by dropping those two nukes, give them this. It's a PDF of 'Thank God for the Atomic Bomb', and explains why.
And you might note to them that, due to findings after the surrender of the Japanese having more planes(being set up as kamikaze) and first-line troops(fully equipped) in the home islands, the earlier casualty count estimates had to be upped. Drastically.
One note:
On the other hand, John Kenneth Galbraith is persuaded that the Japanese
would have surrendered surely by November without an invasion. He thinks
the A-bombs were unnecessary and unjustified because the war was ending
anyway. The A-bombs meant, he says, “a difference, at most, of two or three
weeks.” But at the time, with no indication that surrender was on the way,
the kamikazes were sinking American vessels, the Indianapolis was sunk
(880 men killed), and Allied casualties were running to over 7,000 per week.
“Two or three weeks,” says Galbraith.
Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed and wounded, three weeks
more, 21,000. Those weeks mean the world if you’re one of those thousands or related to one of them. During the time between the dropping of the
Nagasaki bomb on August 9 and the actual surrender on the fifteenth, the
war pursued its accustomed course: on the twelfth of August eight captured
American fliers were executed (heads chopped off); the fifty-first United
States submarine, Bonefish, was sunk (all aboard drowned); the destroyer
Callaghan went down, the seventieth to be sunk, and the Destroyer Escort
Underhill was lost. That’s a bit of what happened in six days of the two or
three weeks posited by Galbraith. What did he do in the war? He worked
in the Office of Price Administration in Washington. I don’t demand that he
experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn’t.
3 comments:
No. The Japanese were not going to ever accept unconditional surrender. They were pushing, at the time the bombs dropped, an agenda that included returning to antebellum status, that is, all of their pre-WWII possessions returned. That includes Guam, Iwo Jima, Saipain, Tinian, the Marshall islands, the Gilbert islands, Korea...
At the same time they were willing to discuss conditional surrender, they were arming and preparing defenses that were already formidable. A new wave of kamikaze boats, guided torpedoes, planes, lots and lots of artillery and tanks and mines and chemical and biological weapons were all prepared for the Invasion.
Conditional surrender would have been the worse thing for both the US and Japan. The best thing that ever happened to them was they lost unconditionally. Finally the modern shoguns of the military, that had ruled the country since the fall of the last Shogun, had been broken and civilians actually got to take charge of the country for once.
The japanese still had 60,000 troops on rabaul, entire armies in manchuria and other parts of china. We whipped them where we fought them but there were still a couple of million japanese soldiers outside of japan that we would still had to fight without the atom bombs. It was far from over on august 5, 1945
Find a history book available in 1945, turn to the last page, look for the section that explained how the war turned out.
There are so many people who simply cannot wrap their heads around the fact that no one knew how this was going to end.
Too many people today keep saying, 'well obviously the allies would win..." as if it was all preordained.
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