General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Every year, I see the same thing re Hiroshima and Nagasaki [View all]SheilaT
(23,156 posts)A couple of different universities I attended had bound issues starting with the first one, which was in November, 1936. I read them sequentially, and made it through March, 1945. It's real clear to me at that point that the war in Europe is almost over, it's just a matter of time.
In the Pacific? That's a totally different story. It's obvious that we're going to have to invade the Japanese homeland, the war there will last another year, maybe even longer, and we'll lose many thousands of American servicemen. Not to mention that the Japanese civilians will fight us to the death also, and some enormous number of them will also die. Basically, it's hard to imagine they'll surrender until nearly every soldier and most of the civilians are dead.
Someday I'll find a place that has Life magazine from those years and I'll find out exactly how the war ended.
Okay, so I really do know how the war ended, but you get the idea. Among the things I was able to figure out from reading those old Lifes was that Germany never put itself on a total war footing. Until the very end, German civilians weren't especially touched by the war. They didn't experience too much in the way of shortages, because Germany happily starved all the conquered populations so their people could eat. Japan was a totally different story. That country was 100% focussed on their war effort, and it showed. They held us off much longer than would have been thought, and were willing to do everything until the bitter end. It is possible that the second bomb did not need to be dropped. I'm no expert in what was going on in diplomatic negotiations between the two. But it does seem true that it was going to take something incredibly dramatic to persuade them to surrender.
What is truly frightening is that as living memory of the two bombs recedes, there are those who would casually drop nuclear bombs in all sorts of places. As terrible as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, they need to remain permanent reminders of why nothing like that should ever happen again.