Fact: Using nuclear weapons ENDED the war. That ended the killing. And the killing wasn't just going on in Japan. Japan was massacring massive numbers of people in China. That is your opinion. I've posted you numerous direct quotes from leaders at the time who were present and knew the realities. You have nothing but supposition.
General Douglas MacArthur: "In 1957, he lashed out at large Pentagon budgets. 'Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear—kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor—with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real."
James M. Gillis, editor of Catholic World, "I would call it a crime were it not that the word 'crime' implies sin, and sin requires a consciousness of guilt. The action taken by the Untied States government was in defiance of every sentiment and every conviction upon which our civilization is based."
[considering the target was the only Christian mission in Japan(a Catholic one), he would know]
"The surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible. Both bombings must be judged to have been unnecessary for winning the war. As the power that first used the atomic bomb under these circumstances, we have sinned grievously against the laws of God and against the people of Japan."—Commission on the Relation of the Church to the War in the Light of the Christian Faith.
the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report of July 1, 1946 states, "The Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs did not defeat Japan, nor by the testimony of the enemy leaders who ended the war did they persuade Japan to accept unconditional surrender. The Emperor, the lord privy seal, the prime minister, the foreign minister, and the navy minister had decided as early as May 1945 that the war should be ended even if it meant acceptance of defeat on allied terms.... It is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to December 1, 1945 and in all probability prior to November 1, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
General Curtis LeMay, chief of the Air Forces, p.334, "The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. PRESS INQUIRY: You mean that, sir? Without the Russians and without the atomic bomb? LeMay: The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all." September 29, 1945, statement.
When Stimson said the United States proposed to use the bomb against Japan, Eisenhower voiced 'my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use (of atomic weapons).' Stimson was upset by Eisenhower's attitude 'almost angrily refuting the reasons I gave for my quick conclusion'. Three days later, Eisenhower flew to Berlin, where he met with Truman and his principal advisors. Again Eisenhower recommended against using the bomb, and again was ignored.
siliconinvestor.com
Stettinius called the meeting to order to discuss an urgent matter; the Japanese were already privately suing for peace, which presented a grave crisis. The atomic bomb would not be ready for several more months. "We have already lost Germany," Stettinius said. "If Japan bows out, we will not have a live population on which to test the bomb."
"Nevertheless," said Stettinius, "our entire postwar program depends on terrifying the world with the atomic bomb." "To accomplish that goal," said John Foster Dulles, "you will need a very good tally. I should say a million." "Yes," replied Stettinius, "we are hoping for a million tally in Japan. But if they surrender, we won't have anything."
David McCullough, in his laudatory biography of Truman, which was described as "a valentine", admitted that "Truman didn't know his own Secretary of State, Stettinius. He had no background in foreign policy, no expert advisors of his own."
Japan had been suing for peace. Each day it seemed less likely that she could stay in the war. On March 9 and 10, 1945, 325 B-29s had burned thirty-five square miles of Tokyo, leaving more than one hundred thousand Japanese dead in the ensuing firestorm. Of Japan's 66 biggest cities, 59 had been mostly destroyed. 178 square miles of urban dwellings had been burned, 500,000 died in the fires, and now twenty million Japanese were homeless. Only four cities had not been destroyed; Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki. Their inhabitants had no inkling that they had been saved as target cities for the experimental atomic bomb.
There was another Japan, and MacArthur was one of the few Americans who suspected its existence. He kept urging the Pentagon and the State Department to be alert for conciliatory gestures. The General predicted that the break would come from Tokyo, not the Japanese army. The General was right. A dovish coalition was forming in the Japanese capital, and it was headed by Hirohito himself, who had concluded in the spring of 1945 that a negotiated peace was the only way to end his nation's agony. Beginning in early May, a six-man council of Japanese diplomats explored ways to accommodate the Allies. The delegates informed top military officials that "our resistance is finished".
The bomb was dropped because (p.35) "The Manhattan Project's managers were lobbying to use the atomic bomb. Byrnes sat in on these meetings. Maj. Gen. Groves seems to have been the author of the claim that the use of the bomb would save a million American lives—-a figure in the realm of fantasy."
"The claim that an invasion of the Japanese home islands was necessary without the use of the atomic bombs is untrue. The claim that an 'atomic warning' was given to the populace of Hiroshima is untrue. And the claim that both cities were key military targets is untrue."
Corroboration of these statements is found in the remarkable record of Ellsworth Torrey Carrington, "Reflections of a Hiroshima Pilot", (p.9) "As part of the Hiroshima atomic battle plan my B-29 (named Jabbitt III, Captain John Abbott Wilson's third war plane) flew the weather observation mission over the secondary target of Kokura on August 6, 1945." (p. 10) "After the first bomb was dropped, the atom bomb command was very fearful that Japan might surrender before we could drop the second bomb, so our people worked around the clock, 24-hours-a-day to avoid such a misfortune." This is, of course, satire on Carrington's part. (p. 13) "in city after city all over the face of Japan (except for our cities spared because reserved for atomic holocaust) they ignited the most terrible firestorms in history with very light losses (of B-29s). Sometimes the heat from these firestorms was so intense that later waves of B-29s were caught by updrafts strong enough to loft them upwards from 4 or 5,000 feet all the way up to 8 or 10,000 feet. The major told us that the fire-bombing of Japan had proven successful far beyond anything they had imagined possible and that the 20th Air Force was running out of cities to burn. Already there were no longer (as of the first week in June 1945) any target cities left that were worth the attention of more than 50 B-29s, and on a big day, we could send up as many as 450 planes!" "The totality of the devastation in Japan was extraordinary, and this was matched by the near-totality of Japan's defencelessness." (as of June 1, 1945, before the atomic bombs were dropped.) (p. 14) "The Truman government censored and controlled all the war information that was allowed to reach the public, and of course, Truman had a vested interest in obscuring the truth so as to surreptitiously prolong the war and be politically able to use the atom bomb. Regarding the second element of the Roosevelt-Truman atomic Cold War strategy of deceiving the public into believing that Japan was still militarily viable in the spring and summer of 1945, the centerpiece was the terribly expensive and criminally unnecessary campaign against Okinawa.
Carrington quotes Admiral William D. Leahy, p. 245, I Was There, McGraw Hill: "A large part of the Japanese Navy was already on the bottom of the sea. The combined Navy surface and air force action even by this time had forced Japan into a position that made her early surrender inevitable. None of us then knew the potentialities of the atomic bomb, but it was my opinion, and I urged it strongly on the Joint Chiefs, that no major land invasion of the Japanese mainland was necessary to win the war. The JCS did order the preparation of plans for an invasion, but the invasion itself was never authorized."
Thus Truman, urged on by General Groves, claims that "a million American lives were saved" by the use of the atomic bomb, when no invasion had ever been authorized, and was not in the cards. Carrington continues, p. 16, "The monstrous truth is that the timing of the Okinawa campaign was exclusively related to the early August timetable of the atomic bomb. J'accuse! I accuse Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman of deliberately committing war crimes against the American people for the sole purpose of helping set the stage for the criminally unnecessary use of atomic weapons on Japan."
Carrington further quotes Admiral Leahy, from I Was There, "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagaski was of no material assistance 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."
Carrington concludes, p.22, "Truman's wanton use of atomic weapons left the American people feeling dramatically less secure after winning World War II than they had ever felt before, and these feelings of insecurity have been exploited by unscrupulous Cold War Machine Politicians ever since." As Senator Vandenberg said, "We have to scare the hell out of 'em" in order to browbeat the American people into paying heavy taxes to support the Cold War. |
