Did the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki really end the war?
This Sunday marks the 72nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, followed three days later by the bombing of Nagasaki.
The bombings have long been justified as an ethical choice in decisively ending the Second World War — but it’s not entirely clear that they did
To their dying day, there were senior White House officials who believed the bombings were unnecessary
Surprisingly, there was no shortage of men in the president’s inner circle who objected to atomic bombs being used against Japan. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff even called them “barbarous.” But one of the most poignant critics was John McCloy, the assistant Secretary of War. Early plans for the end of the war had demanded unconditional surrender for Japan, save for one concession: The country would be able to retain its emperor as a powerless figurehead. However, this was later struck from surrender terms presented to Japan before the bombing. As men like McCloy would learn after the U.S. had occupied Japan, the issue of emperor retention was indeed a key reason driving Japanese holdout. “I believe we missed the opportunity of effecting a Japanese surrender, completely satisfactory to us, without the necessity of dropping the bombs,” McCloy was quoted as saying in Deadline, a book published two years after his death.
The bombings coincided with one of the largest invasions in history
On Aug. 9, just three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, as many as 1.6 million Soviet troops launched a surprise attack on Japanese positions in Manchuria. For comparison, D-Day involved 150,000 troops. Across a 4,400-km front, the war-hardened Red Army utterly steamrolled through Japanese defences — and within two weeks Soviet landing craft had begun hitting islands off the Japanese coast. When Imperial Japan came to the United States to talk surrender, they weren’t just facing nuclear bombs, they were staring down an unstoppable communist juggernaut that was just as ambivalent about death as they were.
But by 1945, the U.S. military had gradually become numb to the task of wiping Japanese cities off the map. More than 60 Japanese cities were hit by firebombing attacks, including a massive March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo that easily outstripped Hiroshima or Nagasaki for death toll, destruction and general horror. “In that single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo: men, women, and children,” said Robert McNamara in the 2003 film The Fog of War.
However, talk of peace had been buzzing around Tokyo for weeks until the bombings. American cryptographers reading Japanese military communications reported that as early as July 13 Hirohito seemed to have “personally intervened and brought his will to bear in favour of peace.”
Did the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki really end the war? | National Post