I don't give a shit what some guy who was not involved in the Pacific in ww2 says.
Dimwit,
You understand the generals were actually running the war in the Pacific?
Truman was sitting safe and sound in DC.
"The U.S. military knew this, which informed the analysis of top generals. General Henry Arnold, commanding general of the army air forces, wrote in 1949 that, “It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.” In 1950 Admiral William Leahy, President Truman’s Chief of Staff, wrote that, “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender…” Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, said two months after the bombings that “the atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan…” General Dwight Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs that when told of the decision to drop the bomb, he expressed, “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 a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives…”
According to Admiral Ernest King, there was a much more humane way to end the war: an “effective naval blockade would, in the course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission through lack of oil, rice, medicines, and other essential materials.“
These sentiments were confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: “Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.” In other words, the Japanese government had resolved to make peace before the atomic bombs were dropped.
Clearly if it was up to the military, the bombs would have never been dropped. However, the decision rested with President Harry Truman, who ordered two bombs be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombs caused the deaths of at least 225,000 civilians, almost all of whom were civilians. |
