Thread: Pearl Harbor Day

  1. #1
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Posts
    9,607

    Pearl Harbor Day

    Just wanted to take the time to pay my respects to all those who paid the ultimate price for serving their country on this day in 1941 at Pearl Harbor. They were never warned but they never faltered. That day forever changed America.

    I tip my hat to the greatest generation. May we learn from their bravery and courage.

    Text and audio of the FDR speech after the bombing:
    http://www.radiochemistry.org/histor...r_infamy.shtml
    Last edited by VirtualAce; 12-07-2009 at 12:28 AM.

  2. #2
    Malum in se abachler's Avatar
    Join Date
    Apr 2007
    Posts
    3,195
    Yes, I celebrate this day by hanging festive pictures around the house

  3. #3
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Posts
    9,607
    I used to have an uncle by marriage that was at Pearl Harbor. He suffered burns over 60% of his body but somehow lived through it. I can't imagine what it would have been like.

  4. #4
    Malum in se abachler's Avatar
    Join Date
    Apr 2007
    Posts
    3,195
    Quote Originally Posted by Bubba View Post
    I used to have an uncle by marriage that was at Pearl Harbor. He suffered burns over 60% of his body but somehow lived through it. I can't imagine what it would have been like.
    Yeah back then they still did manual surgical debridement of burns, so the survival rate was higher than it is now, discounting the effects of better antibiotics we have now. The method I've seen used now is just plain barbaric and leads to increased shock and scaring just because the doctors are too lazy or insurance won't pay for full surgical debriding. I'm sure either way it sucks. My late grandfather was in the infantry in europe. My late great uncle was also in the European campaign, but on the german side.
    Last edited by abachler; 12-07-2009 at 08:02 AM.

  5. #5
    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jul 2008
    Location
    segmentation fault
    Posts
    8,300
    Quote Originally Posted by abachler View Post
    Yes, I celebrate this day by hanging festive pictures around the house
    I used to think Hiroshima was an insanely nasty thing to do (pick a civillian target for your first demo).

    I guess it is, but recently I read a book partially set in China during WWII. I had never heard how the Japanese were almost as nice to the Chinese as the Germans (who helped them) were to gypsies and Jews. Except the Chinese had their own cities, which for pretty much the entire five years the Japanese had complete air superiority, I think, and they would run ridiculous mass bombing runs constantly -- eg, non-stop multiple bomber wings for 150 hours straight on a single city. They were so intense thousands of people died of suffocation and starvation in air raid shelters in ChuangKing.

    This continued right up until the day the Japanese surrendered, so needless to say people literally came cheering out of the Chinese air raid shelters, or what was left of them, etc. Of course, that's not really the fault of people living in Hiroshima, but I guess this is typical military activity -- despite rhetoric to the contrary, it seems to me they are all much more willing and eager to create massive civilian casualties than they are to actually engage with each other, which tends to wait until the battleground is cleared (ie, all the civilians are dead or ran away).
    C programming resources:
    GNU C Function and Macro Index -- glibc reference manual
    The C Book -- nice online learner guide
    Current ISO draft standard
    CCAN -- new CPAN like open source library repository
    3 (different) GNU debugger tutorials: #1 -- #2 -- #3
    cpwiki -- our wiki on sourceforge

  6. #6
    Malum in se abachler's Avatar
    Join Date
    Apr 2007
    Posts
    3,195
    Quote Originally Posted by MK27 View Post
    I used to think Hiroshima was an insanely nasty thing to do (pick a civillian target for your first demo).
    The bombing of Hiroshima was not a 'demo'. It was done to end the war and save lives on both sides. Had we not bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is estimated that the war would have dragged on fro another 2 years, and we would have had to take the Japanese mainland house by house. The public mind has a tendency to forget the realities of a war, and to romanticize, demonize or marginalize every event that occurred.

    Horror and mortal terror are your friends. Mourn not the thousands that died at Hiroshima, instead be thankful for the millions that did not die during Operation Downfall.
    Last edited by abachler; 12-07-2009 at 08:53 AM.

  7. #7
    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jul 2008
    Location
    segmentation fault
    Posts
    8,300
    Quote Originally Posted by abachler View Post
    The bombing of Hiroshima was not a 'demo'. It was done to end the war and save lives on both sides.
    It was a demonstration, the purpose of the demonstration was to end the war. There was no other point in destroying Hiroshima, which accomplished no strategic goals at all.

    So my point was not about the use of the weapon, it was about the choice of targets. Doubtless this was just the easiest one, which is very cowardly -- it had no military value, and neither did Nagasaki. In fact, Hiroshima had suffered very little up to that point in the war, because it was not a target. It is as if they said, "Well, lets just pick a nice civilian town that hasn't been bombed much and level it."

    I'm sure they could have demonstrated the power of the weapon on any number of more strategic targets. As I said, armies practice double-speak: they will say their first priority is to protect civilian life, but in reality civilians usually get shot first. Since WWI, the ratio of civilian to military casualites in wars everywhere -- regardless of which nationality the combatants are -- has steadily and drastically increased. I believe this is also considered true of history leading up to WWI.

    In other words, as technology and "the art of war" have improved, armies everywhere have only gotten better at killing civilians and sparing themselves.
    C programming resources:
    GNU C Function and Macro Index -- glibc reference manual
    The C Book -- nice online learner guide
    Current ISO draft standard
    CCAN -- new CPAN like open source library repository
    3 (different) GNU debugger tutorials: #1 -- #2 -- #3
    cpwiki -- our wiki on sourceforge

  8. #8
    The larch
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Posts
    3,573
    What I find disturbing is celebrating the act itself.

    The bombing of Hiroshima was not a 'demo'. It was done to end the war and save lives on both sides. Had we not bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is estimated that the war would have dragged on fro another 2 years, and we would have had to take the Japanese mainland house by house.
    Unlike the question of climate change, I suspect there is no scientific consensus in this.
    I might be wrong.

    Thank you, anon. You sure know how to recognize different types of trees from quite a long way away.
    Quoted more than 1000 times (I hope).

  9. #9
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Location
    Ireland
    Posts
    8,446
    Quote Originally Posted by abachler View Post
    The bombing of Hiroshima was not a 'demo'. It was done to end the war and save lives on both sides.
    That's one version of this historical event.
    The other quite popular too and supported by an equally impressive number of historians and WWII specialists was that it was a 'demo'.

    Take your pick.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  10. #10
    C++ Witch laserlight's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Location
    Singapore
    Posts
    28,412
    Quote Originally Posted by Mario F.
    The other quite popular too and supported by an equally impressive number of historians and WWII specialists was that it was a 'demo'.
    I know a Japanese history professor whose opinion is that it was a 'war crime'. On the other hand, as a U.S. citizen with a professional interest in modern Japan, he probably has a hard time being perfectly objective about the issue.
    Quote Originally Posted by Bjarne Stroustrup (2000-10-14)
    I get maybe two dozen requests for help with some sort of programming or design problem every day. Most have more sense than to send me hundreds of lines of code. If they do, I ask them to find the smallest example that exhibits the problem and send me that. Mostly, they then find the error themselves. "Finding the smallest program that demonstrates the error" is a powerful debugging tool.
    Look up a C++ Reference and learn How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

  11. #11
    Registered User
    Join Date
    Sep 2004
    Location
    California
    Posts
    3,268
    A lot of people died from the bombing of Hiroshima. What most people don't realize was that during the time period of 1937-1945, the Japanese killed over 20 million Chinese people (according to wikipedia). That means an average of 7,000 people killed per day. At that rate, if the bomb had not been dropped on Hiroshima, it would have taken the Japanese 14 days to kill as many Chinese people as were killed in Hiroshima. People who claim that the atomic bomb didn't save lives must not put much stock in the lives of the Chinese people.
    bit∙hub [bit-huhb] n. A source and destination for information.

  12. #12
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Location
    Ireland
    Posts
    8,446
    Quote Originally Posted by bithub View Post
    At that rate, if the bomb had not been dropped on Hiroshima, it would have taken the Japanese 14 days to kill as many Chinese people as were killed in Hiroshima. People who claim that the atomic bomb didn't save lives must not put much stock in the lives of the Chinese people.
    ermm... read about the Second Sino-Japanese War. By the time the bombs were dropped, it had been already 3 years since the Japanese territorial cleansing in China was over. Starting in 1942-43 Japan was mostly holding territory in mainland China and could never again progress any further until the war was over in 1945.

    And to add to that, in a desperate attempt to secure what remaining Chinese territory Japan still had, they changed politics and tried to institute a series of friendly puppet regimes, starting in 1944 if memory serves me right.

    Quote Originally Posted by laserlight View Post
    I know a Japanese history professor whose opinion is that it was a 'war crime'. On the other hand, as a U.S. citizen with a professional interest in modern Japan, he probably has a hard time being perfectly objective about the issue.
    I've read about similar positions, including notable American historians. But I think that's an unfair statement.

    Although the Hage convention in effect at WWII did include the notion of War Crimes and the two bombings could fall in that stipulation (for instance, among the Germany War Crimes accusations and subsequent sentence were the destruction of Warsaw or the Guernica Bombings), the actual situation of the war was critic in 1945.

    I naturally don't support the idea the bombings were a demo. It's nonsense. But I don't support the idea either that they were the only way the war could have ended when it did. Instead I support the idea the nuclear bombings were a a war-time military act against the enemy that wasn't properly pondered. The bombings lacked judgment.
    Last edited by Mario F.; 12-07-2009 at 12:36 PM.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  13. #13
    The larch
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Posts
    3,573
    A lot of people died from the bombing of Hiroshima. What most people don't realize was that during the time period of 1937-1945, the Japanese killed over 20 million Chinese people (according to wikipedia).
    It may have been a necessary evil, but it still feels somewhat morally suspicious to be proud of the evil act itself.

    Besides, I rather doubt the sufferings of the Chinese people where was a major consideration in the decision. Such things are used later to justify oneself.

    I'd rather think they wanted the war to be over and to go home / test out a big bomb / show muscle towards Soviet Union (or whatever, I don't think those considerations necessarily exclude each other).
    I might be wrong.

    Thank you, anon. You sure know how to recognize different types of trees from quite a long way away.
    Quoted more than 1000 times (I hope).

  14. #14
    Registered User
    Join Date
    Sep 2004
    Location
    California
    Posts
    3,268
    Quote Originally Posted by Mario F. View Post
    ermm... read about the Second Sino-Japanese War. By the time the bombs were dropped, it had been already 3 years since the Japanese territorial cleansing in China was over. Starting in 1942-43 Japan was mostly holding territory in mainland China and could never again progress any further until the war was over in 1945.

    And to add to that, in a desperate attempt to secure what remaining Chinese territory Japan still had, they changed politics and tried to institute a series of friendly puppet regimes, starting in 1944 if memory serves me right.
    I'm at work, so I can't do much reading. A quick look shows me that in 1944 the Japanese invaded the Chinese cities of Hunan, Henan, and Guangxi in their largest offensive since the war began. The next year in 1945, the Chinese military took back 2 of those cities.

    Plus there is this little tid-bit:
    Historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta reports that a "Three Alls Policy" (Sankō Sakusen) was implemented in China from 1942 to 1945 and was in itself responsible for the deaths of "more than 2.7 million" Chinese civilians. This scorched earth strategy, sanctioned by Hirohito himself, directed Japanese forces to "Kill All, Burn All, and Loot All."
    So yeah, I'm gonna say that you're wrong.

    Quote Originally Posted by anon
    It may have been a necessary evil, but it still feels somewhat morally suspicious to be proud of the evil act itself.
    "proud" is the wrong word (at least for me). I simply look at it as a horrible (but 100% necessary) act that occurred.

    Quote Originally Posted by anon
    Besides, I rather doubt the sufferings of the Chinese people where was a major consideration in the decision. Such things are used later to justify oneself.
    Now that's just pure speculation.
    bit∙hub [bit-huhb] n. A source and destination for information.

  15. #15
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Location
    Ireland
    Posts
    8,446
    Quote Originally Posted by bithub View Post
    So yeah, I'm gonna say that you're wrong.
    Maybe you'll change your opinion when you inform yourself better about the Japanese genocide in mainland China. The dates, the places, the numbers.

    Meanwhile, for fun I'll leave you with the question: Were the Amrican bombs dropped to stop the genocide of Chinese civilians? If you think not, stop using this argument.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

Popular pages Recent additions subscribe to a feed

Similar Threads

  1. New Monthly Contest!
    By PJYelton in forum Contests Board
    Replies: 50
    Last Post: 03-22-2005, 08:27 PM
  2. Pearl
    By TrollKing in forum Linux Programming
    Replies: 5
    Last Post: 06-13-2002, 10:11 PM
  3. Pearl Harbor and the atomic bombs
    By loobian in forum A Brief History of Cprogramming.com
    Replies: 54
    Last Post: 12-28-2001, 04:23 PM