A lot of us baby boomers wouldn’t be here today if we had been forced to invade Japan. The nuke saved countless American and Japanese lives.
If he was wrong to do it (he wasn’t), how would we further punish ourselves as a society/nation? Is there a limit to white guilt? Maybe not.
Dropping the bombs was the right thing to do. It ended the war and saved millions of lives.
Bump
Interesting visual.
To give some perspective, the number killed by the Bomb was roughly 0.25% of the total number of lives lost due to World War II. And it ended that war.
It basically allowed us to avoid dividing Japan with the Soviets like it happened in Germany. Was very economical in Russian lives too.
This is not withstanding the dastardly unit731, which, had we known about it, would have given immediate attention to developing and using nukes on Japan.
Hiroshima was a significant military target, not something that was chosen by happenstance.
As noted in several other historical post and coments, the Jap war machine instilled a level of fear and fanaticism amongst the civilian population, who would have fought and died to preserve their emperor. Additionally, after the US planes were detected by the Jap radar, the planes were dismissed as a recon flight and not eorth wasting aircraft fuel over.
Thank God for The Bomb!
Not mention is that post war information shows that the US Army underestimated the strength of the defenses on Kyushu. The landing there would have been a victory in the sense that the US could force itself ashore, but the cost would have been more horrific than estimated
This is only new, news, debatable or even interesting to anyone who is ignorant of it and that would be poorly educated children of today. Like Josh, the author.
The negative views all come from the Left and ignore the (a) predictable consequences of an all out invasion of the main island of Japan and (b) the very high likelihood that that is what the Japanese military would have otherwise required of the U.S., in order for the U.S. to have achieved a Japanese surrender. That all out invasion would have included tons of conventional bombing all over Japan, to “soften it up”, producing more total deaths and destruction nationwide than that produced at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
My father was 17 when the war ended, turning 18 in November. Through high school ROTC he had 200 hours in gliders and 100 hours in powered aircraft. Next stop would have been Japan for him. Instead next stop was engineering school.
Edward Luttwak, the American political scientist who has studied the history of this decision was on Steve Bannon’s podcast this morning and had an interesting comment. The decision to actually use the bomb on a city in Japan was approved by a panel of military and civilian experts well in advance of Truman’s final approval and before it had even been tested.
None of the panel was briefed on or had any awareness of the effects that the radiation would have on the population. They all believed it would just explode but not generate further casualties from fallout.
The argument that Japan would have surrendered without the bomb is false. The Japanese Army was itching to fight us. Throughout WWII we had faced mostly Japanese Navy ground forces in the island campaigns and some Japanese Army units but the bulk of the Japanese Army sought direct battle. They believed that in order to “lose honorably” to us they had to take millions of casualties amongst the Japanese civilians. But in fact there would have been no civilians.
The Japanese were mobilizing their entire population. Women with spears. Children. Civilians who would allow our forces to pass by and then engage in biological and chemical attacks. There were tons of of cheap wooden kamikaze planes planned that didn’t show up on radar. Plus loads of kamikaze boats. The fighting and tenacity of the Japanese would have been worse even than at Okinawa and Iwo Jima. A landing may very well have failed.
Hirohito did acknowledge that the A-bombs were the impetus that finally got him to accept surrender. A million weasel words won’t change the fact that the A-bombs were necessary. It’s easy to sit behind a desk smoking a pipe and talk about these things. None of the people who decry the bomb are in the demographic of those who would have had to storm the beaches. The lives of the farm boys and mechanics who fought the Japanese were just as important as the self-satisfied academics who condemn them. Actually the lives of those men are worth more than any pundit or professor.
I was around and sentient: it was a highly favored move by an overwhelming number of the American people at the time.
Nukes are a horrible weapon. Period.
But... Some times horror is exactly what it takes to end a war. You do not go into a fight with one hand tied behind your back. Especially against an enemy who knows no limits to what they would do to win. That is idiocy.
It was right then, and it could be argued that we should have probably used one or two more since then.
Until we come up with something equivalent, it will still be needed tomorrow as well.