You’re leaving out revenge for Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March (The POW camps had been liberated and it was known by then!), defense of Manila atrocities etc.
Truman was told he’d get impeached if he didn’t bomb the bastards
One Two punch with a Happy Ending
Absolutely love the photos of The Greatest Generation and their parents, et al celebrating the defeat of the JAPS
In the REAL world, ACTIONS speak much louder than words. Screw those brainwashing “educators”
I explain it like this:
- firstly, I hate “strategic bombing”...ie bombing cities full of civilians. I think deliberately targeting civilians is awful. Then again, the Axis did it first when they bombed Warsaw and Rotterdam and Shanghai and Nanking and London and Coventry, etc etc. The Allies then retaliated in kind.
- an estimated 10,000 people were dying PER DAY in the Pacific War. They were still dying in large numbers throughout Asia and the Pacific. There was active combat in Indonesia, in Burma, in China, the bombing raids over Japan etc. There was active combat at sea (remember the USS Indianapolis was sunk at the cost of 900 lives after delivering the bomb to Tinian). People were starving to death and dying of disease throughout Asia because of the war. 10,000 per day. Every 2 weeks that that war continued = another Hiroshima worth of death. You can’t just ignore that and act like prolonging the war even as it was would be without massive suffering.
- Operation Downfall was going to cost a vast amount of American casualties and deaths and it was going to cause literally millions of Japanese deaths. The death toll always goes up staggeringly when the fighting gets to somebody’s homeland. HALF of all the Germans who died in WWII died in the last year as they got worn down and as the combat moved to Germany itself. It would’ve been the same for Japan.
- had Operation Downfall not been launched and the Navy’s plan of imposing an airtight naval blockade been adopted - and aside from the roughly 10,000 who were dying every day in the war - an estimated 4-6 Million Japanese were projected to starve to death in the next 6 months. Japan had had the worst rice harvest in 50 years thanks to bad weather and labor shortages, food imports were cut off due to the naval blockade and fishing boats were routinely getting shot to pieces and sunk by the Allies. Japan could not even come close to feeding itself.
So without the two atomic bombs, the death toll of the war would have been far far worse. There is absolutely no question about it.
For those GI’s who’d fought their way in northern Africa, and marched north through Italy...I think most were tired and burned-out by spring of 1945. If you had gone to them and said...this war in Europe is over, and in 30 days...you will board ships for Japan and be in an invasion force by November, it would have been a bitter thing to accept.
I would add this...there were two groups in Japan working on a nuclear weapon (both unaware of what each was doing). If the war had lingered on to the beginning of 1946, both would have had nuke weapons, and used them on the US.
Back in the day National Review featured Florence King's essays on the end page. King wrote that when the bombing of Hiroshima was reported in the papers, her mother danced a jig.