Operation Meetinghouse - The Most Destructive Bombing Raid in History

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The Operations Room

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Love all their videos.

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100,000 Japanese civilians were killed

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war is hell.. but man that's a lot of innocents killed

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war is hell.. but man that's a lot of innocents killed

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Sad, many dont realize the atomic bombs SAVED hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of Japanese lives.

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many dont realize the atomic bombs SAVED hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of Japanese lives.

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likewise, many don't realize the Japanese had approached the soviets offering to surrender before the atom bombs were dropped.

no reason for Americans to invade the mainland either; they were out of oil, fuel and food. your quote is revisionist history imo, justifying the mass murder of civilians and showboating to the soviets.

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Sad, many dont realize the atomic bombs SAVED hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of Japanese lives.

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That’s the story that we tell at least.

These are the results of a Gallup poll conducted immediately after Little Boy and Fat Man and before the official surrender of Japan.

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likewise, many don't realize the Japanese had approached the soviets offering to surrender before the atom bombs were dropped.

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Their terms were a nonstarter, for one, no American occupation, they’d hold their own war crimes trials, no disarmament, etc.

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no reason for Americans to invade the mainland either; they were out of oil, fuel and food.

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You are making the mistake of looking at this matter with the benefit of hindsight. You have to consider things that were known at the time, not later. In the summer of 1945, US intelligence estimates were the Japanese could hold out for anywhere from 3 months to perhaps as much as a year from a food standpoint. As for fuel, that was not as much of a factor as you think because the nature of how Japanese forces fought defensive battles, which by mid1945 they’d been doing for over a year. Namely, they fought from hardened fixed positions that were pre-provisioned. Thy were expected not to hold out indefinitely, only until their provisions ran out, simply put. Japan wasn’t going to resupply them anyway, thus their need for fuel was not what you think it was. Japan was making preparations to go down in history’s biggest blaze of glory, going so far as to arm a train school children to fight with bamboo spears. They knew they could not win, but they didn’t care. They were going to fight to the bitter end.


There were three options available to the US and its allies in late summer 1945 to end the war:

1. Invade, resulting in over a million American casualties plus multiple times that Japanese. This option was estimated to take at least 3-6 months to end the war, possibly more.

2. Blockade, resulting in few American casualties, but millions of dead Japanese from disease and starvation. This option was estimated to take 6 months to a year to end the war.

3. Drop the bomb, resulting in perhaps about a dozen or so American casualties at most and around 100K Japanese. This option was estimated to take days to end the war.

Everyone focuses now on the casualty estimate of each option. But what they fail to take into consideration is the time aspect of each option. This is a mistake.

For starters, it wasn’t just Japanese and Americans dying as a result of the war. Every day across Asia, thousands of innocent civilians were dying as well in Japanese occupied areas. I’m talking about places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Java, Formosa, Korea, and huge swaths of China. It’s estimated the monthly death toll in these areas was in the tens of thousands from disease and starvation. The most humane thing for America to do was to end the war as quickly as possible.

That’s what the bomb did, it ended the war far quicker than either invasion or blockade. And it killed far fewer people than either of the other two options would have.

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your quote is revisionist history imo, justifying the mass murder of civilians and showboating to the soviets.

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The only revisionist history being pushed here is being done so by you. If you look at the situation in 1945, both on the American and Japanese side, it’s quite clear the best (and most humane) option to end the war available to Truman was to drop the bomb.

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war is hell.. but man that's a lot of innocents killed

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The older I get, the more I question and criticize the fire bombing of cities like Dresden and Tokyo.

Maybe I’m getting old and weak, but maybe I’m getting wiser. I don’t know.

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Maybe I’m getting old and weak, but maybe I’m getting wiser. I don’t know.

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Or maybe you’ve forgotten who started the Second World War and the mass atrocities both Germany and Japan committed against mankind.

A lot of people don't realize that by that time most of Japan's heavy industry had been destroyed, so they had moved to a cottage industry, lots of people with machine tools, drill presses, sheet metal tools and stuff etc.Inside their houses prodoucing war armaments.