In proper context, the atomic bombs were minor blows to the Japanese. It was more a psychological attack. Only 140K are linked to the bombs directly (from the event) and indirectly (from radiation poisoning). The firebombing raids did more significant damage and loss of life... 3x-5x more deaths and square miles of destruction attributed to those attacks. Those raids specifically targeted the close packed wooden structures of the civilian population.
-john -----Original Message----- From: Jed Rothwell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 08, 2005 11:06 AM To: vortex-L@eskimo.com Subject: Re: [OT] The myths of Hiroshima Harry Veeder wrote: >it was based were historically inaccurate. For one thing, the >Smithsonian downplayed the casualties, saying only that the bombs >"caused many tens of thousands of deaths" and that Hiroshima was "a >definite military target." Hiroshima had some of largest army and navy installations in Japan. Nagasaki was and still is one of the largest shipyards in the world. The supertankers I saw under construction there dwarfed the whole downtown area. They built the superbattleship Musashi there, and recently they have constructed gigantic cruiseships, as well as wind turbines and solar cells. >Americans were also told that use of the bombs "led to the immediate >surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the >Japanese home islands." But it's not that straightforward. Nothing in history a straightforward. >As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown definitively in his new book, "Racing >the >Enemy" - and many other historians have long argued - it was the Soviet >Union's entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after the Hiroshima >bombing, that provided the final "shock" that led to Japan's capitulation. That is unquestionably true. Every surviving account of the emperor's counsel emphasizes that the Russian attack was the straw that broke the camel's back. However, whether that alone would have been sufficient, and whether they would have surrendered without the nuclear attacks is impossible to know. The final cabinet vote was a tie -- all of the civilians in favor of surrender, all of the military leaders against it. The emperor broke the tie, voting himself for the first and last time in Japanese history. My guess is that there would have been at least one or two more large battles: one in Kyushu against the US, and one in Hokkaido or Tohoku against the Russians. The Japanese still had a million trained soldiers and ungodly amounts of ammunition and fortified bunkers in Kyushu that would have survived a nuclear attack. (Everyone could see that is where the attack would come.) >The fact is that atomic bomb warning leaflets were dropped on Japanese >cities, but only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed. That is ridiculous. They dropped leaflets continuously, starting in the fall of 1944. It was one of the most effective weapons of the U.S., since the purpose of the bombing was to frighten the civilians and get them to leave the cities and stop weapons production. It worked. >The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million >lives were not saved. No one can possibly say how many lives were saved. If the war had dragged on another six months, hundreds of thousands would have starved to death. (Several thousand people starved to death after the surrender, including ~20,000 Japanese P.O.W.s in Southeast Asia, who were half dead when they surrendered.) The invading Russians would have killed hundreds of thousands more, as they did in Manchuria. >The bomb was dropped, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of >the Manhattan Project, said in November 1945, on "an essentially >defeated enemy." No one disputes that. The problem was, even though they were defeated they did not want to stop fighting. Roughly 2 million Japanese people had been killed, or 3% of the population. But they might have fought on and lost another 7 million people (10% of the population). During WWII, Germany lost 7 million people (9%) and Russia lost 25.5 million (13%). In the U.S. Civil War, the Union states lost 1.4% of the population and the Confederacy lost 2.5%. There have been wars in modern history in Central America in which half the male population was killed off, and medieval European wars which depopulated entire fiefdoms. >And they used it on Aug. 6 even though they had agreed among themselves >as >they returned home from the Potsdam Conference on Aug. 3 that the Japanese >were looking for peace. They could hardly disagree about that! The Japanese government was sending them cables asking for peace, and they were tapping and decoding the Japanese ambassador's correspondence from Moscow to Tokyo. The only issue was the terms of the peace. The Japanese did not want to surrender their colonies, allow an occupation, war crimes trials, any change in the status of the emperor, or any changes to their constitution or government. (They were willing to surrender their military forces and leave China.) Within days after the bombing, many columnists and opinion makers began to speculate that the real reason the US dropped the bomb was to send a message to Moscow. I have read many of Truman's papers, biographies and the books that he himself wrote and I have not found a one sentence to back this up. Truman described his motivations and actions in detail. If he had felt this way he would have said so. He was a hard-line cold warrior. He did not hesitate to go to war in Korea. There is no question he was willing to sacrifice lives in the fight against communism: American, Koreans and Chinese lives, and Japanese lives too. He summed up his own views about Hiroshima many years after the war with a single sentence, a quote from Macbeth: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." That seems like an excellent summary to me. That pretty much describes all wars. - Jed
