While I won’t even discuss the fact that the surrender Japan offered in May/June 1945 was identical to the surrender Japan was given AFTER the atomic bombs were dropped on civilian (not military) targets, it is what the public believed in August 1945 that ticks me off the most, that 85% approved the use of atomic weapons by Truman at that point in time. The wartime propaganda was most effective that is for sure, and truth had long been the first causality of that war from the outset.
While the support for these two atomic bombs has fallen to slightly less than the majority in recent years, a 2015 study showed:
… a clear majority of Americans would approve of using nuclear weapons first against the civilian population of a nonnuclear-armed adversary, even killing 2 million Iranian civilians, if they believed that such use would save the lives of 20,000 U.S. soldiers…
So human nature has changed very little indeed as once we are told another people group, defined by lines on a map, are bad .. we are quick to slaughter these people based on what the government/media has told us. Mark Twain said it best when he said:
Consider the thoughts that the military commanders of the day, who were either ready to retire or had retired had to say on the events 73 years ago this month:
Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”
Dwight Eisenhower, “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”
President Truman’s Chief of Staff, Adm. William Leahy, “It is my opinion that 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.”
So government lies to get us into wars, lies to get us out of the wars and then lies to keep their narrative intact for as long as they control the history books. We need a counter balance to this onslaught of fake news that has been around for hundreds of years, we need researchers to go to the source material to unpack the truth.
Along these lines, could Truman have been lied to as well? You might want to consider this quote:
“The World will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians..”(President Harry S. Truman in a radio speech to the Nation, August 9, 1945).
In fact, Hiroshima in 1945 had 350,000 people and was a city that had remained untouched through years of devastating air attacks on the Japanese home islands, and never figured in Bomber Command’s list of the 33 primary targets!
So in effect, the US “stalled” Japan’s surrender for months demanding “unconditional surrender”. Was this so the atomic bomb testing could still be achieved? Unconditional surrender meant to the Japanese was that the emperor, regarded by them to be divine, the direct descendant of the goddess of the sun would certainly be dethroned and probably put on trial as a war criminal and hanged, perhaps in front of his palace.
In hindsight, it was not the United States’ intention to dethrone or punish the emperor but this implicit modification of unconditional surrender was never communicated to the Japanese. In the end after Nagasaki, Washington DC acceded to the Japanese desire to keep the dynasty and even to retain Hirohito as emperor.
Could “miscommunication” have cost 200,000 people and hundreds of thousands more radiation poisoning effects for life? The US has NEVER apologized for the dropping of these two lethal bombs.