@rainbowdazzleprimaryaccount replied:
killing civilians was of course abhorrent but without an end to the war, and Japan was not going to surrender, millions more would have died. I wish we could have ended the war without creating the horror of nuclear war but i honestly dunno how that would have been accomplished
You know, I was also taught this version of the history of the atomic bombings when I was growing up: that the only alternative to the bombings would have been a full-on U.S. invasion of Japan with projected military and civilian death tolls much higher than the numbers of civilians who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That there was no other way to end the war. But it turns out there is a good deal of historical evidence against this claim.
You may be interested in this recent Los Angeles Times article, which makes the case that the bombings were not necessary to end the war and that most of the U.S. military leadership as well as the President knew it. Feel free to check out the whole article, but I will just try and summarize its main arguments:
1) A main obstacle to ending the war was the fact that the U.S. was not willing to negotiate a surrender with the Japanese that would have guaranteed the safety of their Emperor (who had profound cultural and religious status); instead the U.S. demanded unconditional surrender. If the U.S. administration had been less intransigent on this point, they could have ended the war. Japanese leaders were prepared to negotiate a surrender in the summer of 1945, before the bombs dropped. Both Japanese and U.S. documents from the summer of 1945 offer evidence in support of this view.
2) The entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan and the Soviet attack on the Japanese army in Manchuria on August 8th did more to convince the Japanese that they had to surrender immediately than the atomic bombs did. Once the Soviets entered the Pacific War and opened up a second fighting front, the Japanese surrender became inevitable, and both President Truman and the U.S. generals were aware of this.
3) Most leading U.S. WWII generals, including Eisenhower and MacArthur, are on the record as stating that the bombs were not necessary and should not have been used.
To quote directly from the article:
Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur and Henry “Hap” Arnold and Admirals William Leahy, Chester Nimitz, Ernest King, and William Halsey are on record stating that the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both.
No one was more impassioned in his condemnation than Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff. He wrote in his memoir “that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender …. In being the first to use it we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”
MacArthur thought the use of atomic bombs was inexcusable. He later wrote to former President Hoover that if Truman had followed Hoover’s “wise and statesmanlike” advice to modify its surrender terms and tell the Japanese they could keep their emperor, “the Japanese would have accepted it and gladly I have no doubt.”
Before the bombings, Eisenhower had urged at Potsdam, “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
Now, I will just conclude by saying that, even if the atomic bombs had actually been the only alternative to a more deadly invasion, it would still be important to acknowledge that deliberately targeting tens of thousands of non-combatant men, women, and children would still have been a war crime. But as you can see, there is enough evidence to cast very serious doubt on the idea that the bombs were required to end the war. One last quote from the article:
While a majority of Americans may not be familiar with this history, the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., states unambiguously on a plaque with its atomic bomb exhibit: “The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria … changed their minds.” But online the wording has been modified to put the atomic bombings in a more positive light — once again showing how myths can overwhelm historical evidence.
