The Defeat of Japan Was Anything but Inevitable. Dropping the Bomb Was the Right Thing to Do

Screw the fascist leftists attacking the U.S. for defending its interests in August 1945. The numbers from the Battle of Okinawa are enough to justify the bombing alone. And remember, women and children were being armed with bamboo spears. The home islands were prepared to fight to the last. Is that what leftists want? Is that what they would have preferred? Millions of Japanese would have died, to say nothing of the quarter-million Americans who would have been killed in the invasion.

Realism. It's what's for dinner.

An outstanding essay, from Francis Pike, at the San Diego Union-Tribune, "Rethinking ‘The Bomb’ 70 years later":

Was dropping the “A” bomb moral, and did the technology it demonstrated make American victory in the Pacific war inevitable?

In the postwar period, some commentators have averred the United States need not have dropped an atomic bomb. They argue that it was only dropped to demonstrate American power to the Soviets and that it could have been demonstrated on unoccupied land. Furthermore, it is suggested that the bombing of a civilian city was a war crime. In other words, it was an unconscionable and immoral act.

Some contemporaneous commentators such as Adm. William Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Chester Nimitz, Gen. “Hap” Arnold and Adm. Bull Halsey thought the use of the atomic bomb was barbarous and unnecessary. These views are not convincing; the Japanese government in August 1945 was a very long way from accepting the unconditional surrender both President Franklin Roosevelt and his successor, Harry Truman, had demanded, and which the vast majority of Americans supported. Time and again, the U.S. military had been proved wrong in its anticipation of a Japanese surrender.

Japanese diplomats may have been keen to call time on Japan’s military adventurism but the die-hards were still intent on victory. Even after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war, Japan’s war minister, Gen. Korechika Anami, suggested, “Would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” Japan’s ultranationalist army leaders had built a death cult that was incomprehensible to Western logic.

Waiting for American soldiers on the shores of Japan’s four main islands were 2.5 million troops plus a vast civilian reserve. Japan had assembled a force of 11,000 planes and thousands of suicide boats to thwart the American invasion and Adm. Onishi, the main architect of the kamikaze campaign, believed victory on land was possible “if we are prepared to sacrifice 20 million Japanese lives.”

As some 12,000 Americans had been killed at the Battle of Okinawa when faced with just 80,000 Japanese troops, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff realistically estimated that the conquest of mainland Japan would cost 267,000 U.S. lives. Meanwhile, the War Department estimated up to 800,000 dead – more than double the American deaths in Europe in World War II. Japanese casualties, based on the universal refusal of their troops to surrender, were estimated at 3 million dead plus 5 million to 10 million civilians.

Presented with these forbidding numbers, no president of a democratically elected country could have spurned the use of the atomic bomb. Not using the bomb would have been greeted with utter incomprehension by nearly all Americans. As Secretary of War Henry Stimson observed, “No man … could have failed to use it [the A-bomb] and afterward have looked his countrymen in the face.”

For the GIs about to ship out to Japan, it was a reprieve. As Paul Fussell, a 21-year-old officer recalled, “We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.”

Furthermore, with only two atomic bombs available, a demonstration could not be afforded. Lastly, while the conspiracy theorists are adamant the bomb was used as a deterrent to the Soviet Union, the reality was that at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, President Truman was urging Stalin to attack Japan so that America alone would not bear the burden of its defeat....

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