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.
My late father-in-law served in the 4th. Marine Division and was wounded on Iwo Jima. He got the ‘’million dollar wound’’-a leg wound and it got him off that horrible island. he came home, met and married my late mother-in-law and they had four girls, one of them is my wife.
Those bombs saved his life and because of that I have a wife.