Don't be fooled by the "Hate America First" school of historical revisionism - what evidence is there that Truman or anyone else knew that Japan was going to surrender?
>>Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Lesser of Two Evils
By Jamie Glazov
FrontpageMagazine.com | August 03, 2001
URL: frontpagemag.com
THIS AUGUST 6 AND 9 marks the 56th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The use of the atomic bombs was the only alternative left to President Truman and his officials.
By August 1945, the war with Japan showed signs of continuing indefinitely. As American forces advanced closer to the Japanese mainland, the Japanese refusal to surrender did not diminish but increased. In the summer of 1945, Japan had more than 2 million soldiers and 30 million citizens who were prepared to choose "death over dishonour." This point had already been established by the kamikaze pilots and Japanese soldiers who fought at Okinawa and Iwo Jima.
The Japanese view of war was quite different from that of the American view: death in war was not something to be avoided, but to be sought. The Shinto cult, for example, which preached a radical concept of self-sacrifice, taught that suicide was glorious, while surrender was an unthinkable disgrace. It was at Saipan that even Japanese civilians committed suicide by jumping off the cliffs on the northern tip of the island rather than surrender. At the battle of Okinawa Island, thousands of Japanese had drawn themselves up in a line and killed themselves by hand-grenades, rather than surrender.
The Japanese leadership never disguised its revulsion to the idea of surrender. It repeatedly made clear its intention to fight to the last man, woman and child. The Japanese bitter-end slogan called for "the honorable death of a hundred million" -- the entire population. Allied intercepts of communications revealed that Japanese militarists were obsessed with vindicating their emperor’s, as well as their own, honor in a bloody till-the-death battle over the home islands.
This explains why at this very time the Japanese military was rapidly building up defense forces on the southern island of Kyushu, where by war's end there were 14 divisions and 735,000 troops ready to sacrifice themselves in battle.
Japan's stubborn and unsatisfactory response to the Allies' Potsdam Declaration left Truman with little choice. He knew, as General Marshall's reports confirmed, that at least 500,000 Americans would be lost in an invasion of Japan. That was a conservative estimate, as the possibility existed that up to one million Allied casualties would be suffered. Meanwhile, it was estimated that potential Japanese casualties stood at five million.
Truman and his advisers were well aware that they had just suffered 75,000 American casualties in seizing Okinawa, just a small island. The bombing of the two Japanese cities, therefore, was considered to be the quickest way to end the war with the least amount of casualties on both sides.
For nearly four years America had watched its soldiers being killed by militant and fanatical Japanese troops. And now, every day that the Japanese refused to surrender, the death toll on both sides rose, while Allied POWs and civilian internees in Japanese concentration camps were being tortured and executed.
Truman knew that if an American invasion was carried through, the 100,000 Allied prisoners of war would die. He was aware of Tokyo’s order that, at the moment that the Americans invaded Japan's home islands, the POW's were to be tortured, beheaded, and executed en masse. At many POW camps, many prisoners had already been instructed to dig their own graves. Fifty thousand POWs had already died from torture, starvation, and unimaginable abuse.<<
My own point of view as stated a couple of weeks ago:
>>Dropping bombs on cities is always going to kill civilians. When you say "Japan" I assume you mean Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The terrible destruction caused by those bombs has always caused a lot of controversy. One thing to
remember is that no one knew, in advance, about radiation poisoning. In fact, a large group of scientists thought that
detonating the bombs might cause a chain reaction which could destroy the earth. In other words, the aftereffects
could not be predicted. The tests were done in the desert.
Many say that the targets had no military value. That's at best an urban legend and at worse an absolute fabrication.
Hiroshima was headquarters for the Japanese 2nd Army, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan.
The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops. It also had a heavy
concentration of factories manufacturing munitions and other military goods.
From the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum website, a source with no reason to be biased in favor of the USA:
hiroshima.tomato.nu
Here is a map showing the military installations in and around Hiroshima:
hiroshima.tomato.nu
Why Hiroshima was chosen:
>>The size and the shape of the city was suited to the destructive power of the A-bombs. Because Hiroshima had
not been bombed, ascertaining the effects of the A-bomb would be relatively easy.
Hiroshima had a high concentration of troops, military facilities and military factories that had not yet been subject to
significant damage.<<
hiroshima.tomato.nu
The second bomb, detonated on August 9, 1945, was destined for Kokura Arsenal on the southwest Japanese
island of Kyushu. Due to bad weather, the pilot instead bombed Nagasaki, the home of a Mitsubishi torpedo
factory.
The reasons for chosing the second targets:
>>The two target cities had been carefully selected. They had purposely not been bombed
heavily by LeMay's B-29s so that, as the after-action report noted, "The assessment of the
atomic bomb damage would not be confused by having to eliminate previous incendiary or
high explosive damage."
Kokura, on the northeast corner of Kyushu, was chosen as the primary target for Fat
Man because it was the enemy's principal production source for automatic weapons. It
was also the site of the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works and was one of the largest
shipbuilding and naval centers in Japan.
Nagasaki, the secondary target, was the third largest city on Kyushu. It was also one of
Japan's leading shipbuilding and repair centers. It was not considered a completely "virgin"
target, however, because it had been bombed many weeks before by Twentieth Air Force
bombers. Niigata was originally considered as a third target, but it was too far away from
the other two cities. <<
thehistorynet.com. <<
Message 16404418
If mistakes were made, then the right thing to do is learn from them. Not allow them to make you hate your own country, afraid to act, afraid to do anything but wallow in lacerating self-hatred.
Lunatics like bin Laden claim that Hiroshima and Nagasaki gives them justification to use the bomb on the US - they still want to refight the Reconqusta, 1492, and the Battle of Vienna, 1683. Lunatics still want to refight the Battle of Kosovo, 1389.
People who castigate the United States for the fate of the Plains Indians in the 1850's are also lunatics, IMO. No one alive today was involved in those decisions. May as well hate America for the Salem Witch Trials while you're at it. If you take them seriously, you're playing into their hands, and their agenda is not something that is in your favor. |
