The ones telling him that either had no knowledge of the situation like Eisenhower or were part of the bomber mafia like Curtis LeMay who were convinced that strategic bombing could force a surrender in spite of all the evidence to the contrary from Germany, Great Britain and Japan itself.
Enough of your statist ignorance and adherence to statist myths. When will you realize what you learned in government grade school was propaganda?
With unconscionable carnage and up to 85M deaths, the Second World War was the greatest catastrophe in history. In a sense, the atomic bombs were an apt climax to that orgy of butchery.
Among them was Admiral William Leahy, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the war:
“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was no material success in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. … My own feeling was that in being the first to use [nuclear weapons] we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”
Former President and retired Five-Star General Dwight Eisenhower chimed in with similar sentiment:
“The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. … I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”
Major General JFC Fuller described the bombings as “a type of war that would’ve disgraced Tamerlane.” He also dispensed with the common justification:
“Though to save life is laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can be justified.”
As Stanford professor Barton Bernstein relayed in a
New York Times article preceding a Smithsonian exhibit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
“Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan’s unconditional surrender. She was defeated before either of these events took place.”
These weren’t Barton’s words. He was quoting what Brigadier General Bonnie Fellers wrote to General Douglas MacArthur soon after V-J Day.
This isn’t the convenient clarity of 20/20 hindsight. Skeptics were wearing corrective lenses many months before the Enola Gay left the runway.
In January 1945, the Japanese offered to surrender on terms virtually identical to those they accepted after Nagasaki. MacArthur informed FDR of this two days before the president left for Yalta. Leahy provided the information, and Truman himself later corroborated the account.
Had the US accepted the overture, not only the devastation of the atomic bombs would’ve been avoided, but Iwo Jima and Okinawa wouldn’t have occurred, sparing 20,000 American lives.
