The truth about Nagasaki and Hiroshima

[ccr1138.livejournal.com]

My grandmother and grandfather both worked on the Manhattan Project. Grandmother was an electronics genius, and Granddaddy was in charge of Uranium 235 accounting. I was born and grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, surrounded by nuclear scientists, reactors, and a bomb drill every day at 5:00 p.m.

So I have a special perspective on the development of The Bomb. My grandparents didn't know exactly what they were doing during the war -- they were forbidden from discussing their jobs with each other lest they figure it out -- but Grandmother knew enough about nuclear physics to put it all together. When the bombs were dropped, the workers finally realized what the project had been about, and they knew they'd been instrumental in killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Did it bother them? Of course. But they also knew something that our history classes are failing to teach these days: without the bomb, even MORE Japanese civilians would have died in far more horrible ways, along with hundreds of thousands of American soldiers.

April 1945: On the day the Japanese surrendered, Jeff's father was 17 and a newly minted U.S. Marine on a ship bound for Japan. Their CO said only twenty percent of them were expected to survive the first landing, so Bill had grabbed his buddy, counted out eight others, and said, "It's been nice knowing the you boys." They fully understood that most of them would die on a Japanese beach, yet they volunteered to go because they loved America. Fortunately, because of the bombs, their lives were spared, and they spent months helping the civilian populace rebuild.

The U.S. military had commissioned nearly 500,000 purple hearts (the award given to soldiers wounded or killed) in anticipation of that invasion. They are still using that stock today, sixty years later, because Truman was brave enough to drop the atomic bomb and bring about an end to a murderous, bloody war.

I write this because people aren't being taught the facts. History is being rewritten by those who want to paint America in the worst light possible. If you think dropping the bomb on Japan was wrong or evil or a war crime, I urge you to watch this video: Jon Stewart, War Criminals & The True Story of the Atomic Bombs

Comments

[modernelegance.livejournal.com]

I live in Tennessee so I too have grown up hearing stories about the Oak Ridge facility and have met people who worked there. I loathe how people are rewriting history and not just recent history but the history of the founding of our country. (I have ranted about this often in my personal journal so sorry friends that you may see a few repeated things!)

I am a historian trained to follow the facts not the "feelings" about a situation. People are never perfect but I find our culture trying to make everything "politically correct" such as demonizing our founding fathers for having slaves. I am NOT stating that slavery is good and they should be excused but that was the culture and some of them even admit that it was not right for them to own slaves. Meanwhile the Greeks and Romans practiced forms of "slavery" but we hold their cultures in high esteem. In a sense slavery is still happening because people are having to depend on the government for their monthly checks and to continue getting them they have to vote the way those who hold the power want them to vote. No it's not slavery as we are led to believe it is even though in the South most slave holders were Yeoman farmers who owned a handful of slaves to help around their farms not these big plantation owners that people think about. [This was taught to me by a liberal black professor which was a shocker] I digress...but you see that people are changing history to suit their own beliefs and convictions but if history does not support their view then they villainize the person. I hate what revisionism has done to the military in the past 100 years and I hate what it has done to our founding fathers.

As you can tell this is a bee in my bonnet...LOL. Sorry for randomly ranting like that...

[ccr1138.livejournal.com]

No apologies necessary. It's maddening to see how the education system is failing our citizens, which in turn leads to bad decisions by the electorate. I just wish there were something we could do to stop it, but all our protests fall on deaf ears.

[writerspleasure.livejournal.com]

for one thing we need to encourage inexpensive, competing, rational, factual, secular schools versus the government union schools.

[caromiofic.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I've been a Revolutionary War era buff since age 5-6. I read everything in our school library I could get my hands on, and our trips back east always included visiting Early American History sites. My little brother is now a History major at a Christian univ., so we have a lot to talk about.

I loved having a conservative history teacher for a mother. Unfortunately for the young, she got out of it in 2004.

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

It's post-60s liberal guilt, anti-military sentiment, pacifism at all costs, and racial politics all rolled into one. Fire bombings in Tokyo and Dresden were a lot worse yet you hardly hear about it.

[caromiofic.livejournal.com]

Yes, in studying why we dropped The Bomb, we have to consider not only our way we got there, but the Japanese culture. They wouldn't have stopped fighting until their last citizen was dead. The civilian casualties and lingering radioactivity caused cancer are terrible, of course, but it really was a choice of the lesser of two evils for Truman.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

No, this is what I was taught, and this is pretty much all I ever see, unless it's from the nuttiest of nutters, the bleeding-est of hearts.

[ccr1138.livejournal.com]

I guess Jon Stewart didn't get the memo.