My father was an army officer in 1945, scheduled for the invasion of Japan. Projections were horrific--a million US casualties (not deaths)--I've seen the written briefing he was given. Awful enough without exaggerating. <My father, who was deeply troubled by the bomb, always found those figures comforting--the bomb a lousy option, but better than the alternative. Current estimates of what the cost of an invasion would have been, based on fuller knowledge of the state of Japanese industry and will by that date, are far lower, and, since the Japanese no longer had a navy or airforce, a blockade, plenty cruel enough, would have done the job with little danger to our side--the Japanese had been trying to negotiate a peace deal for quite a while anyway. But let's assume that Truman believed the figures, or even a quarter as much. We're still left with the question of whether unleashing what we did wasn't more dangerous in the long run. Maybe it was really the opening salvo in the post-war power struggle--like, "Don't mess with us."
But let's go back to the "bomb as act of mercy" justification. Couldn't the germans have said the same if they'd had an a-bomb and dropped it on London? Why not, to avoid a large percentage of the 30 million or so WWII deaths, blanket the enemy--whatever enemy--with same?
As to the other atrocities you mention, the behavior of others is never permission, and there are anyway enough horrors to go around without leaving anyone with nothing to feel bad about. We have no monopoly on atrocities, but we don't have clean hands, either.
There were famously few prisoners taken on Okinawa. The official explanation was that the Japanese were determined to die rather than surrender. This wasn't my father's experience. There were strict orders to take prisoners--they were needed for intelligence. Nonetheless, my father was greeted by the sight of his "boys" jumping on the belly of a Japanese soldier they had just decapitated, to force the blood to spurt more powerfully. He recalled flecks of blood in a GI's blond hair.
Hiroshima Day hardly seems an appropriate time for recriminations or justifications.
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Aug 6, 2005 11:46 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Hiroshima
----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, August 06, 2005 11:11 AM
Subject: Re: Hiroshima
Thanks for that Hal.
>Still, he professes wonder at the American reaction to 9/11.
"Americans were terrified by what happened, but not by Hiroshima. Which
was the most terrible?"<
Yup.
Doug
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
And are the Japanese "terrified," now, by the activities of the Imperial
Japanese Army in Nanking? Or those of its "medical researchers" in
Manchuria? Or by the mass-kamikaze exercises they - women, children,
civilians of all sorts - underwent in '45 to prepare for an invasion, which
could easily have cost 2 million American lives and perhaps 15 million of
theirs?
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