My source for this information is Samuel J. Walker's Prompt and Utter Destruction. University of North Carolina Press, 1997
Unless the Japaneese were willing to unconditionally surrender the bombs should have been used rather than a mainland invasion that would have killed possibly hundreds of thousands of American troops.
America didn't start this war but was willing to end it on our terms.
the Japaneese were ruthless in their pursuit of war. They had commited many many violations of international norm, The rape of nanking, the sneak attack on Pearl, the Bataan death march, the using of prisoners for medical experiments, the using of prisoneers for slave labor,etc etc etc. Hand wringers are trying to rewrite history. Should we have dropped the two bombs? HELL YES, and more if we had any more,which we didn't.If that is what it would have taken.
Truman saved both Japanese and American lives with his decision. The firebombings would have continued and countless Japanese would have been incinerated in the long term. He saved countless American lives, the estimates are debatable. After Okinawa the death rate of American servicemen in the Pacific Theater dropped to less than 1,000 a month. After Nagasaki it all ended. Patriotic Americans would have crucified Truman if they had known he had the means to end the war in such a quick manner and had not used it.
Now to the recent past. How is Clinton being judged for the Somalia fiasco given it could have been prevented by providing our brave men with the equipment and support they needed to carry out their tasks? He is lauded by the same revisionist leftist crowd that castigates Truman.
As numerous other posters have brought up, Nagasaki was the secondary target after Kokura (which is also not an inland city as some here suggested-it's on the N.E. coast of Kyushu near the entrance to the the Inland Sea), but that doesn't mean it wasn't a legitimate industrial target on its own. The main Mitsubishi plant was the aiming point, but the bomb missed.
Another poster brought up blockade. In fact, the submarine and aerial mine blockade had nearly brought Japan to it's knees, but not quickly enough to satisfy an America which had seen the end of the war Europe and wanted to get this one over with, too.
The first time I went to my future in-law's house in Nagaski Prefecture, I noticed 2 war era photos on the wall, a woman and a school aged boy. When I asked my wife later who they were, she told me it was her father's older sister and her son, who were killed by the bomb. They didn't live in the city, but by unfortunate chance, went into the city that day.
The fact is, for all the people that died in the atomic bombings, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of lives, both Japanese and American were saved. An invasion of Kyushu would have a bloodbath on a scale that dwarfed Okinawa, the largest battle of the war. The atomic bombing of Nagaski may have "political" in a sense, i.e. let's show the Russians, but it was not bombed because it had a large portion of Japan's tiny Christian population.
But at the last moment the Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who arguably had knowingly precipitated Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack by instigating an international embargo on its life-or-death oil supplies, removed Kyoto from the list for annihilation and replaced it with Nagasaki.
Ponte is just another anti American Bravo Sierra POS, who will rearrange history to suit his agenda. His POS agenda is simple, blame American for everything!
Blaming Stimson for the Boshida Japanese Racists attack on Pearl Harbor is no different than the POS's who blame 9/11 mass murderers on Americans!
Very true. Mitsubishi had two armaments plants at Ohashi. Morimachi and Mitsubishi both had steel plants located in the Urakami Valley, away from the downtown area of Nagasaki. Those targets were detroyed and the residential and business districts of Nagasaki were spared due to the topography of the area.
Bock's Car made three bombing runs on Kokura before Sweeney made the decision to head for the secondary target, Nagasaki. Smoke from the fires still burning from the previous nights bombing of Yawata, by 224 B-29s, prevented the drop on Kokura. Wonder how Stimson was able to manipulate the surface winds to accomplish that feat! One of the many points that revisionists gloss over is this: In the three months that Truman had been President, the United States sustained almost 50% of its total casualties in the Pacific Theater.
On paper it may have appeared that Japan was defeated, but such was not the case. The Japanese conditionally accepted the Potsdam Declaration on 10 August with the following major caveats: Japan would try its own war criminals, Japan would retain control of its troops and disarm said troops itself, the Allies could not occupy the home islands of Japan, Hirohito would remain sovereign ruler. The Allies rejected those terms. Truman counter offered that Hirohito could stay but under the authority of the supreme Allied commander. The Japanese did not reply but instructed their forces to fight on. The Allies toned down their offensive actions and began dropping surrender leaflets instead of bombs. Finally with still no response from Japan, Truman ordered Marshall to resume air raids against Japan. On the 14th Spaatz ordered anything that could carry bombs into the air. The result was the largest raid of the war; 2000 airplanes bombed Japan. High ranking officers planned a coup after Hirohito told them he would announce the surrender to the Japanese people over radio. The coup attempt failed and the message was finally broadcast at noon on the 15th.