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In reply to the discussion: No Choice: Why Harry Truman Dropped the Atomic Bomb on Japan [View all]Algernon Moncrieff
(5,790 posts)Since everything here is essentially a repeat of what is said every year, I'll repeat essentially what I said the last time I was in this debate:
On April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, and the weight of the world fell on the shoulders of Harry S. Truman. The US participation in the war had been close to 3 1/2 years. Europe was about mopped up. The Pacific was another subject. Hopping from island to island, the Marines and the Army suffered horrific casualties fighting an enemy that would not surrender. Operation Olympic loomed in 1946 (after Europe was mopped up, and the US had time to transport and refit the armies of the European theater for use in the Japanese homeland). The anticipated allied casualties were high - very high. There was no reason to believe the conquest of Japan would take place prior to '47 - and by Allies, really just us, because Britain and France would need to rebuild, and the USSR was an ally only in the sense that we had common cause against Germany and Italy. They were going to be a problem in Asia.
And then something very unexpected happened to HST. A couple of days into his presidency, an obscure general named Leslie Groves came to visit him in the White House to tell him a secret that had been kept from his predecessor Henry Wallace. Groves told Truman something right out of science-fucking-fiction. In Oak Ridge Tennessee, a group of scientists - working in near-total secrecy under the guise of the Manhattan Project -- were developing a bomb based on the principles of nuclear fission theorized by physicists such as Albert Einstein (who wrote FDR before our entry into the war). A test was soon to be conducted to see if the bomb - a single bomb, mind you - would live up to its promise of destroying an entire city. If so, it was reasoned that the war would be quickly concluded, as Japan would realize that they truly had no option but annihilation.
It's easy to second guess Truman now, but his calculus was straightforward (as most things were with HST): we could continue a conventional fight against Japan, which would be Okinawa, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, Tarawa, and Guadalcanal times (probably literally) 1000, or we could drop the bombs. We dropped the bombs. And even still, the council that ran Japan deadlocked between continuing the fight and surrender, and Hirohito himself had to break the tie and surrender.
You can hate Truman and hate the bomb, but upwards of half a million American lives were most likely saved, as well as a million or more Japanese - civilians and military.
Part of the reason we are seeing so much stupidity around Europe and the US right now is that with the deaths of the greatest generation, the lessons of WWII are being forgotten. Let us all pray we do not forget how truly horrific both conventional and nuclear war are.