Ask anyone that survived the invasion of Okinawa about the wisdom of dropping the bomb.
I asked him once about the use of the bomb knowing what he would say--he agreed with it. In fact he wanted the US to use the bomb on North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
If a million Americans and millions of Japanese had died because Truman refused to use the bomb, and the public learned that it existed, what do you think Americans would have thought of his refusal?
My Dad was on the tip of the spear heading for Japan. Dad was on the USS Wadsworth DD516, the Wadsworth entered the war starting w Bougainvillea, 7 Battle Stars and the Wadsworth was awarded the PUC for their Picket Line duties at Okinawa.
Dad was a quiet man, never spoke of the war until someone made negative comments about usage of the nukes or Prez Truman allowing their use. That’s where the tip of the spear comment came from.
Dad’s opinion was that Harry Truman saved his life bec the Wadsworth was in the mouth of the tiger, he saw the devastation of Japanese suicide planes on picket line ships. Ships limping to rear areas or being towed off the picket line knowing Okinawa was just the opening act to what awaited the Navy when they invaded Japan’s home islands.
He was not in Tokyo Bay for the surrender, the Wadsworth was outside the Bay in case the Japanese surrender was a ruse. Once the surrender was in place, the Wadsworth went to Sasebo for 4 months. But enroute to Sasebo they emptied cargo storerooms by dumping war-time parts and supplies into the ocean. When they ported in Sasebo, they brought on wood to make beds in the storerooms for walking wounded prisoners of war for return to AU and NZ. Those on stretchers, they would put on the decks to transport to the hospital ships in the harbor, then the hospital ships proceed to AU or NZ.
Dad saw Nagasaki 3 weeks after the bomb dropped. For a couple days, the ship would drive a Deuce/2 truck to and threw Nagasaki to “see what the new bomb could do”.
No one in the family would have ever known he was in Nagasaki. But I worked in a nuke power plant and just a passing comment about how little radiation I got during our 2 or 3rd refueling outage, compared to when I replaced pressurizer heaters on our two plants on the my ship. That’s when he asked me how much radiation he prob got when he drove thru Nagasaki n told my brother, Mom and I how he saw it.
His description of the drive to n thru Nagasaki is prob a several paragraph story itself.