.

German descended peoples made up roughly 5% of the US population in 1941. At best Japanese descended peoples made up 0.3%. And yet 10 times, by number, not by percentage, as many people of Japanese descent were interned.

I also included that there were potentially MANY more documentable German sympathizers than were ever interned. I used the example of the Bund rally at Madison Square Garden, more people (many of them German descended or German-American) went to that single rally, openly supporting Nazi principals and mentioning Hitler by name, than were interned during the War.

T!

Enola Gay, heroism or insanity?
This is a subject that will go on as long as there are more than person on this planet, the same regarding RAF's area bombing of Dresden and other places during WWII..
Was it heroism? Maybe, as the bomb possibly killed less people, than what land invasion would have done and another year or so of bloody war..
Was it insanity? Possibly, looking at what kind of weapon the bomb was...
I for sure wouldn't like to swap seats with the person who decided to use it....was it a win/win situation, cut the war short and save 100.000's of lives or lose/lose, to use this terrible weapon and all that comes after it and always be remembered for doing it...

Token said:

That does not seem to be supported by historically recorded activities. You would think that regardless of the total number if the government wanted to they could have interned at least as many (by number, if not percentage) Germans as Japanese, but the numbers are not even close.

During WW II roughly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans were interned or forcibly relocated (over 60% of those were US citizens, and because of the Immigration Act of 1924 that meant most were born in the US), out of the roughly 300,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans population between Hawaii and the Mainland. This directly affected almost one third of all people of Japanese descent in the US.

And yet only about 11,500 Germans or German-Americans were interned (overwhelmingly German born), out of almost 6 million German, German-American, and German descended people in the US at the start of WW II. There were over 1.2 million German born people in the US in 1940. There were another roughly 5,000 Germans interned who were expelled from South America to the US after the start of WW II, so one might claim roughly 17,000 total. This 17,000 internees would have fit in just 1 of the 10 camps that held Japanese nationals and US citizen Japanese-Americans.

Remember that in the mid 1930's the American Nazi Party (organizations like Friends of New Germany and the German American Bund) had more than 10,000 members. In Feb 1939 the Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden was attended by about 20,000 people, and Hitlers activities were openly praised.

In other words, there were far more demonstrated supporters of Nazi Germany in the US than demonstrated supporters of Japanese aggression. And yet the Japanese were interned 10:1 compared to the Germans.

American military personnel of German descent were allowed to fight in Europe without general restriction, while American military persons of Japanese descent were generally not allowed to fight in the Pacific (there are a few exceptions, such as in certain military intelligence units). Japanese-Americans certainly did fight in WW II, but mostly in Europe.

T!

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It's been a while since I read Arnold Krammer's book, but he pointed out that there were "too many of them" to intern. Which you confirm in the above post.

Lucky13 said:

Enola Gay, heroism or insanity?
This is a subject that will go on as long as there are more than person on this planet, the same regarding RAF's area bombing of Dresden and other places during WWII..
Was it heroism? Maybe, as the bomb possibly killed less people, than what land invasion would have done and another year or so of bloody war..
Was it insanity? Possibly, looking at what kind of weapon the bomb was...
I for sure wouldn't like to swap seats with the person who decided to use it....was it a win/win situation, cut the war short and save 100.000's of lives or lose/lose, to use this terrible weapon and all that comes after it and always be remembered for doing it...

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Perhaps the use of Little Boy and Fat Man helped prevent the use of nuclear weapons later.
Perhaps the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are heroes, if not for them, perhaps it would have been much easier for someone to have started a nuclear WW III, or a conventional WW III for that matter, due to fear of it escalating to nuclear.

The question is a bit off the mark for me. Heroisms got nothing to do with it IMO. I think the question should be was the bomb justified?

It was justified in the minds of every US Citizen who heard about the Pearl Harbor sneak attack causing 2,500 deaths. If there was EVER anything to get the US public out of isolationism and united behind a war cause, the Japaense certainly provided it.

If they had managed to declare war before the attack, it possibly might have been different but I doubt it. If you want to kick the US into action, go kill a lot of people on US soil without warning. You'll get the action. It might take awhile, but it will get there. In 1941 every US citizen would have dropped the bomb if they knew about it. There was little change in 1945. Many of the still-living WWII vets still feel that way. We have a sense of fair play in the U.S.A., even in 1941 ... and Pearl Harbor volated that by a VERY wide margin.

It was regrettable from the point of view of a reasonable person in 2015 but, in 1945 it was very certainly justified. History has a way of looking at things later without the attitudes and feelings of the time when things were done. Historians try professionally to not have sympathy for victims ... they're just writing history. Most of the people alive at the time weren't historians and had NO qualms about what happened, and very probably still don't today if they are still with us.

How many Japanese regret the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor? Maybe we should address that.

My bet is you won't find many of WWII vintage that regreet the attack or the US casualties ... but they regret the outcome of the war. I really don't KNOW how many younger Japanese regret it since I have the distinct impression WWII isn't much discussed in Japan today. Personally I have no animosity towards Japan at all since the war is long over and the people who planeed it are mostly gone. I still don't understand their culture but have met many very nice Jamapese people who were visiting over here, and some in Japan when I was there.

I certainly won't lose any sleep over whether or not it was justified in 1945, but I would think long and hard before authorizing the use of nuclear weapons again aginst a civil population ...assuning I had any say in it (I don't). Against military targets in a war that excalated to that point ... that would be a tough call if you have the weapons and are losing.

How many people who are leading nations today would surrender their counry rather than lose a war if they had the choice between losing or using nuclear weapons?

There are very few Gallup polls that address that sort of thing, but it boils down to, "How rational are our leaders?" If I look at the leaders around the world and what they are doing in real life, my real-world assessment makes me think that there aren't really all that many who would choose to save lives rather than let loose the dogs of war, and damn the cost ... when national survival is about to be in question, even after the lessons of WWII are taken into account.

What you learn at history class may not be same country by country but history textbooks for Japanese students have been granted as decent ones among China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the U.S. by Stanford University researchers in 2008 though we might be too modest.

Japan's teaching on war doesn't deserve bad press.

parsifal said:

The question is a bit off the mark for me. Heroisms got nothing to do with it IMO. I think the question should be was the bomb justified?

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Michael, I think Heroism is appropriate. Before the Trinity test, the Manhattan scientists were about equally divided. About half thought that once the chain reaction was initiated it would continue throughout all the heavy elements in the Earth's crust. Oppenheimer made the final decision.
Second, no one had ever dropped a nuclear bomb before. No one really knew if the B-29 would survive the blast intact or if the crew would survive. Could have very well been a suicide mission

VBF-13 said:

Really, it's hard to blame even that generation. These weren't a bunch of schoolyard bullies. These Nazi leaders were psychopaths, and a propaganda machine. The population was given a race to kick around for their troubles, because they were deep in the hole, just like everywhere else. Think of the kind who go along with that, and who relish it. There were a few. But the vast majority were simply scared to rock the boat.
It happened in Germany, it happened in the Deep South, it can happen anywhere.

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drgondog said:

What are you talking about when you say 'it happened in Nazi Germany and the Deep South' ??

There is zero connection.

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The going along of the general population with the disparate treatment out of fear of reprisal is what I'm referring to. Both the Nazis and the KKK instilled that fear in the general population. The general population of Nazi Germany was no different than the general population of the KKK South, in that respect.

The bombs are dropped and coincidently within a matter of weeks the War is over. Ooh, how does this freaking work?

Gents - I see this thread going very bad very fast so now its closed!