Celebrating Hiroshima

Serves him right for not checking his privelege.

Packard has demonstrated a thorough inability to understand Wordforge. It's because he's Austrian.

I'll still spit on a Jap, but somehow it isn't the same as when it is done on the Surrender Deck of the USS Missouri. This is one of a couple days that I miss living in Hawaii.

A searing hot flash accompanied the light that blasted me. For a second I dimly saw it burn the girls standing in front of the cave. They appeared as bowling pins, falling in all directions, screaming and slapping at their burning school uniforms. I saw nothing for a while after that.

Immediately, a powerful wind struck me. It propelled me farther into the cave; then in an instant it threw me out the front entrance. I guess the shockwave hit the back of the cavern and bounced. It took me with it and others who had sought refuge in the shelter. We came tumbling out onto the ground.

What a terrible feeling! I could see nothing. My hands and face singed, intense pain gripped my body. I tried to walk a little and stumbled over a fallen tree. I lay there, not knowing for sure where I was or whether something else might happen to me.

When my senses, including my sight, began returning, I heard crying from the girls in front of the shelter. All, except one, were now standing and blowing on their skin. Looking at the one lying down, I saw her leg twisted at a crazy angle. To this day, we don't know how it became broken. The face and hands of the other girls quickly turned bright red. I guess my being partially inside the cave provided some protection because my stinging began to disappear before long.

We told Haruko, the girl with the broken leg, to lie still; we would go for help. Fires started all around us. Flames leaped from paper and wood scraps, some from collapsed structures. Thick smoke and dust filled the air. The fires gave the only real illumination. Even the noontime sunlight, filtering through the clouds, darkened. The word I kept hearing the girls say, jigoku, means hell. That's the closest I ever want to come to jigoku.

'Let's go back to the school. It's only a couple hundred meters,' one of the classmates suggested. We traveled slowly because each step caused pain. Our thoughts were that a bomb must have gone off near the shelter and burned a short distance around us. We didn't even dream what devastation covered our entire city.

The route to the school seemed strangely flat and empty. Someone asked, 'Weren't there houses here when we came to the shelter?' The whole world appeared so surreal we just accepted that structures could disappear off the face of the earth. We were living a terrible nightmare.

My classmate Fumiko scampered about 50 meters ahead of us. When I looked up to see why she was calling, I saw her pointing to a large form on the ground.

'Look over there,' she shouted. 'It has escaped from the zoo. It's an alligator.' It lay in our path to the school, so we approached with caution. Fumiko found a rock.

She drew back the rock above her head as she approached the creature. Then, Fumiko froze in her tracks, screaming hysterically. I ran to her side. The face looking up at us from the crawling creature was human. The shrieking in my ear kept me from hearing what the face was trying to say. I could just see it pleading for something — probably water. No clothes or hair were visible, just large, gray scalelike burns covering its head and body. The skin around its eyes had burned away, leaving the eyeballs, huge and terrifying. Whether male or female I never found out.
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There's no doubt that it was a terrible thing for people to go through.

I'll put their suffering right on the same shelf that contains the suffering of the Korean women kidnapped and raped by the Japanese, the prisoners of war summarily executed with no just cause, the soldiers of the Bataan Death March, and the Rape of Nanking (and the rest of China).

Yeah, war is hell, it's far better not to get involved with one.

Also, see sig:

You're off by more than an order of magnitude. About 70,000 killed instantly/immediately, and another 50,000 or so died from effects in the following months.

I don't celebrate this day. The human cost was very high; the suffering inflicted on Japanese civilians was almost beyond imagination. But the bombs helped bring a speedy end to a very, very bloody war, and brought the ruthless, fanatical power that started the war to its knees.

May nuclear weapons never be used in anger again.

Thank God that the twin atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put a very swift stop to all of that horror.

I'd offer Detroit, but it it already looks like the victim of a Nazi air raid.

ETA: Fuck Ansyc, he made the same joke earlier.

...and gave us Godzilla.

No, no, no. Idaho is a beautiful place, we just need to liquidate the people who live there, who are knob jobs anyway.

And yet, I don't think he even likes kangaroos.

Did he also fail art school? That would explain much.

You're welcome. Glad to be of service.​

You should save the Pearl Harbor jokes for 12/7 and while you're at it, work up material for 2/13 (Dresden).

Didn't you learn anything from WarGames? Las Vegas & Seattle are first out of the gate.

This is pretty funny...

I shall commemorate Pearl Harbor this December 7 by eating Spaghetti-Os.

The example I raise when people talk of how evuuul the A-bombs were, is the Tokyo raids that were happening. A single raid earlier in the year burned out 15 square miles of Tokyo, killed 150,000, and left a million homeless. Basically 5 times the damage and 3X casualties of Hiroshima.



The raid used 800 B-29s (costing $639,188 each) with 10 crew each, risking 8,000 airmen.
Logistically, using three airplanes and one bomb per raid, risking only 30 lives, made pretty damn good sense to the US army.

Realistically, those two atomic raids each did slightly less physical damage than a conventional maximum-effort raid, so complaining about the bombs being too destructive is ridiculous.

I plan to celebrate Pearl Harbour by giving the other half a pearl necklace whilst in the bath.

Dresden is obviously going to be a BBQ. Of course, had it been Frankfurt that had been carpet bombed my choice of what to barbecue would've picked itself...

The economics of modern (or otherwise) warfare is an interesting topic. No one is complaining about fission/fusion bombs being too destructive: war is war.

See? That's funny.

That is only so if one accepts the "conventional" raids as being entirely reasonable.

Given the nationalist attitude of Japan at the time, and their complete mindfucked attitude to anything not Japanese, breaking Japan was entirely reasonable.

I dread to imagine what would've festered there had the war had simply stopped at curtailing expansionism, I don't think it is too great a stretch to imagine an Imperial Japan thinking nuclear war just a great idea if they got to burn the others guys to the bedrock first. An entire strata of Jack D Rippers. You don't give that mindset a chance to grow, you pour enough weedkiller on it to drown a forest.

Hey, Imperial Japan: Don't start none, won't be none.

(to steal a gem from Ramen...)

"I HAD to get it on, man."

The Japanese have tended to believe that the U.S. was at least partially responsible by interferring in their war with China and trying to destroy their economy with the oil and steel embargo.

I consider that somewhat legitimate. We were partly responsible for intervening in their aggressive war against China. Of course, had they not invaded China, there would have been no oil embbargo. So, basically, still their fault. Add in that they then fought the war with us in a way that made anything short of total US victory a win for Japan, and it becomes easy to see why we ended up destroying so many civilian population centers.