A defender of the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan writes: “The choice Mr. Truman made is the correct one.” He says that it is easy for me “to be a Monday-morning quarterback.”(He must be referring to this recent post of mine.) And then he proceeds to be … a Monday-morning quarterback, maintaining: The Japanese government did not want peace, the Japanese army wanted one final battle on Japanese soil, hundreds of thousands of Japanese and tens of thousands of Americans would did in a U.S. invasion of Japan, and the Japanese planned to massacre all allied POW and civilian internees they held in the event of an invasion of Japan (over 300,000).
But as was pointed out recently:
Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”
Dwight Eisenhower, “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”
President Truman’s Chief of Staff, Adm. William Leahy, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”
9:23 am on August 12, 2018