Did President Truman Ever Regret His Hiroshima Decision?

Newsweek ^ | Aug 05, 2020 | Greg Mitchell

[SeekAndFind]

Seventy-five years ago this week, President Harry S. Truman exulted when he heard the first report that the atomic bomb he had ordered dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, by a B-29 bomber, had exploded as planned and on target, most likely devastating most of the large city.

Truman was on the ocean, returning to Washington from the Potsdam Conference in Germany, where he had secured Joseph Stalin's promise to declare war on Japan around August 10. An article in the press the day after the first atomic attack depicted Truman, his voice "tense with excitement," personally informing his shipmates about the atomic attack. "The experiment," he announced, "has been an overwhelming success."

Missing from this account was Truman's burst of triumphalism when the news of the bombing first reached the ship: "This is the greatest thing in history!"

Truman's official announcement, released while he was still at sea, again showed pride in America's achievement. The atomic bomb, he declared, represented "a harnessing of the basic power of the universe." America had "won the greatest scientific gamble in history." And Japan had now been repaid for Pearl Harbor "manyfold."

From that moment on, Truman rarely (some would say, never) looked back from a different angle, inevitably responding to questions about ordering two bombs dropped over Japan—from the media or in sometimes hostile letters to him at the White House—by affirming that decision, or even with what we would now call "doubling down."

He said he "didn't have any doubt" about the wisdom of the decision—unlike those he pictured as "eggheads" or "Monday morning quarterbacks."

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TOPICS: History; Military/Veterans; Society
KEYWORDS: 100percentright; atomicbomb; goodcall; hiroshima; nagasaki; truman

[Vaduz]

Approximately 100,000 people died in the single devastating firebombing raid on Tokyo in March 1945, and more than 250,000 to 300,000 civilians died in total from conventional incendiary raids across Japan before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima

[Verginius Rufus]

The original date of publication was Aug. 5, 2020.

[mewzilla]

The Japanese refused to surrender after Operation Meetinghouse, other firebombings, after the bombing of Hiroshima.

They had Operation Ketsu-Go planned for a land invasion.

If Truman regretted that the Japanese placed so little value on human life, I don’t blame him.

If he regretted his decision to drop both bombs, why would he?

The Japanese made it necessary.

[P8riot]

[Georgia Girl 2]

Why post it now? 😣

[Captain Walker]

The really sketchy part of the use of the nuclear weapons was the careful targeting of cities that had no prior bombing attacks: it smells of using those cities as a testing ground complete with unwarned civilians rather than a target.

This sounds similar to the issues raised about the firebombing of Dresden.

Germans had actually been urging family members to Dresden in the belief that it would never be destroyed. (The Americans, it was explained to them, are simply too much into the arts to ever allow that city to be bombed.)

[DownInFlames]

Not one bit. Hammered em Harry was a very tough man.

[Wallace T.]

While the states of the former Confederacy, with the partial exception of Tennessee, were one party Democrat states between the end of Reconstruction and the 1970s, the state Democratic Parties had liberal, moderate, and conservative factions. A few of the conservative Democratic governors of Texas, particularly Coke Stevenson, were more conservative than George W. Bush, Rick Perry, and Greg Abbott. The Byrd political machine that ran Virginia from the 1920s to the 1960s was noted for its frugality and low taxes

[Fiji Hill]

Atomic Power--Red Foley (1946)

Hiroshima, Nagasaki paid a big price for their sins.

[tlozo]

Counting All The Dead

When judging the morality of the use of atomic weapons in World War II, observers typically focus on Japanese deaths, while ignoring the far-larger number of non-Japanese casualties.

Richard B. Frank

The presenter had recited the specific numbers of Japanese civilian deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Graphic descriptions of the casualties magnified the impact of the statistics. But I came to realize two basic principles essential to understanding and judging these events fairly: we need to count all the deaths in the Asia-Pacific War for perspective and to treat all of the dead as sharing a common humanity. What upset my colleague was that the critique we heard and many others like it denied equal concern about the deaths of civilians who were not Japanese.

The evidence regarding the human toll has existed since the time of the war and continues to grow. In his influential War Without Mercy in 1986, John Dower advanced tentative figures on the noncombatant deaths. His numbers for Japanese civilian deaths totaled 553,000 for all air raids, plus the losses in Okinawa and Saipan.

After reviewing various sources for death totals elsewhere, including a UN report, he concluded that “certainly” it would be “reasonable to think in general terms of approximately 10 million Chinese war dead, a total only surpassed by the Soviet Union.” After deducting the number of combatant deaths, a realistic reading would be that there were about eight million Chinese civilian deaths. The UN and other sources estimate that four million civilians were killed in Indonesia, and another million in Vietnam, in addition to the 10 million killed in China.

Added to the Chinese toll, there were four million civilian deaths in what is now Indonesia, based on a United Nations report. And at least a million Vietnamese victims of a 1945 famine caused in large part by the Japanese invaders, who burned large areas of rice fields to plant peanuts so they could extract oil from them.

That made thirteen million deaths. Simple math showed twenty-three deaths of civilians who were not Japanese to one Japanese civilian death. That is not a definitive figure, but it conveys the grotesque distortion caused by omitting the deaths of civilians who were not Japanese.

https://www.americanheritage.com/counting-all-dead

[Fiji Hill]

My father was a submariner during the war. About a fifth of all US submariners did not survive. Had the A-bombs not fallen, I might not be here today.

[ckilmer]

Oppenheimer was a man of the left. He knew all the los alamos spies. He was well aware of the leftist argument that the bomb was too important to be in an American hands only. The same argument is made about Ai today. During the 1930s he flirted with communism. He well understood the divided loyalties of the scientists at los alamos. “Blood on his hands” could also be treated as a future history of the USA in which this country was bombed by a Russian nuke which was made with the help of scientists at Oppy’s lab.

Whose blood was poppy referring to. History generally imputes Japanese blood. But the left has historically been so double minded that oppy could as easily been referring to Americans.?

[SuperLuminal]

Never... He was the last real man to ever become a democrat president...

Everyone since has been in the soy boy class...
Think Carter, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden...

[MNJohnnie]

That comment so stupid.

The reason for the targeting was made clear. The targeting of current targets was to maximize the physiological impact on the Japanese leadership

War ends when one side loses the will to fight. It not some magical disagreement between adults that can be solved by hugs and kisses

Grow up child
Just stop lying for once

[ansel12]

I often point out how Texas and California are different and why Texas abandoned the modern democrats while California got absorbed by them in spite of being largely republican.

Social conservatism was the difference, the left devoured the social liberal republicans of California because they didn’t have the strong Christian foundational leg of conservatism.

[alexander_busek]

The really sketchy part of the use of the nuclear weapons was the careful targeting of cities that had no prior bombing attacks: it smells of using those cities as a testing ground complete with unwarned civilians rather than a target.

Negative!

It "smelled" of not wanting to waste our precious atomic bombs on low-value targets - namely: cities that had already been ravaged by conventional bombing!

Regards,

[Savage Beast]

In hindsight, it should have been dropped on Mount Fuji, to show what would happen if Japan did not surrender;

However, it probably wouldn't have changed anything because Japan did not surrender even after Hiroshima,

And I agree with you that it was the correct thing to do and no one should ever have any doubts about the decision.

[SoConPubbie]

ground complete with unwarned civilians rather than a target.

Sorry, but you do not know your history if you do not think the civilians were warned.

Our military dropped leaflets in both cities warning the civilians several days before to leave the city as a catastrophic event was about to occur. The Japs didn't believe and just mocked.

[Zathras]

This gets asked every year.
The answer is still the same.
They looked at the tired, burned out solders in Europe and realized we didn’t have the manpower to invade Japan.
Probably took about 10 min of thought.

[JeemBeau]

I’ve read that injured soldiers with up to a 40% disability would have been had to participate in the invasion. Loss of one eye was weighted as a 30% disability.