[ad_1]
Regarding the May 18 news article “Japan to tout nuclear disarmament at Hiroshima summit”:
Historians might debate whether the atomic bombing of Japan was necessary to secure its surrender, but U.S. military leaders in World War II did not. Their consensus was no, if Emperor Hirohito was permitted a titular role in a post-surrender Japanese government. President Harry S. Truman accepted that idea, but only after atomic bombs had been dropped.
Adm. William D. Leahy elaborated: “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. … My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, later president, recalled his thinking when informed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson that atomic bombs would be dropped on Japan: “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and the dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”
The military colleagues of Leahy and Eisenhower echoed their views, a fact confirmed by overwhelming documentary evidence meticulously compiled in “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” by Gar Alperovitz.
[ad_2]
Source link
