Truman had no choice in dropping the bomb, his predecessor and the military had already made that decision for him. Japan was seeking terms of surrender at the time. The bomb was dropped for Uncle Joe to see.
"Truman had no choice in dropping the bomb, his predecessor and the military had already made that decision for him. Japan was seeking terms of surrender at the time. The bomb was dropped for Uncle Joe to see."
A good friend of mine was in the Marines on one of the islands south of Japan at the time that the invasion was to start. He was told to write his last letter home as he and his fellow Marines would not survive their initial landing on Japanese soil.
My father was on his way to a troopship that would take him and his unit to Japan to fight with the newly trained mountain units. His unit, already back from Europe and the Battle of the Bulge had a survival rate of 24%. The mountain fighting was to be spectacularly bad.
The estimate of four million is the lightest that I have heard. The most reliable estimates have been 6 million soldiers and as many as thirty million Japanese civilians who would die from battle or starvation and disease.
You probably have never experienced or thought about what the phrase "Total War" means and the meaning is simply this:
Kill or be killed.
Your contention that the bomb was for Joe Stalin is absolutely wrong. We dropped the bomb to save the lives of our soldiers as well as the lives of the Japanese. Harry made the decision, no one else and it was a good humanitarian decision.
Had we not dropped the bomb, we would have had to burn Japan to the ground. Every home, every factory and every tree. Leveled and burning.
Debatable. Certainly there were elements in the civilian leadership and diplomatic corps who saw the writing on the wall and wanted to find a way out for Japan, but the military was in control of everything, including all the channels of communication. They (Ithe civilians and diplomats) had made a very tenuous peace overture for the Russians to relay to the Americans, but the Russians basically stalled on them while gearing up for their own invasion of China, Korea, etc., When the Japanese military got wind of it, I believe they arrested the people who had reached out. What few peace signals reached the Americans were so obtusely worded and so buried in a thousand "to the last man, woman and child" messages that they were simply ignored.