General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: No Choice: Why Harry Truman Dropped the Atomic Bomb on Japan [View all]Hoyt
(54,770 posts)"The top American military leaders who fought World War II, much to the surprise of many who are not aware of the record, were quite clear that the atomic bomb was unnecessary, that Japan was on the verge of surrender, andfor manythat the destruction of large numbers of civilians was immoral. Most were also conservatives, not liberals. Adm. William Leahy, President Trumans Chief of Staff, wrote in his 1950 memoir I Was There 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.
in being the first to use it, we
adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
The commanding general of the US Army Air Forces, Henry Hap Arnold, gave a strong indication of his views in a public statement only eleven days after Hiroshima was attacked. Asked on August 17 by a New York Times reporter whether the atomic bomb caused Japan to surrender, Arnold said that the Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air.
It was a mistake.... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. Adm. William Bull Halsey. Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, stated in a public address at the Washington Monument two months after the bombings that the atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan
Adm. William Bull Halsey Jr., Commander of the US Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946 that the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment
. It was a mistake to ever drop it
. [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it
"Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, for his part, stated in his memoirs that when notified by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the decision to use atomic weapons, he 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, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives
He later publicly declared
it wasnt necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Even the famous hawk Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Twenty-First Bomber Command, went public the month after the bombing, telling the press that the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all."
https://www.thenation.com/article/why-the-us-really-bombed-hiroshima/