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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J. C. Dithers who wrote (42103)	1/9/2002 12:00:16 PM
From: J. C. Dithers	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Why President Truman dropped the A-Bombs. From David McCullough's award-winning biography, Truman Some critics and historians in years to come would argue that Japan was already finished by this time, just as Eisenhower had said and as several intelligence reports indicated. Japan’s defeat, however, was not the issue. It was Japan’s surrender that was so desperately wanted, since every day Japan did not surrender meant the killing continued. In theory, Japan had been defeated well before Truman became President. (Studies by the Japanese themselves had determine a year and a half before, by January 1944, that Japan had lost the war). Yet in the three months since Truman took office, American battle casualties in the Pacific were nearly half the total from three years of war in the Pacific. The nearer victory came, the heavier the price in blood. And whatever the projected toll in American lives in an invasion, it was too high if it could be avoided. “We had only too abundant evidence in those days that surrender was excluded from the Japanese ethos,” remembered a captain in military intelligence, Charlton Ogburn, Jr. “Thousands of our Marines and soldiers had died rooting Japanese from their foxholes and bunkers when they were perfectly aware that their situation was hopeless.” During the whole war, not a single Japanese unit had surrendered. While intelligence reports indicated that Japan was beaten, they also forecast that the Japanese would hold out for months longer, meanwhile issuing intermittent peace feelers, both to bring the war to what they would regard as an acceptable conclusion, and “to weaken the determination of the United Sates to fight to the bitter end ...” The basic policy of the present [Japanese] government [said a combined Intelligence Committee report of July 8, 1945] is to fight as long and as desperately as possible in the hope of avoiding complete defeat and of acquiring a better bargaining position in a negotiated peace. Japanese leaders are now playing for time in the hope that Allied war weariness, Allied disunity, or some “miracle” will present an opportunity to arrange a compromise peace Nor, it must be stressed, was there ever anything hypothetical about preparations for the invasion -- on both sides -- a point sometimes overlooked in later years. Truman had earlier authorized the Chiefs of Staff to move more than 1 million troops for a final attack on Japan. Thirty divisions were on the way to the Pacific from the European theater, from one end of the world to the other, something never done before. Japan had some 2.5 million regular troops on the home island, but every male between the ages of fifteen and sixty, every female from seventeen to forty-five, was being conscripted and armed with everything from ancient brass cannon to bamboo spears, taught to strap explosives to their bodies and throw themselves under advancing tanks. One woman would remember being given a carpenter’s awl and instructed that killing just one American would do. “You must aim at the abdomen,” she was told. “Understand? The abdomen.” The general in charge of defense plans told the other senior officers, “By pouring 20 divisions into the battle within two weeks of the enemy’s landing, we will annihilate him entirely and insure a Japanese victory." Thousands of planes were ready to serve as kamikazes. To no one with the America and Allied forces in the Pacific did it look as though the Japanese were about to quit. On July 15, The New York Times reported that twenty-five war-front correspondents from the Unite Sates and Australia had compared notes and their guess was the war would not end for nearly a year, not until June of 1946. ...There was no talk at the Pentagon of an early end to the war. The great concern was the likelihood of huge Japanese forces in China and Southeast Asia fighting on even if the government in Tokyo were to give up. Truman foresaw unprecedented carnage in any attempted invasion. “It occurred to me,” he would remark a few months later, “that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood were worth a couple of Japanese cities, and I still think they were and are. Harry Truman was a plain talker. And a plain thinker. McCullough documents that America's nuclear science community was about evenly divided on the wisdom and morality of using the bombs on Japanese cities.

To: J. C. Dithers who wrote (42103)	1/9/2002 1:04:25 PM
From: Solon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

"You need to brush up on the English language" No, Dithers. I don't need to brush up! No "ifs, ands, or buts" refers to the sentence: "In ALL probability they were going to surrender by the end of October...PERIOD, and it makes the point that the sentence portrays the belief of the Report with 100 % accuracy: a little too subtle for you, perhaps! ;-) I set it off in its own pargraph in anticipation of a few slow readers. Foresight is a wonderful thing...