August 6 is not a day that will live in infamy

The decision to drop the bomb saved lives!

Today is August 6, the 78th anniversary of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. 

The Christopher Nolan movie Oppenheimer likely has inspired its viewers to explore more history of this momentous event. The Head Groundskeeper dipped into the Dan Quayle Memorial Library to take another look at David McCullough’s masterful biography, Truman.

The historian reveals that Eisenhower originally opined against using the atomic bomb on Hiroshima but admitted he had not studied the issue. Those who advocated a non-lethal demonstration were countered by arguments that if the bomb turned out to be a dud, Japan’s resolve would only be strengthened. The allies could warn Japan that it was about to strike a given city, but then the Japanese would move our POWs to the target. A demonstration bomb could not cause enough devastation. Oppenheimer himself cautioned that witnesses would see only “an enormous nuclear firecracker detonated at great height doing little damage.”

These excerpts from McCullough’s Truman:

About mid-morning, [Secretary of War] Henry Stimson came in looking extremely excited. A second cable from [his Manhattan Project assistant] had arrived during the night:

Doctor had just returned most enthusiastic and confident oath the little boy is as husky as his big brother. The light in his yes discernible from here to Highhold nand I could have heard his screams from here to my farm.

The decoding officer at the Army message center had been amazed assuming the elderly Secretary of War [then 78] had become a new father. Stimson explained the cable to Truman. The flash at Alamogodo had been visible for 250 miles (the distance from Washington to Highly, Stimson’s estate on Long Island), the sound carrying 50 miles (the distance to Harrison’s farm in Virginia.)

Before noon on Saturday, July 21, Stimson received by special courier the eagerly awaited report from General Groves. … The report described how the steel from the tower had evaporated and the greenish cast of the pulverized dirt in a crater more than 1,000 feet in diameter. All three men felt an overwhelming sense of relief — that so much time and effort, that so vast an investment of money and roursources had not been futile. it wa snot just ate $2 billion had been spent but that it wass $2 billion that could have been used for the war effort in other ways. …

Some critics and historians in years to come would argue that Japan was already finished by this time, just as Eisenhower had said and as several intelligence reports indicated. Japan’s defeat, however, was not the issue. It was Japan’s surrender that was so desperately wanted, since every day Japan did not surrender meant the killing continued. … In the three months since Truman took office, American battle casualties in the Pacific were nearly half the total from three years of war in the Pacific. The nearer victory came, the heavier price in blood. …

“We had only too abundant evidence in those days that surrender was excluded from the Japanese ethos,” remembered a captain in Military Intelligence. “thousands of our Marines and soldiers had died rooting Japanese from their foxholes and bnunkers when they were perfectly aware that their situation was hopeless.:

During the whole war, not a single Japanese unit had surrendered. …

Nor was there anything hypothetical about preparations for an invasion — on both sides — a point sometimes overlooked in later years. Truman had earlier authorized the Chiefs of Staff to move more than 1 million troops for a final attack on Japan. Thirty divisions were on the way to the pacific from the European theater. .. Japan had some 2.5 million regular troops on the home islands, but every male between the ages of fifteen and sixty, every female from 17 to 45, was being conscripted and armed with everything from ancient brass cannon to bamboo spears, taught to strap explosives to their bodies and throw themselves under advancing tanks. ….

Truman foresaw unprecedented carnage in any attempted invasion. “It occurred to me,” he would remark a few months later, “that a quarter of a million of the flower of your young manhood were worth a couple of Japanese cities.” …

Truman’s Bottom Line: And how could a President … answer to the American people when the war was over, after the bloodbath of an invasion of Japan, it became known that a weapon sufficient to end the war had been available by midsummer and was not used?

Would YOU have dropped the big one?