Truman and Hiroshima

Tomorrow is the 75^th anniversary  of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. There likely will be more than the usual amount of superficial second guessing and pious anti-American hand wringing in the traditional media.

 There are also serious second guessers – historians and military officers who wonder whether Truman made the right decision. I think he did, and that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the least costly way to end the war, not only for Americans but also for the Japanese. In the summer of 1945 there were still millions of men and thousands of airplanes available to the Japanese to defend the home islands from invasion and determination to use them. I have read that Japanese officers estimated that an invasion could be stopped at a cost of ten million dead Japanese soldiers and civilians. After the slaughter on Iwo Jima and on and in the waters around Okinawa,  American officers projected numbers of American casualties in an invasion ranging from several hundred thousand to a million.  In addition to that the Japanese are said to have planned  to murder the thousands of allied prisoners of war in camps around the Pacific when their homeland was invaded.  While one cannot be sure that there was not something other than dropping the atomic bombs which might have led the Japanese to surrender without being invaded, it is interesting to note that after the atomic bombs fell and the Japanese decided to surrender, there was an attempted coup in Tokyo to cancel the surrender and continue the war.  

My father was a Republican, but Harry Truman was a  Democrat he always thought well of.  He was a crew member on transport planes in World War II. He told me that in 1945 his unit was stationed in Hawaii and was scheduled to drop paratroopers during the invasion of Japan.  It was expected that during the invasion the Japanese would try to stop incoming allied planes by crashing kamikaze planes flown by inexperienced pilots into them as they reached Japan. So I  along with a great many other boomers have a personal interest in Truman’s decision to use the bomb. Without it a lot of us might never have been here at all.