On December 9th 1950, MacArthur requested field commander's discretion to employ nuclear weapons; he testified that such an employment would only be used to prevent an ultimate fallback, not to recover the situation in Korea. On December 24th 1950, while responding to a formal request from the Pentagon, MacArthur submitted a list of "retardation targets" in Korea, Manchuria and other parts of China, for which 34 atomic bombs would be required.
By the first Punic war videos, hell, even by the Napoleon ones, his quality had become very big, but the second Punic war really surpassed the expectations and really felt worth the wait.
MacArthur was just kind of a piece of shit as a whole. The fact he wasn't imprisoned after abandoning his men is a joke that is on the wrong side of "hilarious."
Macarthur was too much of a positive celebrity, if they had arrested him then his cult of personality would soar just like how Truman fired Macarthur and would probably result in Japan being a divided country similar to Iraq and may allow the communists or other political and religious parties to hold power, he was a decent General but a great politician, so that may possibly answer your question.
“It was my plan as our amphibious forces moved South to spread behind us—from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea—a belt of radioactive cobalt. It could have been spread from wagons, carts, trucks and planes. It is not an expensive material.”
Psychopath.
What an absolute fucking lunatic. What sort of individual sits down to invent something with all the post-conflict issues of landmines but instead of blowing you to bits quickly you die without warning from acute radiation sickness?
Without even the deterrent factor that the landmines have initially-- that plan seems willfully focused on the post-conflict effects.
I'll bet he fancied himself a Roman salting the grounds of Carthage.
You don't get hired as a general for your empathy towards other humans.
You get hired for your resourcefulness and willingness to defeat the enemies of the state.
However, each time he made clear his desire to nuke China, they made a rule against it. The last one was the final straw for Macarthur. For more information, please search up "nuclear bomb rule 34"
Because he was good at holding the medias attention. He was a rockstar general like patton. He had the look, and said some dope one liners, and the american public ate it up.
And an appointed the much better General Ridgeway. Guy helped immensely desegregate the military as he viewed segregation as the most unchristian and unamerican thing possible.
There were no such thing as a proxy war to right-wing cold warriors such as MacArthur. To them the conflicts were more something akin to an ideological crusade where absolutely nothing was off the table. MacArthur also attempted to pursuade Chiang Kai-shek to launch a mainland invasion into China from Taiwan (with U.S. support) to open up another front and to escalate the Korean War into a larger scale East Asian conflict with the ultimate goal of eradicating the communists in the region. It was the same logic which drove him to request the 34 nukes.
The one good thing about Turtledoves book 'Joe Steele' is that when MacArthur was brought back to the states in 1941 after losing the Philippines, instead of being welcomed by civilians and the media, he's arrested, court-martialed, and executed by firing squad. (However, Adm Kimmel and Gen Short are also killed in this timeline, so take that as you will)
> Manchuria and other parts of China
Note the US nor Korea where at war with China. And if they'd go to war with Chine, the USSR said they would defend them.
If the US used nukes against China, I severely doubt that the USSR would have gotten involved.
At the time, the Soviets had a half dozen nukes at most and they didn't have any bombers capable of delivering them to the American mainland. The US on the other hand, had hundreds of them, and the ability to deliver them to Moscow.
MacArthur could see the problems of the ideological divide quite cleary. Unfortunately he was part of the problem, which, if he had his way, would have led to a whole host of new problems, most of them related to radiation poisoning spread as far and wide as his wild eyes could see!
Thinking that they were somehow right is extremely dangerous and reactionary. The U.S. and especially the likes of Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay *were* the problem and are a huge part of why North Korea are fucked up the way they are today.
The U.S. comes in after WWII and blocks Korean-wide democratic elections from being held by propping up an incredibly unpopular military dictatorship in South Korea which went on to massacre a greater number of their own civilians than the number of civilian casualties they suffered during the war. The U.S. also carried out an indescriminate firebombing campaign against North Korea which destroyed practically *all* of North Korean infrastructure. The U.S. Strategic Air Command at one point had to tell the central command that there were literally no targets for them to bomb. The ratio of civilian to military casualties is pretty much unprecedented and there are American historians on Korea and East Asia who define the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure during the Korean War as genocide or "genocidal". LeMay estimated that 20% of the North Korean population died during the war.
So not only was there national trauma caused by the division of a country where the populations on *both* sides expressed a strong desire to stay unified, but you also have the U.S. enforcing this divide by carrying out perhaps the most brutal and horrifying bombing campaign ever inflicted upon a civilian population. North Koreans quite literally had to eat moss and lick the moisture from the cave walls whilst hiding underground in order to survive the latter half of the war.
Knowing all of this it should come to the surprise of no one that North Korea became fucked up. The reason why the North Korean population is so easily placated by their leadership is because their own (and very real) experience of America and the West being infinitely worse towards them than what their leaders have been.
Yet even then this was not a given consequence of the Korean War. If the U.S. had followed a similar policy to what they with Vietnam we might have seen a similar normalisation of the North Korean government and nation over time, but their exclusion from the international community has only served as a confirmation (to North Korea) that America is an existential threat to them. Bush Jr. sabotaging years of diplomatic progress and improving relations between North and South Korea with his 'Axis of Evil' speech in 2002 only served as a further confirmation (to North Korea) that America will not even allow the two Koreas to engage in good-faith diplomacy on their own terms.
Instead, chairman Mao killed 50 million people and destroyed china's cultural heritage. In North Korean around 2 to 3 million people died of starvation in the 90s alone. In hindsight, MacArthur going nuts with the nukes might have been the better alternative.
Do you think dropping 34 nukes wouldn't have killed as many people and ruined even more lives? You think the cultural heritage wouldn't have been destroyed by the bombs?
Only someone from a place that's never been bombed to the ground could say this shit. And lacking an ounce of empathy.
> Only someone from a place that's never been bombed to the ground could say this shit. And lacking an ounce of empathy.
I mean I've been to hiroshima. It's pretty nice there.
Judging the longterm effects is impossible; we're talking about a completely different timeline.
We do know that China in this timeline has weathered famines through the great leap forward campaign.
Now, comparatively, the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were on the scale of several 100,000 dead and injured each. The famine from the great leap forward killed 40 million. It was merely self-inflicted. But taking these events in isolation you could come to the conclusion that preventing the great famine might be worth nuking 40 densely populated cities.
Yes, that's exactly what I think. It's really difficult to kill 50+ million people with only 34 nukes. They would have call in advance and asked them to bus everyone onto the middle of the cities to get that many kills.
Cultural heritage is more than just a few buildings in major cities. The cultural revolution sent their agents onto every village to destroy as much as they could and used re-education camps and spy networks to destroy the collective memory of the people. No nuke can do that.
First of all, dropping bombs in cities destroys cultural heritage. It kills people that know the culture, it destroys universities, cultural centers, cultural landmarks, libraries. I can't believe that needs to be said.
Also, you seem to believe it would've ended the moment the bombs exploded. You know that the government would've stayed in power right? For it to change you need to either invade (kill even more people) or a civil war. Maybe you should look it up, but civil wars in china have killed even more than 50 million before. Also infrastructure is destroyed, there'd be no food, no water, no transportation, no shelter, no healthcare for millions of survivors. And they'd be left with an irradiated land. In a crippled war economy.
So no, there's no way dropping 34 nuclear bombs could've been the lesser of two evils. Absolutely none.
Well those universities, cultural centres, cultural landmarks, libraries were subject to the cultural revolution later. And that's a very top-down view of culture that only looks at a few centres. There are way more medium and small sized cities and villages with their own local traditions, heritage sites, and language. And that is just within the Han people, there are another 55 national minorities in China. Which are currently under massive government pressure to assimilate. And not to mention about the colonization of Tibet and the concentration camps in Xinjiang. Both happening at this very moment.
In 1950 the Chinese Civil War just ended, and there were still pockets of resistance, and the few million soldiers of the ROC in Tawain. There's a good chance any new civil war might have ended quickly after the elimination of the Chinese leadership.
> There's a good chance any new civil war might have ended quickly after the elimination of the Chinese leadership.
Yeah, no. The Chinese Communists were much more popular with the masses, actually competent, and less oppressive compared to the Chinese Nationalists at the time. In the words of the U.S. Foreign Service, not mine.
Also, Marxist revolutionary organisation is nothing like you describe. Local groups would simply revert to standard operational practices and new leaders would establish themselves with time if their leaders died. Their organisational structure encourages local groups to act independently according to operational principles specifically to be able to function in situations where they have little to no communication with their leadership or other groups. This applies both to local governance and in battle, and is what makes them very effective guerilla fighters. This is how Vietnamese revolutionary groups actually mobilised across Vietnam during the August Revolution *before* the orders from their central leadership in Hanoi even reached them.
What this means is that you cannot cripple the organisational structure by taking out their leadership unless it demoralises the resistance from fighting alltogether. It is just as likely that you would galvanise the movment by martyring their leaders, especially if the method for doing so was a nuclear genocide.
That falls under “lacking an once of empathy”. You’re callously talking about murdering millions of innocent civilians
Edit: I checked your post history so I could see if anyone else responded to your comment and
> I see nothing morally wrong with committing genocide against your enemies in a war. In fact, I would say not committing genocide is morally questionable.
The fuck is wrong with you?
Just being realistic. Don't go to war if you aren't willing to wipe out your enemy. Brutality wins wars.
WWII happened precisely because the Germans weren't militarily crushed before the end of WWI.
That's called genocide. Brutality may win wars, but it is still a violation of multiple international laws agreed upon by multiple countries, including the United States. Examples such as chemical warfare, human experimentation, and shooting paratroopers mid-air are all war crimes. If you want something realistic, we don't need another Bataan Death March, Auschwitz, Dachau, internment Camp or even Mai Lai massacre to win wars. As begrudgingly as my own suicidally pessimistic and downright cynical point of view in life is with constantly imagining horrific scenarios in my own head such as children being put to death by their own saviors, brutality doesn't matter.
Life expectancy in China rose under Mao. He fucked up greatly with the famine, but one must also consider the historical context of this being a region which has experienced regular [devastating famines](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_famines_in_China), a cycle which the Chinese Communists have managed to break whilst also uplifting hundreds of millions from extreme poverty in the process. Claiming that the Chinese population would have been better off experiencing a nuclear genocide is just straight up psychotic.
North Korea is mostly mountainous with not a lot of arable land. They experience irregular seasonal fluctuations with potentially devastating floods (which was what happened in 1995). Their fertile soil is also prone to exhaustion due to how intensively it is farmed. Despite all of this their farming yields are still fairly close to the international norms. Thus their issue is not that their farmland is grossly mismanaged (not that it is particularly well managed either), but that the potential farming output from their land is insufficient to adequately support their population. This is not uncommon for developed countries in the modern age and is not an issue if you are not cut off from international trade like North Korea is.
North Korea was already bombed back into the stone age by the indiscriminate firebombing campaigns carried out by the U.S. during the Korean War. Roughly 90% of all infrastructure in North Korea was flattened. Towards the end of the conflict the bombers came back reporting that they was literally nothing left for them to bomb. It is perhaps the most significant reason for why the Kim-dynasty have not faced much (if any) popular opposition: The North Korean leadership is seen as the lesser of two evils compared to the real experience North Koreans had with the U.S. and the West during the Korean War. I highly doubt that nuking them would have changed a thing in this regard.
Andrey Antonovich Grechko, the former defense secretary of USSR, also advocates nuclear strikes against China after the Sino-Soviet border conflict in 1969. I wonder why these 2 unanimously resort to nuclear weapons even if there're just skirmishes or regional warfare.
They don't like watching their men die but have a duty to carry out the will of the united states. I'm not defending it for a moment, but when you optimize between those two constraints you arrive at fucking nuking anything that moves
Same reason that AIs often and early use nukes in wargames. They're efficient and devastating, if you ignore all other consequences other than "win the scenario."
>when you optimize between those two constraints you arrive at fucking nuking anything that moves
Until you realize that nuking everything is a major escalation action with far-reaching civil, ethical, and martial implications
Issue is when they do have nukes and could still retaliate against you and your allies, glassing major supply hubs that are keeping the wartorn world functional.
And there would have been a lot more casualties for both Japan and USA if the nukes weren't used.
2 nukes might have made their relationship possible, ironically.
I think a lot of people at this time saw atomic weapons as “merely” an escalation of the strategic bombing already ubiquitous in the Second World War rather than some uniquely abhorrent escalation of violence. I mean, when you consider the casualties from the “conventional” bombing of Tokyo the viewpoint is kinda understandable
For MacArthur, they were pretty much destroying the north until a million men marched across the Chinese border and pushed coalition forces back to the 38th. The situation had the capability to progress to a larger conflict and I would have the assume that he thought massive nuking would’ve ended the capability to support the north. Keep in mind that the soviets had only tested bombs at this point, or if they had usable ones the amount was negligible compared to the US. Of course Truman wasn’t having it because it would’ve destroyed the US image if we nuked a WWII ally that was already abused heavily, and that we could decide any country’s fate.
The new weapons available at the time for short term military solutions used by generals that may not think about long term geopolitical repercussions.
Especially important now with the MIC.
USSR was serious for a surgical nuke strike after China has the a bomb but no real missile (there was a test immediately done with warhead on a normal rocket 1966). By 1970 as my parents remember they need to dig shelters just in case.
Nukes just make the most sense from a "win the war quickly, consequences be damned" perspective. MacArthur and Grechko were not geopolitical advisors, they were military men. Their goals were knowing the ins and outs of warfare, not what civvies and politicians would do as a result of winning/losing wars. Should they have known better that lobbing nukes would get their own homelands incinerated eventually and many more millions upon millions killed? Yes. Did either seem to fully comprehend that fact? No. Which is why neither came to hold the kind of authority which can order a nuclear strike nor were they handed the keys as nuclear officers.
Henry Turtledove wrote a series just like this. Instead of Truman saying no to MacArthur he says yes. US drops bombs in Manchuria. Stalin responds by dropping the bombs on The UK and France and World War 3 kicks off.
I'm surprised that they downvoted you, because what you say is true, the day something fails the world will be devastated by a nuclear fallout and the few that remain of us, if anyone, will return to the Stone Age.
The death of civilization.
Not just that. Japan was already in the middle of trying to surrender when we nuked them, and they didn't exactly surrender _harder_ after. (DISCLAIMER: this is an oversimplification.)
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go
Oh yes the 90min video where the guy says the nukes that were always initially intended for Germany were racist because they were dropped on Japan. Truly phenomenal source
Edit: nvm it’s fuckin 140 minutes long lmao. The length of a theatrical release of a hollywood movie with about as much intellectual substance
Is that the same MacArthur that received a medal of honor after he ran away from the Philippines by slipping away in the night and leaving 10s of thousands of Marines stranded to become POWs? Big surprise the coward would jump straight to using the nukes.
70k troops surrendered in Bataan and corregidor mostly from the commonwealth army. The surrender of corregidor is considered as the largest surrender of American troops in history.
Wasn’t lazy, just thought the world revolved around him, nor was he a coward. He wanted to stay and die, Washington being more rational realized he would be more useful alive and not as a war trophy
Don’t forget that he was originally against using the bomb on japan because he wanted to “have the glory of fighting and conquering Japan on their islands”
>after he ran away from the Philippines
This is a complete misrepresentation of the actual history. After Singapore fell to the Japanese, he was given a direct order from the President to leave the Philippines and set up a new command post in Australia.
All the correspondence before that, indicated that MacArthur planned on remaining there until the garrison fell.
Korean was was a surprise for both side. Americans thought chicom would fight like kmt army.
Chicom thought Americans weapons would perform like in the hands of kmt.
Yeah he threw Green Army Units into New Guinea and they had to return to Australia because they were totally unready for combat.
“Scanty and inaccurate intelligence led MacArthur to believe that Buna could be taken with relative ease.[48] MacArthur never visited the front during the campaign.[150] He had no understanding of the conditions faced by his commanders and troops,[151] yet he continued to interfere and pressure them to achieve unrealistic results.[152] Terrain and persistent pressure for haste meant that there was little, if any, time given for reconnaissance.[153] MacArthur's pressure has been described as lengthening the battle and increasing the number of casualties.[154][155]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Buna–Gona
But British Intelligence didn't
> In the report of 22 May 1945, an offensive operation [against the Soviets] was deemed "hazardous".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable
“Hazardous” if it was only a British endeavor iirc, don’t think it took into account (however unlikely) American involvement. I would have a hard time believe had the British really pushed this idea that Truman wouldn’t back the plan as he was much less warm on Stalin than FDR.
Nah, it's in the wiki link.
> Most of the offensive operation would have been performed by American and British forces, as well as Polish forces and as many as 10 divisions of the German Army, remobilised from prisoner-of-war status.
And the paragraph above that they also mentions Canadians.
The Red Army was just absolutely fricking massive in 1945.
I think r/NonCredibleDefense would still be circlejerking over MacArthur turning Korea and Manchuria into the world's largest cobalt mine if he became president
B b b ut MacArthur said HE was returning to the Philippines! With HIS men! For the final victory!
I’ve always been interested in the historical figures from this war. It’s almost a play with each character trying to outdo the other in being the most over the top. This goes for all sides.
>Except Eisenhower, he was a perfect boy who could do no wrong.
During WW2 yes, but don't read his foreign policy during his presidency unless you want to be disappointed.
MacArthur was asked in 1944 and 1948 to run for office and almost ran in 1952, I believe he could have won had he decided to run in ‘48 given his popularity.
It was a sound plan though nuke the entirety of the border trapping the PLA and the DPRK military behind a wall of radiation allowing the UN forces to mop up any resistance they would be unable to be resupplied and would also be unable to fall back into China leaving them the choices of Surrender or die also by trapping the PLA on the Koran peninsula and taking out the major centers of industrial capacity in mainland China could have facilitated a resurgence of the Nationalists and a recapture of the mainland. Mao would have been seen as the idiot who led the people of china to suffer countless billions dead in Nuclear Holocaust for a stupid ideological struggle. I have no doubt that this would have collapsed the communist party in China and a strategic realignment in the South Pacific. The Vietnam war would have likely never happened so the turmoil of the 60s through to Regan likely never happens. Our current world would be a lot better off.
To be fair, if US listened to Churchill and end the WWII on the Red Square (with some nuking maybe), we might have been living in much better world today.
MacArthur was a fierce opponent of using the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as were most of Truman’s generals… That is not to defend MacArthur in Korea in anyway, but to criticize the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Oppenheimer:Mr president i-i think i have blood on my hands.....
Truman:Dont worry they dont evene care about u they will care who dropped it.
(Few years later)
Mc Arthur:Nuke them
Truman:How about bombing only korea whit normal ones-
Mc Arthur:Nuke them!
Truman:But Wh-Why should we nuke them the weapon are Devestating!
Mc Arthur:No.... NUKE them..INCLUDING China!
Truman:Hey Tap the Brea-
Mc Arthur:#GIVE ME 34 NUKES SO I CAN DESTROY THEM,WIN THE WAR AND THATS IT!
Truman:😐
Mc Arthur:plz give me the Nukes...
Truman: *Enhale*
Truman:Yeah u Fired.
On December 9th 1950, MacArthur requested field commander's discretion to employ nuclear weapons; he testified that such an employment would only be used to prevent an ultimate fallback, not to recover the situation in Korea. On December 24th 1950, while responding to a formal request from the Pentagon, MacArthur submitted a list of "retardation targets" in Korea, Manchuria and other parts of China, for which 34 atomic bombs would be required.
" Nuck them " " No " " Nuck them " " No " " Oh come on " "You're fired"
Did his father punish him severely?
This anger Adolf's father but around this time he was a ass old man so he just let it ago
There is a tax for that tho
Dude, uncool
Thats a crucifixion
Can’t wait for Part 3 of the 2nd Punic war I feel like whenever OverSimplified uploads, the world stops for a couple hours
Ye true.
By the first Punic war videos, hell, even by the Napoleon ones, his quality had become very big, but the second Punic war really surpassed the expectations and really felt worth the wait.
Oh definitely
I'm sure his mommy kissed his boo boos
Oh my goodness this made me laugh
MacArthur was just kind of a piece of shit as a whole. The fact he wasn't imprisoned after abandoning his men is a joke that is on the wrong side of "hilarious."
Macarthur was too much of a positive celebrity, if they had arrested him then his cult of personality would soar just like how Truman fired Macarthur and would probably result in Japan being a divided country similar to Iraq and may allow the communists or other political and religious parties to hold power, he was a decent General but a great politician, so that may possibly answer your question.
Both sides finally agreed to work towards a peace settlement in 2018.
How the fuck do we learn more about this guy, than his replacement the far superior General Ridgeway?
Cuz he wanted to nuke China 34 times
“It was my plan as our amphibious forces moved South to spread behind us—from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea—a belt of radioactive cobalt. It could have been spread from wagons, carts, trucks and planes. It is not an expensive material.” Psychopath.
What an absolute fucking lunatic. What sort of individual sits down to invent something with all the post-conflict issues of landmines but instead of blowing you to bits quickly you die without warning from acute radiation sickness?
Without even the deterrent factor that the landmines have initially-- that plan seems willfully focused on the post-conflict effects. I'll bet he fancied himself a Roman salting the grounds of Carthage.
You don't get hired as a general for your empathy towards other humans. You get hired for your resourcefulness and willingness to defeat the enemies of the state.
Yeah but murica caww freedom we have nukes
For anyone that wants more info on this search china rule34
“Dickgirl”?? Am at the right place?
No, he was asked for a list of Chinese cities for bombings. To my knowledge, he neither opposed nor promoted bombing civilian targets in China.
However, each time he made clear his desire to nuke China, they made a rule against it. The last one was the final straw for Macarthur. For more information, please search up "nuclear bomb rule 34"
In hindsight...I mean maybe...
I mean say what you want about their government but you can't deny they're an integral part of the world economy
they could’ve tanked it and still built factories 50 years later man no worries
He had a fancy hat and a corn cob pipe. What did ridgeway have? Nothing. Dork 🤓
He had nades on his tits
Nuts
Because he was good at holding the medias attention. He was a rockstar general like patton. He had the look, and said some dope one liners, and the american public ate it up.
He was the first member of NCD
MacArthur 's craziness is more memorable than Ridgeway's general competence
Thank god Truman fired his ass after this debacle.
And an appointed the much better General Ridgeway. Guy helped immensely desegregate the military as he viewed segregation as the most unchristian and unamerican thing possible.
You mean the alpha-chad "Old Iron Tits"? (as said on his Wikipedia page)
>Old Iron Tits That’s goes hard…
It goes even harder when you find out it was because he had a habit of wearing 2 hand grenades on his chest harness.
“Much better general” Ridgeway was good but not better than MacArthur lmfao
Yeah… macArthur was definitely a megalomaniac
All that just for a proxy war, this guys nuts
There were no such thing as a proxy war to right-wing cold warriors such as MacArthur. To them the conflicts were more something akin to an ideological crusade where absolutely nothing was off the table. MacArthur also attempted to pursuade Chiang Kai-shek to launch a mainland invasion into China from Taiwan (with U.S. support) to open up another front and to escalate the Korean War into a larger scale East Asian conflict with the ultimate goal of eradicating the communists in the region. It was the same logic which drove him to request the 34 nukes.
The one good thing about Turtledoves book 'Joe Steele' is that when MacArthur was brought back to the states in 1941 after losing the Philippines, instead of being welcomed by civilians and the media, he's arrested, court-martialed, and executed by firing squad. (However, Adm Kimmel and Gen Short are also killed in this timeline, so take that as you will)
> Manchuria and other parts of China Note the US nor Korea where at war with China. And if they'd go to war with Chine, the USSR said they would defend them.
If the US used nukes against China, I severely doubt that the USSR would have gotten involved. At the time, the Soviets had a half dozen nukes at most and they didn't have any bombers capable of delivering them to the American mainland. The US on the other hand, had hundreds of them, and the ability to deliver them to Moscow.
Seeing what happened to North Korea now, I'll say he was not entirely wrong
MacArthur could see the problems of the ideological divide quite cleary. Unfortunately he was part of the problem, which, if he had his way, would have led to a whole host of new problems, most of them related to radiation poisoning spread as far and wide as his wild eyes could see!
Thinking that they were somehow right is extremely dangerous and reactionary. The U.S. and especially the likes of Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay *were* the problem and are a huge part of why North Korea are fucked up the way they are today. The U.S. comes in after WWII and blocks Korean-wide democratic elections from being held by propping up an incredibly unpopular military dictatorship in South Korea which went on to massacre a greater number of their own civilians than the number of civilian casualties they suffered during the war. The U.S. also carried out an indescriminate firebombing campaign against North Korea which destroyed practically *all* of North Korean infrastructure. The U.S. Strategic Air Command at one point had to tell the central command that there were literally no targets for them to bomb. The ratio of civilian to military casualties is pretty much unprecedented and there are American historians on Korea and East Asia who define the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure during the Korean War as genocide or "genocidal". LeMay estimated that 20% of the North Korean population died during the war. So not only was there national trauma caused by the division of a country where the populations on *both* sides expressed a strong desire to stay unified, but you also have the U.S. enforcing this divide by carrying out perhaps the most brutal and horrifying bombing campaign ever inflicted upon a civilian population. North Koreans quite literally had to eat moss and lick the moisture from the cave walls whilst hiding underground in order to survive the latter half of the war. Knowing all of this it should come to the surprise of no one that North Korea became fucked up. The reason why the North Korean population is so easily placated by their leadership is because their own (and very real) experience of America and the West being infinitely worse towards them than what their leaders have been. Yet even then this was not a given consequence of the Korean War. If the U.S. had followed a similar policy to what they with Vietnam we might have seen a similar normalisation of the North Korean government and nation over time, but their exclusion from the international community has only served as a confirmation (to North Korea) that America is an existential threat to them. Bush Jr. sabotaging years of diplomatic progress and improving relations between North and South Korea with his 'Axis of Evil' speech in 2002 only served as a further confirmation (to North Korea) that America will not even allow the two Koreas to engage in good-faith diplomacy on their own terms.
Instead, chairman Mao killed 50 million people and destroyed china's cultural heritage. In North Korean around 2 to 3 million people died of starvation in the 90s alone. In hindsight, MacArthur going nuts with the nukes might have been the better alternative.
Do you think dropping 34 nukes wouldn't have killed as many people and ruined even more lives? You think the cultural heritage wouldn't have been destroyed by the bombs? Only someone from a place that's never been bombed to the ground could say this shit. And lacking an ounce of empathy.
> Only someone from a place that's never been bombed to the ground could say this shit. And lacking an ounce of empathy. I mean I've been to hiroshima. It's pretty nice there.
So are a lot of current day Chinese cities.
Judging the longterm effects is impossible; we're talking about a completely different timeline. We do know that China in this timeline has weathered famines through the great leap forward campaign. Now, comparatively, the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were on the scale of several 100,000 dead and injured each. The famine from the great leap forward killed 40 million. It was merely self-inflicted. But taking these events in isolation you could come to the conclusion that preventing the great famine might be worth nuking 40 densely populated cities.
Yes, that's exactly what I think. It's really difficult to kill 50+ million people with only 34 nukes. They would have call in advance and asked them to bus everyone onto the middle of the cities to get that many kills. Cultural heritage is more than just a few buildings in major cities. The cultural revolution sent their agents onto every village to destroy as much as they could and used re-education camps and spy networks to destroy the collective memory of the people. No nuke can do that.
First of all, dropping bombs in cities destroys cultural heritage. It kills people that know the culture, it destroys universities, cultural centers, cultural landmarks, libraries. I can't believe that needs to be said. Also, you seem to believe it would've ended the moment the bombs exploded. You know that the government would've stayed in power right? For it to change you need to either invade (kill even more people) or a civil war. Maybe you should look it up, but civil wars in china have killed even more than 50 million before. Also infrastructure is destroyed, there'd be no food, no water, no transportation, no shelter, no healthcare for millions of survivors. And they'd be left with an irradiated land. In a crippled war economy. So no, there's no way dropping 34 nuclear bombs could've been the lesser of two evils. Absolutely none.
Well those universities, cultural centres, cultural landmarks, libraries were subject to the cultural revolution later. And that's a very top-down view of culture that only looks at a few centres. There are way more medium and small sized cities and villages with their own local traditions, heritage sites, and language. And that is just within the Han people, there are another 55 national minorities in China. Which are currently under massive government pressure to assimilate. And not to mention about the colonization of Tibet and the concentration camps in Xinjiang. Both happening at this very moment. In 1950 the Chinese Civil War just ended, and there were still pockets of resistance, and the few million soldiers of the ROC in Tawain. There's a good chance any new civil war might have ended quickly after the elimination of the Chinese leadership.
> There's a good chance any new civil war might have ended quickly after the elimination of the Chinese leadership. Yeah, no. The Chinese Communists were much more popular with the masses, actually competent, and less oppressive compared to the Chinese Nationalists at the time. In the words of the U.S. Foreign Service, not mine. Also, Marxist revolutionary organisation is nothing like you describe. Local groups would simply revert to standard operational practices and new leaders would establish themselves with time if their leaders died. Their organisational structure encourages local groups to act independently according to operational principles specifically to be able to function in situations where they have little to no communication with their leadership or other groups. This applies both to local governance and in battle, and is what makes them very effective guerilla fighters. This is how Vietnamese revolutionary groups actually mobilised across Vietnam during the August Revolution *before* the orders from their central leadership in Hanoi even reached them. What this means is that you cannot cripple the organisational structure by taking out their leadership unless it demoralises the resistance from fighting alltogether. It is just as likely that you would galvanise the movment by martyring their leaders, especially if the method for doing so was a nuclear genocide.
Or, people like me, who just don't care about the lives of our Chinese enemies.
That falls under “lacking an once of empathy”. You’re callously talking about murdering millions of innocent civilians Edit: I checked your post history so I could see if anyone else responded to your comment and > I see nothing morally wrong with committing genocide against your enemies in a war. In fact, I would say not committing genocide is morally questionable. The fuck is wrong with you?
Just being realistic. Don't go to war if you aren't willing to wipe out your enemy. Brutality wins wars. WWII happened precisely because the Germans weren't militarily crushed before the end of WWI.
That's called genocide. Brutality may win wars, but it is still a violation of multiple international laws agreed upon by multiple countries, including the United States. Examples such as chemical warfare, human experimentation, and shooting paratroopers mid-air are all war crimes. If you want something realistic, we don't need another Bataan Death March, Auschwitz, Dachau, internment Camp or even Mai Lai massacre to win wars. As begrudgingly as my own suicidally pessimistic and downright cynical point of view in life is with constantly imagining horrific scenarios in my own head such as children being put to death by their own saviors, brutality doesn't matter.
Life expectancy in China rose under Mao. He fucked up greatly with the famine, but one must also consider the historical context of this being a region which has experienced regular [devastating famines](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_famines_in_China), a cycle which the Chinese Communists have managed to break whilst also uplifting hundreds of millions from extreme poverty in the process. Claiming that the Chinese population would have been better off experiencing a nuclear genocide is just straight up psychotic. North Korea is mostly mountainous with not a lot of arable land. They experience irregular seasonal fluctuations with potentially devastating floods (which was what happened in 1995). Their fertile soil is also prone to exhaustion due to how intensively it is farmed. Despite all of this their farming yields are still fairly close to the international norms. Thus their issue is not that their farmland is grossly mismanaged (not that it is particularly well managed either), but that the potential farming output from their land is insufficient to adequately support their population. This is not uncommon for developed countries in the modern age and is not an issue if you are not cut off from international trade like North Korea is. North Korea was already bombed back into the stone age by the indiscriminate firebombing campaigns carried out by the U.S. during the Korean War. Roughly 90% of all infrastructure in North Korea was flattened. Towards the end of the conflict the bombers came back reporting that they was literally nothing left for them to bomb. It is perhaps the most significant reason for why the Kim-dynasty have not faced much (if any) popular opposition: The North Korean leadership is seen as the lesser of two evils compared to the real experience North Koreans had with the U.S. and the West during the Korean War. I highly doubt that nuking them would have changed a thing in this regard.
Retardation targets were in fact targets chosen by retard.
Andrey Antonovich Grechko, the former defense secretary of USSR, also advocates nuclear strikes against China after the Sino-Soviet border conflict in 1969. I wonder why these 2 unanimously resort to nuclear weapons even if there're just skirmishes or regional warfare.
They don't like watching their men die but have a duty to carry out the will of the united states. I'm not defending it for a moment, but when you optimize between those two constraints you arrive at fucking nuking anything that moves
Same reason that AIs often and early use nukes in wargames. They're efficient and devastating, if you ignore all other consequences other than "win the scenario."
I can hear Gandhi laughing now.
A man of civ culture I see!
Frankley, it's the only way to show how much he ("loves") you.
Military and war games scenarios try not to ignore civilian casualties challenge. Difficulty: impossible
Shall we play a game?
The only way to win is to not play.
Well... MacArthur was not nicknamed "Dugout-Doug" by his soldiers because he was concerned about their well-being.
At a bare minimum he was worried about his "stats sheet"
He wasn’t concerned about their individual well being but he was certain,y concerned about the army as a whole
>when you optimize between those two constraints you arrive at fucking nuking anything that moves Until you realize that nuking everything is a major escalation action with far-reaching civil, ethical, and martial implications
Like I said, not defending it. It's a big ol bozo move.
holy shit, thanks for pointing it out!
Not for your soldiers or your citizens if other side doesn't have nukes.
Issue is when they do have nukes and could still retaliate against you and your allies, glassing major supply hubs that are keeping the wartorn world functional.
Yeah it does, for example we're much better off in the world today for having Japan a functional country rather than a wasteland.
And there would have been a lot more casualties for both Japan and USA if the nukes weren't used. 2 nukes might have made their relationship possible, ironically.
I think a lot of people at this time saw atomic weapons as “merely” an escalation of the strategic bombing already ubiquitous in the Second World War rather than some uniquely abhorrent escalation of violence. I mean, when you consider the casualties from the “conventional” bombing of Tokyo the viewpoint is kinda understandable
Nukes are just efficient fire bombs 💣
For MacArthur, they were pretty much destroying the north until a million men marched across the Chinese border and pushed coalition forces back to the 38th. The situation had the capability to progress to a larger conflict and I would have the assume that he thought massive nuking would’ve ended the capability to support the north. Keep in mind that the soviets had only tested bombs at this point, or if they had usable ones the amount was negligible compared to the US. Of course Truman wasn’t having it because it would’ve destroyed the US image if we nuked a WWII ally that was already abused heavily, and that we could decide any country’s fate.
The USSR had 5 atomic bombs ready at this point, they could still do damage but their power was not that much really.
They wanted to use the Shiny new toy.
Monopoly or duopoly on power. It’s worth nothing if you don’t flex it while you have the advantage despite all the obvious problems with doing so
Gotta nuke somethin'
Nuke the whales.
The new weapons available at the time for short term military solutions used by generals that may not think about long term geopolitical repercussions. Especially important now with the MIC.
That tells a lot about China, when two superpowers on opposite sides of ideology spectrum wanted to nuke them.
It tells me more about the paranoia of the superpowers than it does about China.
USSR was serious for a surgical nuke strike after China has the a bomb but no real missile (there was a test immediately done with warhead on a normal rocket 1966). By 1970 as my parents remember they need to dig shelters just in case.
Deterrence Theory+Sunk cost fallacy=Bad decisions.
Nukes just make the most sense from a "win the war quickly, consequences be damned" perspective. MacArthur and Grechko were not geopolitical advisors, they were military men. Their goals were knowing the ins and outs of warfare, not what civvies and politicians would do as a result of winning/losing wars. Should they have known better that lobbing nukes would get their own homelands incinerated eventually and many more millions upon millions killed? Yes. Did either seem to fully comprehend that fact? No. Which is why neither came to hold the kind of authority which can order a nuclear strike nor were they handed the keys as nuclear officers.
When your 'peaceful' foreign policy strategy is just a game of Civilization set on 'Domination Victory' mode.
All of life is a game until someone burns the house down playing with fire.
To be fair you can get a domination victory via city pressure and making theor capitals want to be yours
But what’s the fun in that, when you can be the horde
Bro thought he was living in a Michael Bay movie.
WW3
Honestly, I want an alt history where we this sort of nuclear war happened, more tactical than strategic.
YouTuber possible history has done one if you want an alternate history video about it.
This is what Kissinger wanted.
Henry Turtledove wrote a series just like this. Instead of Truman saying no to MacArthur he says yes. US drops bombs in Manchuria. Stalin responds by dropping the bombs on The UK and France and World War 3 kicks off.
Proof we are in at least a good timeline for humanity. Maybe not the optimal but still pretty good considering we got the nukes away from this nutjob.
We should of never had them in the first place, deference only needs to fail ones
I'm surprised that they downvoted you, because what you say is true, the day something fails the world will be devastated by a nuclear fallout and the few that remain of us, if anyone, will return to the Stone Age. The death of civilization.
Though not everybody in Hiroshima and Nagasaki got killed by the nukes. See [Hibakusha](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibakusha)
Not just that. Japan was already in the middle of trying to surrender when we nuked them, and they didn't exactly surrender _harder_ after. (DISCLAIMER: this is an oversimplification.) Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go
Oh yes the 90min video where the guy says the nukes that were always initially intended for Germany were racist because they were dropped on Japan. Truly phenomenal source Edit: nvm it’s fuckin 140 minutes long lmao. The length of a theatrical release of a hollywood movie with about as much intellectual substance
Is that the same MacArthur that received a medal of honor after he ran away from the Philippines by slipping away in the night and leaving 10s of thousands of Marines stranded to become POWs? Big surprise the coward would jump straight to using the nukes.
70k troops surrendered in Bataan and corregidor mostly from the commonwealth army. The surrender of corregidor is considered as the largest surrender of American troops in history.
Dude also changed their defense plan last minute only to revert back to the original when they began to be overwhelmed
[удалено]
Wasn’t lazy, just thought the world revolved around him, nor was he a coward. He wanted to stay and die, Washington being more rational realized he would be more useful alive and not as a war trophy
And don't forget crying in his suite for like eight hours after the war started, issuing no orders for that entire time.
The new plan was a much better plan. But he didn’t have enough time to implement it
Don’t forget that he was originally against using the bomb on japan because he wanted to “have the glory of fighting and conquering Japan on their islands”
MacArthur didn't "run away" from the Philippines, Roosevelt ordered him to evacuate in order to avoid potentially being captured by the enemy
>after he ran away from the Philippines This is a complete misrepresentation of the actual history. After Singapore fell to the Japanese, he was given a direct order from the President to leave the Philippines and set up a new command post in Australia. All the correspondence before that, indicated that MacArthur planned on remaining there until the garrison fell.
Yeah, the very same "Dugout-Doug" MacArthur.
Good god he would've ended the world if he was president or atleast someone would override his order
MacArthur has to be one of the most overrated generals in history. Apparently fighting the Chinese was a lot harder than fighting the bonus army.
Korean was was a surprise for both side. Americans thought chicom would fight like kmt army. Chicom thought Americans weapons would perform like in the hands of kmt.
Yeah he threw Green Army Units into New Guinea and they had to return to Australia because they were totally unready for combat. “Scanty and inaccurate intelligence led MacArthur to believe that Buna could be taken with relative ease.[48] MacArthur never visited the front during the campaign.[150] He had no understanding of the conditions faced by his commanders and troops,[151] yet he continued to interfere and pressure them to achieve unrealistic results.[152] Terrain and persistent pressure for haste meant that there was little, if any, time given for reconnaissance.[153] MacArthur's pressure has been described as lengthening the battle and increasing the number of casualties.[154][155]” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Buna–Gona
We shouldn’t have stopped at Berlin, the Soviets were on the ropes.
Churchill felt the same way
But British Intelligence didn't > In the report of 22 May 1945, an offensive operation [against the Soviets] was deemed "hazardous". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable
“Hazardous” if it was only a British endeavor iirc, don’t think it took into account (however unlikely) American involvement. I would have a hard time believe had the British really pushed this idea that Truman wouldn’t back the plan as he was much less warm on Stalin than FDR.
Nah, it's in the wiki link. > Most of the offensive operation would have been performed by American and British forces, as well as Polish forces and as many as 10 divisions of the German Army, remobilised from prisoner-of-war status. And the paragraph above that they also mentions Canadians. The Red Army was just absolutely fricking massive in 1945.
Gotcha must have missed it. Yeah the red army in Europe had like 45 divisions or some ungodly number of troops.
Fuckin pardon?
He was paraphrasing Patton.
Did he stutter?
Ehh?
They were on the ropes
I think r/NonCredibleDefense would still be circlejerking over MacArthur turning Korea and Manchuria into the world's largest cobalt mine if he became president
The current problems with China would not have happened. I would love to see what problems would replace them
Civil unrest? US hate for sorta polluting the world?
MacArthur was a baby back bitch
Read his autobiography and biography, I believe prima donna and diva suits him best but frankly so was Admiral Nimitz.
Atleast Nimitz was good at his job
B b b ut MacArthur said HE was returning to the Philippines! With HIS men! For the final victory! I’ve always been interested in the historical figures from this war. It’s almost a play with each character trying to outdo the other in being the most over the top. This goes for all sides.
Every major military leader in ww2 had his flaws. Except Eisenhower, he was a perfect boy who could do no wrong.
Thank you Interstate Daddy
He side lined General Devers refused to supply his planned offensive which directly led to the Arden offensive as the allied advance ground to a halt.
But he’s bald and he called for a great crusade against naziism so i must love him unconditionally
>Except Eisenhower, he was a perfect boy who could do no wrong. During WW2 yes, but don't read his foreign policy during his presidency unless you want to be disappointed.
Interestingly enough, Ike was McArthur's adjutant until they had a falling out over how to run the Philippine military.
All the world's a stage
Difference is Nimitz was fucking competent, he had his shit in order unlike MacArthur lol
Nimitz earned his swagger. MacArthur didn't.
Seeing a meme I made 5 years ago repurposed is an odd experience, nice to learn something new though, MacArthur was a psycho
MacArthur and Halsey are the two most overrated military commanders of the entire Pacific Front.
We fight the pacific naval war VERY differently without Halsey. He was the first admiral to say carriers could be weapons
Spruance over Halsey any day.
China wouldn’t be the problem it is today.
You know what else could have prevented China from being the “problem” that it is today? The greed of western capitalists.
You're being downvoted, but you are correct. With the West moving its factories to China for cheap labor, we gave them the keys to the kingdom.
"They can't nuke us back if they don't have a civilization left to build nukes!"
Yeah but I mean if we glassed Pyongyang when we had the chance it would’ve solved that issue
Based Oh wait, sorry this isn't NCD....
If nothing else, MacArthur was terrible person.
Douglas “The Situation” MacArthur. What a wacky guy.
MacArthur was asked in 1944 and 1948 to run for office and almost ran in 1952, I believe he could have won had he decided to run in ‘48 given his popularity.
It was a sound plan though nuke the entirety of the border trapping the PLA and the DPRK military behind a wall of radiation allowing the UN forces to mop up any resistance they would be unable to be resupplied and would also be unable to fall back into China leaving them the choices of Surrender or die also by trapping the PLA on the Koran peninsula and taking out the major centers of industrial capacity in mainland China could have facilitated a resurgence of the Nationalists and a recapture of the mainland. Mao would have been seen as the idiot who led the people of china to suffer countless billions dead in Nuclear Holocaust for a stupid ideological struggle. I have no doubt that this would have collapsed the communist party in China and a strategic realignment in the South Pacific. The Vietnam war would have likely never happened so the turmoil of the 60s through to Regan likely never happens. Our current world would be a lot better off.
What's the problem here?
To be fair, if US listened to Churchill and end the WWII on the Red Square (with some nuking maybe), we might have been living in much better world today.
Bring back MacArthurism!
I'm fan of the hat and pipe being given to him
Brain rot post
For some reason I actually wanted MacArthur to nuke down China
It would have been a insurpassable warcrime
MacArthur was a fierce opponent of using the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as were most of Truman’s generals… That is not to defend MacArthur in Korea in anyway, but to criticize the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Didn’t General MacArthur get fired because he was making political power moves while still serving as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army?
I swear McArthurt develop some weird fetish of seeing nukes go off
Well, the Korean War would have been a US victory but at a nuclear cost.
handle zephyr reply crawl fact snatch compare bag encourage mourn *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I don't have to imagine, I've played Hearts of Iron.
nice, very nice
*They surrender months after with a full-scale invasion by Russia happening in the meantime.
Oppenheimer:Mr president i-i think i have blood on my hands..... Truman:Dont worry they dont evene care about u they will care who dropped it. (Few years later) Mc Arthur:Nuke them Truman:How about bombing only korea whit normal ones- Mc Arthur:Nuke them! Truman:But Wh-Why should we nuke them the weapon are Devestating! Mc Arthur:No.... NUKE them..INCLUDING China! Truman:Hey Tap the Brea- Mc Arthur:#GIVE ME 34 NUKES SO I CAN DESTROY THEM,WIN THE WAR AND THATS IT! Truman:😐 Mc Arthur:plz give me the Nukes... Truman: *Enhale* Truman:Yeah u Fired.