It was not a decision Truman made lightly as some have intimated. The fact is there were many things to consider not the least of which was the ever more fragile alliance between the three powers left: Britain, Russian and the United States. Harry Truman had a decision to make: Sacrifice the lives of possibly one million American lives (and up to half a million British – a concern to Churchill) to take the island outright, or drop the A-bomb on Hiroshima and with that one action, not only save the lives of those American servicemen but also bring Japan to heel.įurther, there was no guarantee the Russians and Stalin would enter the fray as promised-they’d delayed already by August 5th. Devastation to the Japanese mainland was quite severe and the loss of life great, but the Japanese continued to wage war as best they could despite warnings to stop and overtures for peace.įor Truman’s part, he knew of the fire bombings, and many in the war department, Henry Stimson himself, thought the war could be won that way, but Truman allowed them to continue despite the ongoing development of the A-bomb, hoping the Japanese leadership would come to its senses, but understanding that they’d probably not. With the backing of the United States government, specifically Roosevelt and Truman, the United States engaged in a campaign to burn to ash Tokyo with relentless firebombs – we’d call it napalm – for weeks leading up to the flight of the Enola Gay. There were events already taking place in Japan prior to the dropping of the bomb that are generally not mentioned in schools the fire bombing of Tokyo being the prime example. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was the catalyst for the retribution of the bomb, of that there is no question. Whether it was the Japanese invasion of China in 1932, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the German blitz over England during the Battle of Britain, or the allies indiscriminate bombing of Nuremberg or Dresden, both needless in determining the outcome of the war, but both as brutal in their effect, all sides were guilty of these events.įurthermore, when one considers the totality of the western way of war historically, that of complete destruction of the enemy being the norm rather than the exception, one can begin to understand the devastation that was World War II, and also why the West takes great pains to ensure that nothing happens again on that scale.
Carpet bombing of civilian targets was not only routine, but an integral part of war planning. The world during the Second World War was certainly much different before the war than after it, a phenomenon I refer to as the Hitlerian Effect (yes, I will be writing on that in depth in the future). The problem is that quite often pundits fail to take into account historical context, the time period, it’s morality and mores, preferring to layer on top of their studies the morality of the day in which the analysis is taking place-the cardinal sin in the study of history, and the mistake pundits, commentators, and academics alike make. It’s something that plagues historians, commentators and academics, not to mention the public One of the traps both historians and non-historians fall into is something called generational chauvinism the idea that we, in our age, know better than those in the past and therefore we can then pass judgement on those actions, usually in the negative. The loss of civilian life was tragic, with over 100,000 dying, many in the initial blast, while tens of thousand of others perished due to radiation poisoning, one of the after effects of the bomb itself. Criticism has surfaced in the modern age (post World War II) as to whether the bomb should have been dropped at all considering the loss of life and, of course, the devastation to both Hiroshima and the people that lived there. Over the decades since this event, there has been a lot of speculation as to the efficacy of President Truman’s order that initiated the atomic age. Today, August 6th, is the anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.