The atomic bombs certainly saved the lives of tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees. One of them, Louis Zamperini, the Olympic athlete who was held in a Japanese prison camp after being shot down, wrote that he and his colleagues would not have survived another winter in Japan if the war had continued.
The people who write this tripe are 78 years removed from stepping off a Higgins boat under fire…
My Dad went ashore in Luzon the same time as MacArthur, and was transferred to a Seabee unit. They were building repair depots, pontoon bridges, and dry docks as fast as possible - they all expected to be going to Japan within the next 9-12 months.
He was training to invade Japan when the first A-bomb was dropped.
He was completely thrilled about the atomic bomb!
My own impression is that US military and political leaders feared that Japan and/or Germany might have built several nuclear weapons and would use them against the USA mainland via submarine or other secret methods.
Then why did it take two bombs for them to surrender?
Bill Whittle did the best rebuttal on POS websites like "Stark Realities" and people like Brian McGlinchey, and the execrable and non-funny Jon Stewart (whose asinine commentary led Bill Whittle to make this rebuttal) both birds of a Leftist feather.
Bill Whittle made this 15 minute "FireWall" video which definitively rebuts these jackasses who pop up every single year on August 6th.
Everyone I know who has seen this regards it as the last word in defense of dropping the nuclear weapons on the Japanese.
LINK: Bill Whittle Jon Stewart, War Criminals & The True Story of the Atomic Bombs
There is nothing to be 'proud' of that we had to use those weapons on a vicious enemy, but in Bill Whittle's brilliantly done defense, there is a grim acceptance that it was war, and what needed to be done.
And it also rebuts the "Oh, they were going to surrender anyway" douchebags.
I am no longer a fan of Harry Truman, but he made absolutely the correct decision to use these weapons.
As for the quotes in the stupid revisionist opinion piece, I suggest people shouldn't get too hung up on them.
Regarding those quotes in the article from "Stark Realities" from the military leaders, it is known that many of them, after the fact, did not embrace using it because it wholly changed the character of war from a 1945 perspective (their perspective at the time). I have read good deal on many of these military men, and in the biographies, it is not hard to find statements where they distance themselves from the use of nuclear weapons. In light of this, I fully expect people cherry picking these kinds of quotes from nearly all of them.
Watch the video. It is well constructed, gives point-by-point rebuttals to all the Leftist clap-trap we have heard since 1945 regarding the use of these weapons, and is entertaining in his disembowelment of them to boot.
“...The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all...”
The battle for Japan would have been house to house and it would have taken a terrible toll of American lives. They had been fed lies about Americans killing women and children, raping their women as a means of defeating the nation. They were ready to fight to the bitter end.
My cousin was a marine in one of the divisions waiting for the order to invade. He and the others had already met with the chaplain and written wills.
Hiroshima, I believe, was the center of the Japanese atomic bomb program.
Unbelievable. Literally.
Unconditional Surrender was the only acceptable way for that war to end & that was not likely to happen without Japan being totally defeated.
The bombings could have been easily avoided... by a Japanese surrender.
Nonsense
Yes the bomb could have not been dropped, but it was.
If it wasn’t, the post-WW2 world would have been much different because the US wouldn’t have ended the war on its terms but accepting the terms that the Russians negotiated because Russia was steaming through Manchuria with a million man army and the US was getting ground up in Okinawa and needed to move troops from Europe to the Pacific to have enough forces to sustain expected casualties from a mainland assault.
FDR had the gall to die in April 1945, before the Trinity test. Truman didn’t even have full understanding of the Manhattan project or its readiness until assuming office and he had to look like a strong war leader around Stalin almost immediately.
If Truman didn’t end the war as quickly as possible, he would be seen as weak against Stalin and Churchill, and if didn’t use the bomb, his other option was to commit a million US troops to be eaten up by the Japanese in a full invasion after the horrors of Okinawa.
Truman was thrust in charge of a government nearly at the end of a world war, which spent all of the war developing this terrible new weapon for exactly the type of mission it eventually was used for.
All of this second guessing and “we didn’t need to drop the bomb” stuff is great monday-morning quarterbacking, but it is also greatly oversimplifying history in a way that, amazingly, is making America look like bad guys and the Soviets look like the good guys.
If the soviets dictated the terms of peace in Japan, all of asia would be communist by the 1960s and the Soviets would still have gotten the bomb.
This is a serious historical error. It should read:
...after upwards of 210,000 people — disproportionately women, children, LGBTQs, persons of color, trans womyn and men, and historically otherwise disadvantaged persons and also elderly — were killed in the two cities.
Utterly stupid. Pack of lies. We took 27,000 casualties at Iwo Jima. We took 50,000 more on Okinawa.
Bet none of the guys who were going to land and fight on the home islands, sail around them for another year, or fly above them agreed with this.
Go over these opinions. Ike, spent his time in Europe. What the hell did he know about Japan? Ever hear Joe Stillwell or USMC Vandegriff opining about the ETO?
LeMay? Angry that the bomb was seen as the death blow rather than his fire raids.
Also, all the others made these statements in the 1950s when the order of the day was “make nice with Japan because of Korea and Cold War” so there was some ass kissing going on.
As for Leahy; Truman’s Memoirs: Year of Decisions, Leahy was skeptical about the atomic bomb, saying: “That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”
Lots of post war agendas happening. But no fighting men thought any such thing. Between Iwo Jima and Okinawa we lost 20,000 dead, and 55,000 wounded. Jap resistance was increasing. Geezer officers born in the late 1800s had the luxury to think that way. Men facing death, or another year in the Pacific for a starvation of Japan blockaid didn’t.
This is childish America hate and comes up every year.
Generals don’t always say the brightest things. Chesty Puller once said, to a reporter, that he’d trade a deuce and a half full of dog tags for a MOH. Ouch!
The foreign ministry who wanted to surrender and was already quietly drafting a new constitution for the country was effectively neutered in the government control of the war. They were using back channels that they had before the war to try to stop the war before the nuke strikes. The Imperial Army was controlling the war and the emperor. They were not going to give up. I would not want to drop them but Truman did not have the needed info not to deploy the weapon. 20/20 sight after the war had all these folks regretting the action afterwards as this is a difficult actions to choose and they wanted to distance themselves from the action and justify the decision by separating themselves from it.
This book made me think a lot about the war.
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-pacific-war-1931-1945—a-critical-perspective-on-japans-role-in-world-war-ii-the-pantheon-asia-library_saburo-ienaga/290593/item/2466340/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=high_vol_midlist_standard_shopping_customer_acquisition&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=666157863328&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIiZzI9sfJgAMVcYVaBR2u4gwCEAQYBiABEgLPHPD_BwE#idiq=2466340&edition=2384829
Saburo ienaga’s book paints a different picture from these folks. Japan was willing to go down if the GoJ was not shocked. The civilian deaths would be great as the soldiers would have massacred thier own people . I assume the marines would be assaulting the shoreline of Hokkaido after killing thier way through the rest of the country.
Pure BS. Maybe the idiots shouldn’t have “needlessly” bombed Pearl Harbor.
This article is bullsh!t. The invasion of the main Japanese island would have been horribly brutal to both sides.
It is telling that, out of those 45 goals, these are the first three of them:
There is a reason that this revisionist crap has been around almost from the moment those bombs finished exploding, and these three reasons shed some light on that, IMO.