"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.
In the case of Japan, kill and be killed. The Japanese government was instructing civilians in tactics like strapping themselves with explosives and rolling under tanks. The Kamikaze pilots were just the tip of the iceberg -- lower-tech suicide attacks could call on old folks and children who wouldn't need much skill, training or a flyable airplane.
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.
I agree that was the primary motivation, and that Truman made the right call. But sending a message to Stalin was also on the table. It was clear from the discussions at the summits that the Soviets and the Western allies were jockeying for position in the post-war world.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively undamaged from the previous waves of bombing -- they were chosen as targets rather than, say, Tokyo, because it made a more effective demonstration of the power of the Bomb. The Japanese leadership was the primary, but not the only, audience. What Truman did not know was how thoroughly compromised the Manhattan Project was, and that the Soviets would have the bomb themselves in only a few years.
My dad was a marine on a troop ship in the Pacific massing for the invasion when the bombs ended the war. It would have been his first, and I'm sure his last, combat.
You are correct. My dad was burned a crash in the CBI Campaign in '43 and was back in the US (as a still certified flyer)after his recovery... He was ready to go at Rough and Ready Island in '45.
The horror of Okinawa was the preview, and would have been magnified a million-fold. Japanese civilians had been taught that the Americans would slaughter the men, rape the women and enslave the kids - and they believed it. They were ready to fight to the death and never surrender.
Before the A-Bombs Gen. Lemay had destroyed virtually all the cities in the firebombing, which would have convinced any other country to surrender. But they didn't.
The casualties, and especially the Japanese casualties, would have been unimaginable. Truman did the right thing.
You are correct, of course. But, that is the revisionist line lately taken by the anti-Americans who try to make the assertion that dropping the bomb was unnecessary.
Such a view is anti-historical and relies on a breathtaking ignorance of the times. To have had the bomb in 1945--and not used it--would have been an act of madness.