Hiroshima: A Real Decision

My great retirement-from-retirement plan not having worked out, I was idly surfing the net reading about the apparent and "surprising" "resurgence" of AQ (will post more on that), when I re-encountered Joe Biden's fawning adoration of Obama's decision on the Osama take down. He labelled Obama's decision, which he took after thinking it over for 16 hours, something like the greatest decision ever or at least the most "audacious plan " in the last 500 years. Right, Joe, right. The Greatest and Most Audacious Plan Since, Since, Since . . . . Well, EVER!

Given today's date, August 6, I couldn't help but think about another decision made by a US president: the decision to go ahead with the atomic bombing of Japan.

The plain-speaking, non-charismatic Truman, a little known Senator and party hack who by almost any political calculus never would have been President, proved a smart, tough and decisive man. He came to power as the war in Europe was wrapping up, but the war in the Pacific was dragging on. The US Navy--including the most successful submarine warfare campaign in history--and the Marines had cut-off Japan from the outside world; the US Army Air Force was taking Japan's cities apart, block by block; and while Japan could not hope to attain anything approaching a victory, it still seemed highly unlikely, almost impossible to imagine the Japanese surrendering without an Allied invasion of the home islands.

Allied planners estimated that the invasion of Japan, "Operation Downfall," would produce AT LEAST 1.2 million American casualties, about one-fourth in deaths; unofficial Navy estimates, which extrapolated from the casualty rates on Iwo Jima and Okinawa,  put American losses considerably higher, with perhaps 800,000 dead--and that did not include the deaths of British, Australian, and other allied forces that would participate in the invasion. Japanese losses were estimated at ten to twelve million; American military leaders were pushing for the use of gas against the Japanese as a means to reduce the Allied body count. There, of course, was no guarantee that the invasion would succeed, and no one could tell how long the battle would go on in Japan--maybe months, maybe years.  The legacy would be a horrid one, indeed.

Truman decided to try to avoid all that horror, and gave the green light to the dropping of the atomic bomb. The risks were enormous. The bombs, which had never been tested as bombs, might fail; we only had enough material for at most three; and, of course,the Japanese might still refuse to surrender even after two or three such atomic attacks.

The first bomb, of course, was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the second on Nagasaki three days later, killing outright a total of something over 100,000 persons. Japan surrendered soon after, but not before some die-hard officers sought to launch a coup to prevent the Emperor from announcing the surrender. In the brutal arithmetic of war, that was a cheap price to pay for an end to the conflict.

Now that was a decision. Obama cannot hold a candle to that one.

WLA