The cherry-picking on this topic is extreme. One guy claims Lehey was the leader of the U.S. Military during WWII. He was not. He was the senior-serving military official, who worked as chief of staff to Roosevelt. You could call him an early CJCS, or you could just use his title: chief of staff. Marshall was probably the closest we had to a senior person actually running the war, as anybody with a modicum of WWII history can tell you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Marshall The only reason to pump up Lehey is to add authority to the quote, which was made years later during a completely different political situation. When you see this kind of thing, it never bodes well for the argument.
But you beat down one red herring and three more pop up. It's like talking to those 9-11 guys. They already know the answer. Just a matter of selectively arranging facts in a convincing narrative.
The author gives it away towards the end "...There is real resistance to looking at the facts. But perhaps this should not be surprising...They fill an important psychic need."
Well there you go. From the author's comments, and those on this board, I take it this is supposed to be some kind of argument between "patriotic" Americans and the facts (as told to us by the revisionists), instead of what it is: rewriting history to suit current fashion.
I actually wish the revisionists well. Maybe they can get their way and we can go through 100 years or so of believing that the A-bomb was not the proximate cause of the end of WWII. Then a new fashion will take hold, and we can come back to believing what 95% of the people at the time it happened believed. The neat thing about this is that people get educated about history. Frankly, if history is your passion and you spend time on this and know your stuff, I could care less which theory you pick. These stories need to be remembered.
Whenever this topic comes up I reminded of this quote:
But perhaps George M. Elsey, a young naval intelligence officer assigned to the Truman White House, provided the best reply to revisionist historians and others who question the decision to drop the atomic bombs. Asked by David McCullough for his biography of the President (Truman, Simon & Schuster, 1992) about the decision, Elsey replied: "Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made. He could no more have stopped it than a train moving down a track. It's all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing."
This is seriously misleading. The OP doesn't even mention William Lehey, let alone include a howler about him. And you accuse other people of red herrings!
Surely if you had found even the tiniest flaw in the OP, you'd have shared it with us by now. Instead your comments are positively incontinent with innuendos and slurs: "UFO stories", "pseudo-science", "revisionists", "9-11 guys", "cherry picking", "selectively arranging facts", "pump up", "add authority", "rewriting history to suit current fashion", "emotional reasoning" (since deleted, unless my memory is playing tricks), and my favorite: "From the author's comments, and those on this board"—as if the two were colluding instead of obviously having nothing whatever to do with each other.
I don't have an opinion about why Japan surrendered in WWII, but when an apparently well-reasoned case provokes this kind of thing, it seems likely that there is something to it.
Knowing a bit about the Asian way to handle conflict, I think it is possible that the bombs gave a good pretext (not the best word) to end the war. It would mean that many in Japan headquarter knew it was foolish to continue the war but it was not possible to change boat without a special new circumstance that can be used to explain the change.
Yes, I know. And then he switched back to the OP as if the two were the same thing, when in fact they're entirely unrelated. That's the dictionary definition of a red herring.
The cherry-picking on this topic is extreme. One guy claims Lehey was the leader of the U.S. Military during WWII. He was not. He was the senior-serving military official, who worked as chief of staff to Roosevelt. You could call him an early CJCS, or you could just use his title: chief of staff. Marshall was probably the closest we had to a senior person actually running the war, as anybody with a modicum of WWII history can tell you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Marshall The only reason to pump up Lehey is to add authority to the quote, which was made years later during a completely different political situation. When you see this kind of thing, it never bodes well for the argument.
But you beat down one red herring and three more pop up. It's like talking to those 9-11 guys. They already know the answer. Just a matter of selectively arranging facts in a convincing narrative.
The author gives it away towards the end "...There is real resistance to looking at the facts. But perhaps this should not be surprising...They fill an important psychic need."
Well there you go. From the author's comments, and those on this board, I take it this is supposed to be some kind of argument between "patriotic" Americans and the facts (as told to us by the revisionists), instead of what it is: rewriting history to suit current fashion.
I actually wish the revisionists well. Maybe they can get their way and we can go through 100 years or so of believing that the A-bomb was not the proximate cause of the end of WWII. Then a new fashion will take hold, and we can come back to believing what 95% of the people at the time it happened believed. The neat thing about this is that people get educated about history. Frankly, if history is your passion and you spend time on this and know your stuff, I could care less which theory you pick. These stories need to be remembered.
Whenever this topic comes up I reminded of this quote:
But perhaps George M. Elsey, a young naval intelligence officer assigned to the Truman White House, provided the best reply to revisionist historians and others who question the decision to drop the atomic bombs. Asked by David McCullough for his biography of the President (Truman, Simon & Schuster, 1992) about the decision, Elsey replied: "Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made. He could no more have stopped it than a train moving down a track. It's all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing."
http://hnn.us/articles/44729.html