THE A-BOMBS SAVED MANY, MANY MORE LIVES THAN THEY TOOK

Had it not been for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war in the Pacific would have continued with an estimated 400,000 American deaths resulting from the invasion of Japan and with millions of Japanese civilians killed. I have always been thankful to President Harry Truman for ordering the A-bomb attacks because they probably saved my bacon.

THE DATE
By William Katz

politicalmavens.com
August 6, 2013

I always get a chill when I write today’s date, August 6th. To young Americans it may mean nothing. But to those of us of a certain age, it is the anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima in 1945.

I bring it up in part because we’re told that the current terror alert is linked to important dates on the Muslim calendar. Well, this is an important date on the American calendar, and one that is still used against us by leftist groups both East and West. I’ve always worried that it could be used as the date of a terror attack, just to provide another chance to portray America as the nuclear monster.

The1945 attack has always been controversial, although the controversy has died down in recent years as it became clear that President Truman had little choice other than to use the awful weapon to try to end World War II quickly. In that he succeeded. It is easily forgotten that 1945 was the bloodiest year of the war, with this country taking unspeakable casualties in the Pacific, on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The new president, who had assumed his office upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12th, was confronted with the possibility of invading Japan, with probably hundreds of thousands of more American deaths, and millions of Japanese fatalities.

In addition, a million people a month were dying in China, part of which was occupied by Japan.

And fighting continued in the Philippines.

Some have argued that a peace faction was in place in Japan, and that we could have negotiated an end to the war. But the peace faction had no real power. It was the military who made the decisions, and they were willing to fight to what they considered an honorable death. We later learned that the Japanese government intended to arm the civilian population with sharpened sticks, with which hordes of Japanese would rush the invasion beaches.

The bomb was ghastly. But continuing the war would have been far worse. President Truman made the correct decision, as horrible as the immediate effects were.