Rose65
Well-known Member
- Location
- United Kingdom
To me all war is madness. I cannot make sense of the depths of man's inhumanity to man can reach.
80 years ago, on August 6 & 9, 1945, the world changed.
- Thread starter fuzzybuddy
- Start date
My guess is that @George1959 is laughing at the way you tried to say it, no American life is worth a million of others lives.
rgp
Well-known Member
- Location
- Milford,OH
I never said anything like that at all.
I said that , I didn't care if a million of them died, so long as no American lives were lost.
I worked in a Japanese company and came to be close friends of the expats that rotated in and out of the company. Only one of those friends ever spoke of the events of 1945. He was a very young person at the time but had extended family that died as a result. He was surprisingly understanding of the events. It seemed his family was not in favor of the war and how Japan was involved. At the same time he mourned the devastation to his country and his people. We only spoke of it once during a long trip by car, but his view point was profound. Strangely it helped me as I dealt with my own experiences in Vietnam in the many years since that conversation.
MoBeans
Member
Major Charles Sweeney led the mission over Nagasaki. I know one of his daughters who was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force and asked her once if he regretted it. She said no and shared this snippet of the testimony to congress that he gave in 1995. Kind of says it all.
"The world is a better place because German and Japanese fascism failed to conquer. Japan and Germany are better places because we were benevolent in our victory. The youth of Japan and the United States, spared from further needless slaughter, went on to live and have families and grow old. Today, millions of people in America and Japan are alive because we ended the war when we did. This is not to celebrate the use of atomic weapons. Quite the contrary. It is my fervent hope that my mission is the last such mission ever flown. But that does not mean that back in 1945, given the events of war and the recalcitrance of the enemy, President Truman was not obliged to use all of the weapons at his disposal to end the war."
"The world is a better place because German and Japanese fascism failed to conquer. Japan and Germany are better places because we were benevolent in our victory. The youth of Japan and the United States, spared from further needless slaughter, went on to live and have families and grow old. Today, millions of people in America and Japan are alive because we ended the war when we did. This is not to celebrate the use of atomic weapons. Quite the contrary. It is my fervent hope that my mission is the last such mission ever flown. But that does not mean that back in 1945, given the events of war and the recalcitrance of the enemy, President Truman was not obliged to use all of the weapons at his disposal to end the war."
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