Why
we dropped the bomb on Japan
by Ricky Zee
bart,
i have to disagree with [Phil's
column.] i'm sure there was some talk of showing Uncle Joe
Stalin
what we had, but i think the true motivation
was as simple as it seemed.
again, why not just drop it on Bikini atoll and scare the bejesus out of the Russians?
we were a nation--a world--exhausted by war and
death and sacrifice. the battle for Japan would have
been horrendous. with little more than
small arms weapons, the Japanese had made the battle for Iwa Jima
and Okinawa hell on earth. at Iwa Jima,
the last three or four thousand Japanese, having been deprived of
food and water for days, staged a banzai charge,
led by their commanding general and resulting in all their deaths.
they meant to fight to the bitter end. bayonets and sabers.
the most telling evidence of the rightness of
dropping the bomb is perhaps film footage of the young marines
at Okinawa. with Japan already cut off
from all of their empirial resources, Americans had to fight for every
square inch of the island, while the American
fleet had to withstand non-stop kamikaze attacks from thousands
of planes, human jets, and one suicidal run from
a dreadnought battleship.
at the conclusion of that battle, there is some
wonderful footage of young marines actually falling to their knees
and weeping at the news that Japan had surrendered.
these were hardened combat veterans--killers--and they
cried, almost fainting, to find out they would
not have to fight the battle of Japan.
as far as Curtis LeMay being against dropping
the bomb, i don't give that any import at all. Curtis LeMay was
a bloodthirsty, sadistic, lunatic. he enjoyed
bombing people. he believed in the disproved theory--again and again--
that strategic bombing alone can win a war.
if he objected to the dropping of the A bomb, it was only because he
felt that a premature ending of the pacific war
would deprive him of his chance to prove that he could strategically
bomb the Japanese into submission, much as the
sudden collapse of Nazi Germany had deprived him of the
opportunity to prove he could bomb the "krauts"
into surrender.
if you doubt that, look at LeMay's feelings about
the A bomb once it became the sole province of the newly
created Air Force--they swear by it! they
outfit F-16's, the nimblest, fastest fighter in the world to carry nuclear
weapons. in fact, the Air Force doesn't
want to do anything but drop nuclear weapons. that's why they won't
provide close air support for the army, and the
army needs to build all those attack helicopters. that's why the
Air Force hates the A-10, one of the greatest
close air support planes ever built--it doesn't deliver nuclear weapons.
if Curtis LeMay had control of the bomb at the end of WWII, he certainly would have advocated dropping it.
i fully believe that we dropped the bomb for the
reasons we believe we dropped the bomb. the battle of Japan
would have been the most disgusting needless
slaughter of Americans and Japanese that we can even conceive,
and that Harry Truman honestly felt that if he
did not use the bomb, history and the nation would never forgive
him for bringing a swift end to the Pacific war,
when he might have had the means.
The real reason for the bomb on Japan
Remember me? Kuma from Japan (well, Vietnam
now). I concur wholeheartedly with everything Phil wrote.
From the handful of history books I've
read, his conclusions are pretty much given. There is much that needs
to be re-taught in regards to this particular
period of history imo. We all assume the immediate conclusons made
in the wake of the victory were the accurate
ones and they have been taught a such since. But the more you
research, the more realize that a few are
inaccurate or just plain false. One of the biggest is that the Emperor
was an unwitting patsy of the militarists
and just limply went along with their warmongering.
He was very involved from the first military
actions to the last and often changed Cabinet personnel when they
disagreed with him vis a vis the conduct
of the war and the Imperial expansion. The US had to absolve him of
blame in order to maintain order and keep
Japan as a bulwark against communism in Asia. There were war
criminals in back in charge as quickly
as possible because the only legitimate oppostion left in Japan was
communist/socialist. No way the US could
have that.
And just to not pile all the blame on the
US, the Emperor himself increased the likelihood of the A-bombs by
making numerous mistakes. One glaring one
was maintaining that the Soviets (!) be their intermediary with the US.
Only when the Soviets declared war after
Hiroshima did he abandon that dream. He also always insisted that
abdication NOT be a condition of surrender,
come what may. There's more, but you get the point.
Oh yeah, one mistake Phil made: "along with
the fact that most other cities had been burned to the ground,
excepting the holy city of Kobe". Kobe
is not in a holy city (maybe for shoes), but Kyoto most certainly is
and it was that city that was spared.
kuma