Sixty five years ago today, one United States warplane dropped one bomb on one Japaneses city, Hiroshima and killed what a hundred thousand Japanese civilians; men, women, children. from Bruce McQuain, Q and O [1]:
[I]t is the annual Hiroshima remembrance in Japan and the usual cries of “outrage” [2] and demands for an “apology” fill the air.
My father fought against the Japanese in WWII on Saipan, Leyte and Okinawa. I have studied the war in detail. I’ve been particularly interested in the planned invasion of Japan.
Okinawa was the first indicator of what that would have been like – it was and is considered a Japanese “home island”. My father was slated to be with the first wave of divisons landing on Kyushu. The technical description of their anticipated condition after a day or so was “combat ineffective”. That means those initial divisions would have been destroyed and unable to continue to fight.
So what the big deal? It was better for Harry Truman to have Japanese civilians die than have one more American die. As William T. Sherman once noted, War is Hell. Well Give em Hell Harry, did just that. That what Presidents do. The Japanese started the war. Truman ended it. I suppose if Dim Won were Commander-in-Chief at the time, he would bowed down to Hirohito and negotiated a surrender, an American surrender.