I read Giangreco’s Hell to Pay recently. I believe it was you who linked to it a while back that made me aware of this book; and what a good book it is. It thoroughly details what it would have taken to invade the jap home islands, and left me wondering whether we could have actually ever forced them to surrender without the additional shock to their regime of using the few atom bombs we had in our arsenal against them.And that anti-American narrative is powerful, as I've experienced with my students. It gets quite emotional even, I think from the extreme frustration some have in resisting a rational explanation to why we dropped the bomb. In any case, I hadn't heard of the book and I'm putting on my list for birthday presents.
Maybe give it another plug. This book certainly counters the pervasive anti-American narrative under which we exist.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947
An update to my post yesterday on the decision to drop the bomb on Japan. Glenn Reynolds' reader Josh Fagan writes:
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2 comments:
All I can say is thank God we didn't have to invade the Japanese home islands beyond Iwo Jima.
-Dave
I would like to know what was finally the American attitude right before the Japaneses surrender. As you know right after Pearl Harbor it was "I want to kill Japs", and "Kill Japs and kill more Japs". And even racial slogans against the Japs. And now that the war against the Japs was dragging on, the hyper-ism and hooping and hollering about killing the Japs was deflating while it was seemingly looking like the Americans kept saying to themselves "When is this war going to end?" And you also saw how Americans were so excited that the war ended the way is was ended without using Operation Downfall.
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