re: #187 Bear

Pres Truman “saved my a**” authorizing dropping the Bomb. Was in one of the four Divisions scheduled to hit the beach in Japan.

My late father was in the US Navy, and would’ve participated in an invasion of the Japanese islands. He was a torpedo bomber pilot.

His view of the atomic bombs: As terrible as they were, and as much as they summoned in a dread new era of warfare, they ultimately saved more lives then they took, both American and Japanese. As he put it to me, “Think how many millions of Japanese would’ve been killed in an invasion of the Japanese home islands - in the end, it was worth it. A lot of Japanese alive today would never have been born if we [the US] hadn’t dropped those bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

A cold equation, if you will.

He was also the first to tell me, at a young age, the the USSR’s declaration of war on Japan on August 9th 1945 had as much to do with the Emperor’s decision to surrender as the atomic bombs. As he explained it, “Hirohito reckoned that if the Soviets occupied Japan, they’d never go home, and Japan today would be like East and West Germany is now.”

On the other hand, my dad was of the opinion that Hirohito should’ve been prosecuted for war crimes. Not sentenced to death - but haled in front of a court. But in the end, he said MacArthur’s opinion led to the best outcome, even if he didn’t personally agree with it.