We didn’t need to drop the bomb — and even our WW II military icons knew it

[polly7]

59. We didn’t need to drop the bomb — and even our WW II military icons knew it

It is possible to go down the line and find similar views among most of the top World War II military figures. Many of those who had access to secret intelligence showing Japan’s desperate attempts to end the war were deeply disturbed by the bombing. Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet stated publicly two months after Hiroshima: “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war.” “The atomic bomb,” he stated “played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan….”

A contemporaneous May 29, 1945 memorandum by Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy also shows that America’s top military leader, General George C. Marshall, “thought these weapons might first be used against straight military objectives such as a large naval installation and then if no complete result was derived from the effect of that, he thought we ought to designate a number of large manufacturing areas from which the people would be warned to leave—telling the Japanese that we intend to destroy such centers…”

As the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima approached in 1985, former President Richard Nixon reported that “[General Douglas] MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf. He thought it a tragedy that the bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants…MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off…”

Modern debates over the decision to use the atomic bomb without warning against a predominantly civilian target would also do well to include reminders that President Truman was advised well before Hiroshima that a Red Army declaration of War against Japan, planned at U.S. request for the first week of August, together with assurances for the Japanese Emperor, would bring an end to the war long before even the first stage landing of an invasion might occur three months later on the Island of Kyushu (and long before any possible general invasion in the spring of 1946.) There was plenty of time to use the bombs if the recommended strategy failed (and it had already been decided in any case to keep the Emperor to help control Japan after the war.)