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A long post, but one with many parallels to the present.

Ribtorus wrote:

Bat wrote:

Okinawa, now- IIRC the naval armada that came over their horizon was the largest ever, & hundreds of thousands died by air and naval bombardment. We still had to go in and dig them out on/of the ground, with casualties high all 'round. That also speaks to the situation under discussion.

Area bombing against industrial targets, including the labour force, may be justifiable when a war depends on the belligerents industrial capabilities.

But it was targetted attacks on Japanese merchant shipping which really ended their capacity to continue to fight.

Largely true, but the island-hopping advance was what gave us the bases to operate our planes, ships and subs from. Even the subs carried only so many torpedoes, and were relatively slow, as were whatever resupply freighters we could operate. We couldn't do it from Midway, let 'lone Hawaii. I wouldn't minimize destroying their bases in the process, like Truk. There's still an immense debris field there, the remains of that which previously supported Japanese operations, as well as their fuel and ordnance depots.

During World War II, Truk Lagoon served as the forward anchorage for the Japanese Imperial Fleet. The place was considered the most formidable of all Japanese strongholds in the Pacific. On the various islands, the Japanese Civil Engineering Department and Naval Construction Department had built roads, trenches, bunkers and caves. Five airstrips, seaplane bases, a torpedo boat station, submarine repair shops, a communications center and a radar station were constructed during the war. Protecting these various facilities were coastal defense guns and mortar emplacements. At anchor in the lagoon were the Imperial Japanese Navy’s giant battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, tankers, cargo ships, tugboats, gunboats, minesweepers, landing craft, and submarines. Some have described it as Japan's equivalent of the Americans' Pearl Harbor.

Once the American forces captured the Marshall Islands, they used it as a base from which they launched an early morning attack on February 17, 1944 against Truk Lagoon. The Japanese withdrew most of their heavy units. Operation Hailstone lasted for three days, with an American bombardment of the Japanese wiping out almost anything of value - 60 ships and 275 airplanes were sent to the bottom of the lagoon.

It's more than a little complex, but to be remembered is that the proximate trigger for Pearl Harbor was our oil embargo, Roosevelt's way of hindering their expansionism.

Despite their progressive losses in all means of warfighting, tho, they kept on even after losing Okinawa, and we came very close to invading mainland Japan. Operation Olympic was scheduled for October '45.

The Battle of Okinawa, also known as Operation Iceberg, was fought on the Ryukyu Islands of Okinawa and was the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Nearly 60,000 troops stormed ashore on the initial invasion. The 82 day long battle lasted from late March until June 1945.

The battle has been referred to as the "Typhoon of Steel" in English, and tetsu no ame ("rain of steel") or tetsu no bōfū ("violent wind of steel") in Japanese. The nicknames refer to the ferocity of the fighting, the intensity of gunfire involved, and sheer numbers of Allied ships and armored vehicles that assaulted the island. The battle has one of the highest number of casualties of any World War Two engagement: the Japanese lost over 100,000 troops, and the Allies (mostly United States) suffered more than 50,000 casualties, with over 12,000 killed in action. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, wounded or attempted suicide. Approximately one-fourth of the civilian population died due to the invasion. The Tenth Army had five Army Divisions, the 7th, 27th, 77th, 81st, and 96th; and two Marine Divisions, the 1st and 6th fought on the island while the 2nd remained as an amphibious reserve and was never brought ashore. All these divisions were supported by naval, amphibious, and tactical air forces.

The main objective of the operation was to seize a large island only 340 miles away from mainland Japan. After a long campaign of island hopping, the Allies were approaching Japan, and Okinawa would serve as a springboard for the planned invasion of the islands. Although hastily converted to a base for air operations, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union's formal declaration of war[2] caused Japan to surrender just weeks after the end of the fighting at Okinawa and the invasion never took place.

Okinawa also saw the first large-scale use of Kamikazes; mostly planes, it was fortunate for us that our BBs had been progressively converted to floating AAA platforms that could shield the carriers- also that the proximity fuse had recently come into service for the 5" DP gun, making them effective in the AA role. Unlike the RN, we hadn't armored our flight decks.

Several kamikaze attacks caused significant damage, but since the British used armored flight decks on their aircraft carriers, they only experienced a brief interruption to their force's objective.[5]

In the three-month battle for Okinawa, the Japanese flew 1,900 kamikaze missions, sinking dozens of Allied ships and killing more than 5,000 U.S. sailors at the cost of 1,465 expended kamikaze planes (2,200 other Japanese and 763 U.S. aircraft were also destroyed, including during the land battle). The ships lost were smaller vessels, particularly the destroyers of the radar pickets, as well as destroyer escorts and landing ships. While no major Allied warship was lost, several fleet carriers were severely damaged. Land-based motorboats were also used in the Japanese suicide attacks.

There was a hypnotic fascination to the sight so alien to our Western philosophy. We watched each plunging kamikaze with the detached horror of one witnessing a terrible spectacle rather than as the intended victim. We forgot self for the moment as we groped hopelessly for the thought of that other man up there.
—Vice Admiral C.R. Brown
..

Either by design or the "fog of war", Buckner did not detect the Japanese general retreat to their second line of defense in the Kiyan Peninsula, which ultimately led to the greatest slaughter on Okinawa in the latter stages of the battle, including the deaths of thousands of civilians.
..

Ushijima and Chō committed suicide by seppuku in their command headquarters on Hill 89 in the closing hours of the battle. Colonel Yahara had asked Ushijima for permission to commit suicide, but the general refused his request, saying:

"If you die there will be no one left who knows the truth about the battle of Okinawa. Bear the temporary shame but endure it. This is an order from your army Commander."[9]

Yahara was the most senior officer to have survived the battle on the island, and he later authored a book entitled The Battle for Okinawa.
..

U.S. forces suffered their highest-ever casualty rate for combat stress reaction during the entire war, at 48%, with some 14,000 soldiers retired due to nervous breakdown.
..

This was also the first battle in the war in which surrendering Japanese were made into POWs by the thousands. Many of the Japanese prisoners were native Okinawans who had been impressed into the Army shortly before the battle and were less imbued with the Japanese Army's no-surrender doctrine.[16] When the American forces occupied the island, the Japanese took Okinawan clothing to avoid capture and the Okinawans came to the Americans' aid by offering a simple way to detect Japanese in hiding. The Okinawan language differs greatly from the Japanese language; with Americans at their sides, Okinawans would give directions to people in the local language, and those who did not understand were considered Japanese in hiding who were then captured.
..

Ninety percent of the buildings on the island were completely destroyed, and the lush tropical landscape was turned into "a vast field of mud, lead, decay and maggots."[27]

The military value of Okinawa "exceeded all hope". Okinawa provided a fleet anchorage, troop staging areas, and airfields in close proximity to Japan. [..]

Ironically

Some military historians believe that Okinawa led directly to the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as a means of avoiding the planned ground invasion of the Japanese mainland. A prominent holder of this view is Victor Davis Hanson, who states it explicitly in his book Ripples of Battle:

"...because the Japanese on Okinawa, including native Okinawans, were so fierce in their defense (even when cut off, and without supplies), and because casualties were so appalling, many American strategists looked for an alternative means to subdue mainland Japan, other than a direct invasion. This means presented itself, with the advent of atomic bombs, which worked admirably in convincing the Japanese to sue for peace, without American casualties. Ironically, the American conventional fire-bombing of major Japanese cities (which had been going on for months before Okinawa) was far more effective at killing civilians than the atomic bombs and, had the Americans simply continued, or expanded this, the Japanese would likely have surrendered anyway. Nevertheless, the bombs were a powerful symbolic display of American power, and the Japanese capitulated, obviating the need for an invasion of the home islands."

The war's end is a large subject on its own, still controversial, and on a side note, Japan still has a hard time even educating its young about WWII.

There is ongoing major disagreement between Okinawa's local government and Japan's national government over the role of the Japanese military in civilian mass suicides during the battle. In March 2007, the national Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) advised textbook publishers to reword descriptions that the embattled Imperial Japanese Army forced civilians to kill themselves in the war so they would not be taken prisoner by the U.S. military. MEXT preferred descriptions that just say that civilians received hand grenades from the Japanese military.

This move sparked widespread protests among the Okinawans. In June 2007, the Okinawa Prefectoral Assembly adopted a resolution stating, "We strongly call on the (national) government to retract the instruction and to immediately restore the description in the textbooks so the truth of the Battle of Okinawa will be handed down correctly and a tragic war will never happen again."[31]

On September 29, 2007, about 110,000 people held the biggest political rally in the history of Okinawa to demand that MEXT retract its order to textbook publishers on revising the account of the civilian suicides. The resolution stated: "It is an undeniable fact that the 'multiple suicides' would not have occurred without the involvement of the Japanese military and any deletion of or revision to (the descriptions) is a denial and distortion of the many testimonies by those people who survived the incidents."[32]

On December 26, 2007, MEXT partially admitted the role of the Japanese military in civilian mass suicides.[33] The ministry's Textbook Authorization Council allowed the publishers to reinstate the reference that civilians "were forced into mass suicides by the Japanese military," on condition it is placed in sufficient context. [..]

Wiki for the 'short' form on these matters. Military History Quarterly also had a long article about it in, IIRC, the late '90s. My bolds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_campaign

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truk_Lagoon

sp

Last edited by Bat (2009-10-27 7:45 pm)

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

Sternum wrote:

Pariah wrote:

I have never quite understood exactly how killing 100,000 people with fire bombs is more moral than killing 100,000 people with a nuclear weapon.

Admittedly, there's the whole radiation aspect is akin to salting the Earth after burning your enemy's city to the ground. The atomic bomb fatalities rise considerably if you factor in the increased cancer rate and birth defects in the post-war years.

Except the radiation effects became known only well after their first use in war. "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" were only seen as bigger, more efficient booms at the time.

D'Eyncourt wrote:

Sternum wrote:

Pariah wrote:

I have never quite understood exactly how killing 100,000 people with fire bombs is more moral than killing 100,000 people with a nuclear weapon.

Admittedly, there's the whole radiation aspect is akin to salting the Earth after burning your enemy's city to the ground. The atomic bomb fatalities rise considerably if you factor in the increased cancer rate and birth defects in the post-war years.

Except the radiation effects became known only well after their first use in war. "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" were only seen as bigger, more efficient booms at the time.

No, radiation was well known at the time. Nuclear technology was developed as a direct result of research into radioactivity. Once it was finally understood how radioactivity occurred (an unstable nucleus of an atom breaking up and throwing off high energy particles), then it was immediately understood that this knowledge could be used for power generation as well as weapons. This happened in 38 I think, I'll check on that though.

Now, to be fair, I'm sure the gross effects would not be well known. They knew radioactivity could kill you or give you cancer, but I doubt they had any idea what would happen to the population that had a real live bomb actually dropped on their heads.

edit: 1938 was when it was realized that by throwing a neutron into an atom you could split it, and set up a chain reaction of fission that could runaway with itself. Various experiments in radioactivity had been done in the decades before.

Last edited by [Tycho?] (2009-10-27 10:05 pm)

Bat wrote:

A long post, but one with many parallels to the present.

Ribtorus wrote:

Bat wrote:

Okinawa, now- IIRC the naval armada that came over their horizon was the largest ever, & hundreds of thousands died by air and naval bombardment. We still had to go in and dig them out on/of the ground, with casualties high all 'round. That also speaks to the situation under discussion.

Area bombing against industrial targets, including the labour force, may be justifiable when a war depends on the belligerents industrial capabilities.

But it was targetted attacks on Japanese merchant shipping which really ended their capacity to continue to fight.

Largely true, but the island-hopping advance was what gave us the bases to operate our planes, ships and subs from. Even the subs carried only so many torpedoes, and were relatively slow, as were whatever resupply freighters we could operate. We couldn't do it from Midway, let 'lone Hawaii. I wouldn't minimize destroying their bases in the process, like Truk. There's still an immense debris field there, the remains of that which previously supported Japanese operations, as well as their fuel and ordnance depots.

During World War II, Truk Lagoon served as the forward anchorage for the Japanese Imperial Fleet. The place was considered the most formidable of all Japanese strongholds in the Pacific. On the various islands, the Japanese Civil Engineering Department and Naval Construction Department had built roads, trenches, bunkers and caves. Five airstrips, seaplane bases, a torpedo boat station, submarine repair shops, a communications center and a radar station were constructed during the war. Protecting these various facilities were coastal defense guns and mortar emplacements. At anchor in the lagoon were the Imperial Japanese Navy’s giant battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, tankers, cargo ships, tugboats, gunboats, minesweepers, landing craft, and submarines. Some have described it as Japan's equivalent of the Americans' Pearl Harbor.

Once the American forces captured the Marshall Islands, they used it as a base from which they launched an early morning attack on February 17, 1944 against Truk Lagoon. The Japanese withdrew most of their heavy units. Operation Hailstone lasted for three days, with an American bombardment of the Japanese wiping out almost anything of value - 60 ships and 275 airplanes were sent to the bottom of the lagoon.

It's more than a little complex, but to be remembered is that the proximate trigger for Pearl Harbor was our oil embargo, Roosevelt's way of hindering their expansionism.

Despite their progressive losses in all means of warfighting, tho, they kept on even after losing Okinawa, and we came very close to invading mainland Japan. Operation Olympic was scheduled for October '45.

The Battle of Okinawa, also known as Operation Iceberg, was fought on the Ryukyu Islands of Okinawa and was the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Nearly 60,000 troops stormed ashore on the initial invasion. The 82 day long battle lasted from late March until June 1945.

The battle has been referred to as the "Typhoon of Steel" in English, and tetsu no ame ("rain of steel") or tetsu no bōfū ("violent wind of steel") in Japanese. The nicknames refer to the ferocity of the fighting, the intensity of gunfire involved, and sheer numbers of Allied ships and armored vehicles that assaulted the island. The battle has one of the highest number of casualties of any World War Two engagement: the Japanese lost over 100,000 troops, and the Allies (mostly United States) suffered more than 50,000 casualties, with over 12,000 killed in action. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, wounded or attempted suicide. Approximately one-fourth of the civilian population died due to the invasion. The Tenth Army had five Army Divisions, the 7th, 27th, 77th, 81st, and 96th; and two Marine Divisions, the 1st and 6th fought on the island while the 2nd remained as an amphibious reserve and was never brought ashore. All these divisions were supported by naval, amphibious, and tactical air forces.

The main objective of the operation was to seize a large island only 340 miles away from mainland Japan. After a long campaign of island hopping, the Allies were approaching Japan, and Okinawa would serve as a springboard for the planned invasion of the islands. Although hastily converted to a base for air operations, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union's formal declaration of war[2] caused Japan to surrender just weeks after the end of the fighting at Okinawa and the invasion never took place.

Okinawa also saw the first large-scale use of Kamikazes; mostly planes, it was fortunate for us that our BBs had been progressively converted to floating AAA platforms that could shield the carriers- also that the proximity fuse had recently come into service for the 5" DP gun, making them effective in the AA role. Unlike the RN, we hadn't armored our flight decks.

Several kamikaze attacks caused significant damage, but since the British used armored flight decks on their aircraft carriers, they only experienced a brief interruption to their force's objective.[5]

In the three-month battle for Okinawa, the Japanese flew 1,900 kamikaze missions, sinking dozens of Allied ships and killing more than 5,000 U.S. sailors at the cost of 1,465 expended kamikaze planes (2,200 other Japanese and 763 U.S. aircraft were also destroyed, including during the land battle). The ships lost were smaller vessels, particularly the destroyers of the radar pickets, as well as destroyer escorts and landing ships. While no major Allied warship was lost, several fleet carriers were severely damaged. Land-based motorboats were also used in the Japanese suicide attacks.

There was a hypnotic fascination to the sight so alien to our Western philosophy. We watched each plunging kamikaze with the detached horror of one witnessing a terrible spectacle rather than as the intended victim. We forgot self for the moment as we groped hopelessly for the thought of that other man up there.
—Vice Admiral C.R. Brown
..

Either by design or the "fog of war", Buckner did not detect the Japanese general retreat to their second line of defense in the Kiyan Peninsula, which ultimately led to the greatest slaughter on Okinawa in the latter stages of the battle, including the deaths of thousands of civilians.
..

Ushijima and Chō committed suicide by seppuku in their command headquarters on Hill 89 in the closing hours of the battle. Colonel Yahara had asked Ushijima for permission to commit suicide, but the general refused his request, saying:

"If you die there will be no one left who knows the truth about the battle of Okinawa. Bear the temporary shame but endure it. This is an order from your army Commander."[9]

Yahara was the most senior officer to have survived the battle on the island, and he later authored a book entitled The Battle for Okinawa.
..

U.S. forces suffered their highest-ever casualty rate for combat stress reaction during the entire war, at 48%, with some 14,000 soldiers retired due to nervous breakdown.
..

This was also the first battle in the war in which surrendering Japanese were made into POWs by the thousands. Many of the Japanese prisoners were native Okinawans who had been impressed into the Army shortly before the battle and were less imbued with the Japanese Army's no-surrender doctrine.[16] When the American forces occupied the island, the Japanese took Okinawan clothing to avoid capture and the Okinawans came to the Americans' aid by offering a simple way to detect Japanese in hiding. The Okinawan language differs greatly from the Japanese language; with Americans at their sides, Okinawans would give directions to people in the local language, and those who did not understand were considered Japanese in hiding who were then captured.
..

Ninety percent of the buildings on the island were completely destroyed, and the lush tropical landscape was turned into "a vast field of mud, lead, decay and maggots."[27]

The military value of Okinawa "exceeded all hope". Okinawa provided a fleet anchorage, troop staging areas, and airfields in close proximity to Japan. [..]

Ironically

Some military historians believe that Okinawa led directly to the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as a means of avoiding the planned ground invasion of the Japanese mainland. A prominent holder of this view is Victor Davis Hanson, who states it explicitly in his book Ripples of Battle:

"...because the Japanese on Okinawa, including native Okinawans, were so fierce in their defense (even when cut off, and without supplies), and because casualties were so appalling, many American strategists looked for an alternative means to subdue mainland Japan, other than a direct invasion. This means presented itself, with the advent of atomic bombs, which worked admirably in convincing the Japanese to sue for peace, without American casualties. Ironically, the American conventional fire-bombing of major Japanese cities (which had been going on for months before Okinawa) was far more effective at killing civilians than the atomic bombs and, had the Americans simply continued, or expanded this, the Japanese would likely have surrendered anyway. Nevertheless, the bombs were a powerful symbolic display of American power, and the Japanese capitulated, obviating the need for an invasion of the home islands."

The war's end is a large subject on its own, still controversial, and on a side note, Japan still has a hard time even educating its young about WWII.

There is ongoing major disagreement between Okinawa's local government and Japan's national government over the role of the Japanese military in civilian mass suicides during the battle. In March 2007, the national Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) advised textbook publishers to reword descriptions that the embattled Imperial Japanese Army forced civilians to kill themselves in the war so they would not be taken prisoner by the U.S. military. MEXT preferred descriptions that just say that civilians received hand grenades from the Japanese military.

This move sparked widespread protests among the Okinawans. In June 2007, the Okinawa Prefectoral Assembly adopted a resolution stating, "We strongly call on the (national) government to retract the instruction and to immediately restore the description in the textbooks so the truth of the Battle of Okinawa will be handed down correctly and a tragic war will never happen again."[31]

On September 29, 2007, about 110,000 people held the biggest political rally in the history of Okinawa to demand that MEXT retract its order to textbook publishers on revising the account of the civilian suicides. The resolution stated: "It is an undeniable fact that the 'multiple suicides' would not have occurred without the involvement of the Japanese military and any deletion of or revision to (the descriptions) is a denial and distortion of the many testimonies by those people who survived the incidents."[32]

On December 26, 2007, MEXT partially admitted the role of the Japanese military in civilian mass suicides.[33] The ministry's Textbook Authorization Council allowed the publishers to reinstate the reference that civilians "were forced into mass suicides by the Japanese military," on condition it is placed in sufficient context. [..]

Wiki for the 'short' form on these matters. Military History Quarterly also had a long article about it in, IIRC, the late '90s. My bolds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_campaign

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truk_Lagoon

sp

The Japanese experience in China in the 30s is another example of what not to do, for so many reasons. Lessons that seem worthy of being ignored by some who perhaps feel they are in posession of a kind of exceptional ability or exceptional problem.

I dislike being in kabul because of the illusion of security. In Kandahar at least I know where I stand.

Japan's back was broken by targeted attacks on its merchant fleet, not by the two atomic bombs. It was controversial then, and remains so. It is far from a settled matter by those who still have to make such decisions.

JakeTheTall wrote:

What exactly does victory in Afghanistan look like again ?

An opium trade that doesn't fill Taliban coffers.

JakeTheTall wrote:

I mean...doesn't that article say that America is feeding / maintaining corruption in Afghanistan ?  Which is in turn undermining the Afghanistani government's legitimacy ?  And the goal of NATO in Afghanistan is to create enough security for a non-corrupt, effective government to form ?

Any Afghan government that enables certain interests to remain in place, will be considered legitimate.

JakeTheTall wrote:

Legitimate to Pashtuns and Tajiks and Hazara and Uzbek ?

Wha? Who? Wut now?

This is a very depressing statistic:

Troops lingering in Korea and Germany don't represent a success. Both presences are the result of a much larger failure that has continued to be expensive. One might hope for better results in Afghanistan.