The B-29 "Enola Gay" climbs away as the mushroom cloud of the first Atomic Bomb bellows above the doomed city of Hiroshima, August 6th, 1945.
August 8, 1945, Russia finally joined the Allies and declared war on Japan. Despite that and the atomic bombing of Hiroshime, the Japanese still did not surrender. By 10:00 that same night, a second atomic bomb was placed in a B-29 Superfortress named Bock's Car which released its atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
The US unilateral atomic attack on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and later Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, may or may have not have pushed Japan's government into surrendering "unconditionally" ending the Second World War. Actually, Japanese historianswill tell you that fear of the USSR and a verbal promise from the US State Department coming after six months of back channel negotiations to end the war did the trick. The Japanese government would surrender as long as the Emperor of Japan could keep his throne. A verbal promise from the US Secretary of State's office was the "condition" that allowed the Japanese to surrender "unconditionally" to the Americans. A promise trusted may have had more power than atomic bombs to end the war.
Nagasaki Nuked
Please don't tell this version of history to most of our fellow Americans especially the conservative ones because they will consider this pure blasphemey . Their simple version of history avoids this Japanese view because it makes a myth out of that favored American excuse for using atomic weapons on defenseless cities: we dropped the bomb to end the war sooner. We committed an evil to preempt a greater evil. Two cities teeming with civilians and refugees, of little or no military significance, must be sacrificed in an atomic terror attack. We aimed to terrorize the Japanese government into surrendering; otherwise, without the atomic bombs the US would have been forced to invade the Japanese home islands with conventional weapons and armies, turning Japan into a huge Iwo Jima. A graveyard for millions. That's right! America saved lives by killing them.
Fire Bombing by conventional air fleets
Strange that the Japanese did not surrender until nearly a month after both cities were nuclear toast. If atomic bombs were so terrifying a weapon why did they not lay down their arms immediately? The fire bombing of cities like Tokyo did far more damage and killed more civilians than did these primitive Atomic Bombs. The Japanese view is that more than one factor weighed on their decision to give up the fight and the atom bombing of the last two cities of Japan virtually left standing after two years of Fire Bombing by more conventional air fleets may not have been the priority factor. The survival of Hirohito's monarchy and the imminent invasion of the northern home island of Hokkaido by Soviet forces may have been of greater concern. The Japanese cabinet feared their country would be divided and occupied by Russian communists just like Germany.
Stalin would have been more than happy to sacrifice millions of his own Soviet troops in order to gain even more Japanese territory than that which was already promised him.[The Kurile Islands shall be handed over to the Soviet Union as well as The Southern half of Sakhalin Islandwhich had been forcibly delivered to Japan by treaty after the embarrasing defeat of the defeat of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905]. As was expected the USSR did indeed invade Japan after Germany was defeated as was the agreement Stalin had made with Roosevelt and Churchill at the Yalta Conference. Thus the Japanese government delivered their country to a US promise as soon as it was given, weeks after the atomic bombs fell.
In 1945 the USSR not only regained all over the territory it had lost to Japan after being defeated 40 years earlier in the Russo-Japanese War but also stripped Japan of the Kurile Islands.
I like most American's prefer the explanation that we were taught in school much better although it probably isn't the sole reason Japan capitulated. It's cleaner, simple. Otherwise what is the difference between Saddam Hussein gassing thousands of Kurdish civilians in Halabja in 1988, and the USA irradiating several hundred thousand Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I mean, can the good guys put their leaders in the same dock with scum like Goering, or Tojo to face charges for committing crimes against humanity?
TOKYO FIREBOMBING WOODCUT IMAGE
But don't make these claims around conservatives because they will denounce you as a traitor because in their view the Good guys cannot get the filth of their actions rubbed into their white hats. So let us find the righteous rationale. A necessary evil prosecuted to the fullest will make the world a better place for most of us.
In Hitler's warped hate-filled mind you must exterminate Communists , Jews , Gays , and the Gypsies in order to make a better world. In America's case you exterminate several hundred thousand innocent Japanese civilians to save millions more from death by invasion. In Vietnam they evolved this rational to its clearest convolution of ethics–you have to destroy a village to save it. In other words, you have to destroy Japanese cities with atomic bombs to save the Japanese. Here at home our Government destroys drug users in order to save them from themselves. How many must die in Iraq to make it a better place ? Do we have to likewise destroy Iran to save Iran.
Nosecone Painting on one of todays modern US Bombers
Did America use the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to forestall a greater slaughter of innocents if a conventional invasion of the Japanese home islands had gone forward as planned for October 1945. US military planners anticipated a death toll of at least a million US and 20 million Japanese. All were saved by the Bomb and its incineration of an estimated 214,000 citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-the last two major metropolitan centers of Japan, I might add, left intact. Why where these cities left intact? It makes one wonder if they were preserved to meet a special fate, to become a testing ground of mortar, wood, flesh and bone to see exactly what the "new weapons" could do.
Video clip of a Nuked Hiroshima
We all know that it was the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended WW II in the Pacific. We all know that the USSR only entered the Pacific War when Japan had already lost heart, and that the Soviet advance was a farcical beating of an already dead enemy.
Tokyo Fire Bomb Air Raid : In their desperate escape from fire and intense heat, many jumped in nearby rivers. But not many were successful to live through, as they had no choice of either being drowned or burned to death while smolder of fire scaffle across the surface of the river.
Well, according to Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, who has spent decades reading the debates that swirled through the US, Soviet and Japanese elites during the last days of the war, much of what we all think we know about the leadup to VJ Day is simply wrong. Hasegawa's research shows that the Soviet Union's invasion of Manchuria was a far greater shock to the Japanese High Command: ":the Soviet entry into the [Pacific] war played a greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender."
Nagasaki after being Nuked by the A-Bomb attack
Tokyo After Firebomb Raid
Atomic Bombs vs Fire bombing I guess they both are equally bad if you get bombed by either one your toast so who really knows what all of the exact reasons were for using the Atom Bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe our military wanted to flex it's muscles after all the USSR didn't yet have the bomb.
One thing that we do know for certain is the fact that Japan did attack us first and unlike today we were the good guys during World War Two even if we didn't have to use the Atomic Bomb. The American people were tired of the war we were also losing too many troops and the Japanese were fighting fanatically. However the question remains if they were a white Christian nation would we have been so quick to drop an Atomic Bomb on them? They also treated POW's like shit and the Kamikaze suicide pilots were demoralizing our Navy. The Japanese wanted a better deal than the unconditional surrender terms that the NAZI Germans had received. They thought by holding out and making us pay dearly for every victory that we would finally allow them to surrender but not be occupied. We didn't want the USSR to have as much power in the Pacific as they already did in Europe. I would imagine that there were several factors regarding our decision to drop the Atomic Bomb on those two cities. The Japanese clearly had more than any one single reason to finally agree to our demands of their unconditional surrender. Maybe we primarily nuked them because we didn't want to share the Japanese islands with the USSR.
Today we have the Neo-cons openly not ruling out the use of a Nuclear first strike against Iran this is just pure insanity. Unlike Truman who arguably had at least some strategic reasons to drop the Atomic bombs on Japan the Neo-cons have none whatsoever. Truman also didn't realize just exactly what kind of destructive device that he suddenly had at his disposal obviously his military advisors wanted him to use this new weapon. The Neo-Cons claim that Iran is a threat to Israel and I would agree with that however Israel has 250-300 of their own nuclear bombs so they don't need us to protect them from a possible Iranian Bomb that could be decades away from even being built.
A Deadly New War ?
The New War Hawks