Mr. Kincaid has responded to Dr. Ernest Engles’ article “As Big A Liar As John Pope”.<\/p>\n
In case people have missed it, as the discussion forum is not a heavily frequented location, I reproduce it here.<\/p>\n
As Big A Liar As John Pope
\nNo doubt the use of nuclear weapons against Japan was a terrible decision that cost many thousands of lives. However, in Mr. Engels’ writing and in the available historical record I’ve seen no compelling evidence that Japan was on the verge of surrender prior to the dropping of the atomic bombs. Yes, their country was virtually flattened, but the Japanese military was still fighting. <\/p>\n
In fact, at that time it was popularly believed that Japan, the country of hideous atrocities against China; kamikaze attacks and ritual haru kiri; and the perpetrators of the Bataan Death March, were a nation of fanatics who would fight down to the last person. In comparison, the Germans seemed rather reasonable. Either a further loss of life or a drastic new weapon system would be necessary to stop the Japanese.<\/p>\n
The US and allies, on the other hand, were wearing down in morale and in finances after a huge expenditure of lives and materiel. Given the circumstances I can’t blame the US for using the weapons of mass destruction. In spite of the consequently huge death toll, I can think of a few things the US has done more recently that were far less justified than ending the war in this manner. Respectfully, I must disagree with Mr. Engels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mr. Kincaid has responded to Dr. Ernest Engles’ article “As Big A Liar As John Pope”.\r\n\r\nIn case people have missed it, as the discussion forum is not a heavily frequented location, I reproduce it here.","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-tuppenceworthie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}