The Real Reason We Bombed Japan

[MADem]

37. I had family members at sea steaming towards Japan, and

part of the task force surrounding Japan towards the end of the war. Everyone had already written their farewell letters and prepared their last wills. Many of them wouldn't have come home had there been a protracted battle for Japan.

It was really not a question of how many would die, at the end of the day, but how those deaths would be distributed. "Better thee than me" was certainly the prevailing attitude.

And, of course, there were other factors at play. Proof of concept had been demonstrated at Trinity; USA wanted to let other actors know that they'd worked out the kinks and were able to produce operational models of this brand new weapon, that they hoped would be the Ultimate Deterrence. Alas, the best laid plans...! The people who developed Fat Man and Little Boy certainly were prosecuting an agenda beyond the war, but the bottom line is that we had those tools in the toolbox and we had a "test bed" that needed to be neutralized. The population was warned, in fact, many of the victims were not Japanese citizens at all, but captured Korean slaves.

I find the finger-pointing and retrospective "blame" about those two weapons deployments just absurd. Revisionist history, guilting, blaming. We didn't ask for that fight, but we stepped up and did the rotten, shitty job. And when it was all done, we could have been total assholes to a decimated population, but we weren't. You got it, Toyota--Japan is a much better nation today than it was in that era, an ally to us, and our post-war conduct had much to do with that.