Ok, time for my every 5 year post from experience. While stationed in South Korea in 1972 and talking with an elderly Korean man that had been held as a laborer in Japan, I asked about the war and the discussion led to the two atomic bombs. He asked me “why did you stop at two?” Not my position but an interesting perspective.
Even to this day, no love lost between Koreans and Japanese.
well i am sure you get where he was coming from. :)
Two were all we had at the time. I’m sure the Koreans didn’t mind us nuking the Japs after how they were treated.
The answer was that was all the appropriate fissile material we had at that moment. The Trinity test bomb, Little Boy (Hiroshima) and Fat Man (Nagasaki) were it for another month or two. Two was all it took to get to unconditional surrender.
Listening to the stories of those who lived in that era, I have no doubts that Truman would have been impeached had the bombs not been dropped in favor of a land invasion.
In anticipation of a land invasion, the War Department placed an order for 500,000 Purple Hearts. They are still drawing from that inventory today.
My wife and I continue to disagree over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I argue it was necessary to end the war as quickly as possible...and my father was in training for the invasion of Japan.
We were prepared to keep building and dropping atomic bombs on Japan until they surrendered.
After the second Atomic bomb Japan surrendered.
I can remember the neighbors gathering around a Boston newspaper that had a photo of the explosion.
Atomic was not in anyone's vocabulary, and the power of the bomb was expressed in tons of TNT going off at the same time.
The Atomic bomb was kept such a secret nobody knew what to make of it.
There was no sympathy for the Japanese, even if we had to obliterate Japan by continued Atomic bombings. -Tom