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Re: Damn watching the war in the Pacific I had no idea 

By: micro in POPE 5 | Recommend this post (1)
Mon, 08 Apr 19 10:33 PM | 36 view(s)
Boardmark this board | Pope 5 		Msg. 29740 of 62138
(This msg. is a reply to 29724 by Decomposed)
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nice history lesson De!
great chart also!

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The above is a reply to the following message:
Re: Damn watching the war in the Pacific I had no idea
By: Decomposed in POPE 5
Mon, 08 Apr 19 3:46 PM 		Msg. 29724 of 62138

Nemo:

Re: "2 years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor there still fighting I learned in school it was immediate after they bombed Pearl Harbor we nuked Japan"Pearl Harbor was December of '41. By June of '42, we'd defeated Japan's navy and victory was just a matter of time. That doesn't mean it was quick or easy. We took Guadalcanal in '43. Guam and the Phillipines in '44. My uncle's submarine was lost off of Guam in February 1945. Iwo Jima was later that same month. Then Okinawa. Hiroshima and Japan's surrender didn't happen until August.

After Germany surrendered in May 1945, everyone on my Dad's crew (he was a navigator) STILL believed that they would die in the war. After all, Japan hadn't surrendered and the Navy estimated that Operation Downfall would take up to 800,000 American servicemen's lives. To put that in perspective, 800,000 was double the number of American deaths in all the rest of WWII.

Now look at the graphic below. Japan lost a total of 3 million people in the war. If we had invaded, our estimates were that TEN MILLION MORE would have been killed. I therefore always shake my head in disbelief at the morons who protest at our use of atomic bombs. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings combined killed between 130,000 and 225,000 Japanese, incredibly few compared to what would have happened if we had tried to end the war with conventional weapons.

The first B-52 came along seven years after the war, btw. WWII's bombers were mostly B-17s and B-24s.



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