- Mar 1, 2008
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All these revision apologists never do take the time to read your op,they just go by what their corrupt school system taught them.We were in a no holds barred war. The invasion of Okinawa showed us that the coming invasion of homeland Japan would cause a half a million GI deaths and million or more wounded not counting the deaths of Japanese. The use of the two bombs to stop the war was the right thing for the time. Your Monday morning quarterbacking 74yrs after the fact shows your lack of knowledge of the war.
I take it you didn't bother to read any of the posts herein where I document Japan's prostrate condition? There was no need to invade Japan, nor to nuke Japan, to end the war.
We know from internal memos that even the War Department knew that the "half a million" estimate was a wild exaggeration. Even most of the few scholars who still defend Truman's nuking of Japan have admitted that the half-a-million figure was baseless.
Kyushu, with its open plains and much larger area, would have provided much greater room for maneuver than did Okinawa. On Okinawa, geography forced us to fight in narrow corridors and small areas. Of course, another major reason for our high casualties on Okinawa, as in the Philippines, was that we were foolish enough to attack entrenched positions in those narrow and small areas, instead of just cutting them off, hemming them in, and letting them die on the vine.
No, nuking two cites was not "the right thing to do." It was a war crime of gigantic proportions.
It is not "Monday morning quarterbacking" to point out that Truman did not need to nuke Japan. Dozens of people inside the government and in the Manhattan Project voiced opposition to nuking Japan before Truman did it. And within months of the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, voices from both conservative and liberal camps began to raise doubts about the necessity and morality of Truman's action. That's why Conant and other Truman-nuke defenders pressured Stimson into signing his name to the famous (infamous) defense of Truman's decision that they wrote for the February 1947 edition of Harper's Magazine.
Finally, many people don't realize that many of the first critics of Truman's nuking of Japan were conservatives:
American Conservatives Are the Forgotten Critics of the Atomic Bombing of Japan | Barton J. Bernstein