Quote:
Originally Posted by Moontanman
should the US have dropped the bomb, Oh yes, should have waited a year, Oh no!
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When my family and I lived in Japan — quite near to Hiroshima, which we visited often — numerous local people we got to know (including a woman marked by burn scars from the bomb) went out of their way to express not only thankfulness that the war ended when it did but also the view that if atomic bombing was what it took then that was a tragic but necessary price — necessitated above all by the stubborn refusal of the Japanese military to face the reality of defeat and by the grip they had on political decision-making (even to the extent of an attempted coup to prevent the Emperor's surrender broadcast).
One example: One of our friends was the son of a man who had been recruited (or brainwashed, or dragooned) into becoming a kamikaze pilot — the war ended just before he was scheduled to fly off to his death, so our friend still had a father after the war.
Getting back to the relationship between the Pacific War and the Vietnam War: one fairly obvious link is that, whatever atrocities they also committed, the Japanese showed colonized Asiatic peoples that their one-time European masters could be defeated, and thereby strengthened the aspirations of colonized peoples for independence. The Vietnam war developed because of French insistence on trying to regain their pre-war colonial hold over "French Indo-China" — in contrast with the Dutch who albeit reluctantly withdrew from the "Dutch East Indies".
Arguably, if the Pacific War had gone on longer, the anti-Japanese forces led by Ho Chi Minh and Giap (and supported by the US) might have become so strong that the French would have been either deterred from attempting to regain the ascendant militarily, or would have been driven to defeat much earlier than 1954 — and perhaps even before the start of the Korean War, without which the US leadership might not have seen any necessity to take over from where the colonial French had failed.
Another dimension to this is that if the war against Japan had continued, not only would much of northern Japan probably have been occupied by the Red Army, but so too in all likelihood would the whole of the Korean peninsula. No divided Korea could have meant no Korean War. In turn, "no Korean War" would have allowed the US military stationed in Asia to revert even further into peacetime mode and become even more unfit for combat than were the first contingents of troops sent from occupied Japan to Korea. But this is all counterfactual speculation anyway, however interesting...
FWIW
satsumajin
