GT said:
The Japanese did not have another choice after the embargo was put to affect They could only have chosen not to continue their war in China before that.
Why? They could have chosen to stop their expansion in China at any time. It was not that they could not, it was that they would not. The greed of Japan's leadership dictated their behavior.
The fact is Japan simply wanted the resources from China and were unwilling to trade for them - they wanted to steal them. When the USA and Britain acted to stop them with the embargo/blockade, after numerous diplomatic appeals which were ignored, Japan opted for war with the USA and Britain.
GT said:
The war was still basically a colonial war and Hawaii had been annexed on 7 July 1898, and this action was the culmination of more than 50 years of growing US commercial interests in the Hawaiian islands. What happened after the war was that the colonist countries discovered that all of their colonies wanted to be free and some became free after a war with the suppressing colonial countries, one of the last being free was Vietnam. Hawaii the one and only not to become free and instead becoming the 50th state to the US on 29 Aug 1959.
It is not true that "all of their colonies wanted to be free". Some did not. Some are protectorates to this day, having judged the benfits outweight any costs.
The World was a very different place prior to WWI. With WWI, the rules changed. One big difference was the nature of communications and transportation had made the World a "much smaller place". A new age of accountability and human rights had dawned, and an end to Colonialism had been mandated in 1928 per the
Briand-Kellogg Peace Pact, where more than 60 nations including both Germany and Japan pledged not to resort to war in furtherance of national goals. A pledge it violated just 6 years later by invading China and SE Asia.
If you read the terms of the
Atlantic Charter (1941), which was by-and-large dictated by FDR, the following assertions clearly show the American position:
Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned;
Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them;
Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity;
Interestingly, while Churchill all to willingly agreed with FDR and signed the charter, after the war, he claimed that the right of self-determination was to apply to the colonies of the "bad nations" such as Italy, but not to those of Britain or France.
GT said:
The decision to drop the bomb was a atrocity of an magnitude never equaled in modern history just because of the reasons that I have stated above and can repeat again.
The Japanese was defeated the had no oil and scrapmetal to continue the war effectively and almost the entire war machinery was gone. The only reason for the A-bomb was that it was the only way to test the bomb as the war in Germany was over and that there was No Way the US would have used the bomb in ETO anyhow!. That fact is that one has to understand in the minds of people and military at that time, let´s try it on the Japs!
It was the US military that pressed for the A-bomb to be tested instead of some other wise and by the wars end accepted methods. There were many that opposed the droppings of the A-bomb at high level but they were "bulldozed".
Cheers
GT
First of all, the A-bomb had already been tested. Your contention that the choice to drop the bomb was in order to test it is nonsense.
Second, despite being beaten, the Japanese would not surrender. As far back as about Oct. 1944 the Japanese had sought a negotiated peace with the USA, but this was unacceptable. Any negotiated peace would leave Japan too capable of rearming itself and then re-initiating war. It made no sense to give Japan a "time-out" so they could recuperate, and the USA did not want to have to maintain a large military force on the boarder with Japanese territories.
You are right, Japan was beaten. And they knew they were beaten. But they would not surrender. They made their intention to inflict as much harm on the USA as possible, and their disregard for the lives of the Japanese people, all too clear in numerous battles including Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and through the use of Kamikazes. There was no sign that Japan would surrender unconditonally, and without the use of the A-bomb an invasion would be required. There was also much reason to believe that any such negotiated peace would not be honored by the Japanese military leadership anyway. The Japanese had two main terms in their peace offerings; First that the Emperor would remain untouched. Second that there would be no occupation of the Japanese mainland.
And again, the Soviet situation dictated the use of the bomb. It was absolutely necessary to prevent Soviet expansion into SE Asia. Without Japan's immeadiate surrender, more than half of China and the northern Islands of Japan were likely to fall to the Soviets. Even had Japan surrendered the Soviets might well have claimed these lands. The use of the A-bomb was a signal to the Soviets as well as the Japanese. The Japanese were far better off having suffered the relatively small losses at Hiroshima and Nagasaki than to have had the Soviets occupy the northern islands.
I don't see what the whining over the use of the A-bombs is all about. More people were killed by conventional bombing of Japanese cities, something like 400,000 in Tokyo alone in a single raid. The A-bomb just made it undeniably clear that failure to surrender meant utter destruction. No argument that the Japanese could somehow hold out for a negotiated peace could be taken seriously anymore.
Finally, what right do the Japanese have to complain about how they were treated? At every opportunity they showed nothing but contempt and loathing for non-Japanese. They had no regaurd for non-japanese human life. There is absolutely no doubt that if the Japanese had developed the A-bomb they would have used it in a heartbeat. And, even though they were beaten, they were still trying to coordinate a biological attack against the USA which they knew would only inflict suffering on civilians and achieve no military objectives.
The Japanese were a vile culture prior to WWII. Bushido is promoted as some kind of honorable code - it was not. It was a way of life that justified the terrorizing and slaughtering of innocents at the whim of the noblility. It was a means to subjigate responsiblity for ones own actions. It was the ultimate institutionalization of the "I was only following orders" excuse for totally unacceptable behavior. Wrapping evil in a pretty box of ritual and cerimony does not change what it is.
=S=
Lunatic