Truman Was Right to Drop Atomic Bomb

From Chuck Sweeny, at the Rockford Register Star:

Friday was “Hiroshima Day,” when people of the peace movement give speeches condemning the Americans who killed 140,000 people when President Truman ordered the A-bomb dropped over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and another 80,000 on Aug. 9, when he OK’d a second bomb released over Nagasaki.

They’re entitled to their opinion. But for me, Friday was “Harry Truman Day.” I am grateful to the “buck stops here” president who saved a million Americans and millions more Japanese by dropping two A-bombs.

Without Truman’s forceful action, I probably would not be here. The day the war ended in the Pacific, Aug. 15, 1945, Fay C. Sweeny, the American lieutenant who would become my father, was on the SS Monterey, a ship of the Matson Line headed to the Philippines from Europe. He had recently finished slogging through France and Germany to help end the “Thousand Year Reich.”

I have the ship’s newsletter framed in my rec room. The headline reads, “War is Over!” Dad wrote the latitude and longitude of the ship’s position when the end came. All on board knew one thing, he told me years later.

They would not have to invade Japan and die.

“Operation Downfall” was planned to start in October 1945. Dad told me the War Department estimated more than 1 million Americans would be killed or wounded. Tens of millions of Japanese would die, for they had vowed to fight to the death. This included civilians committing mass suicide, something U.S. Marines had witnessed on a small scale in their island-hopping campaign in the South Pacific.

That's fascinating. (More at the link.)

Also, from previously, "Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947.