V-J Day, Hiroshima, and Nagaski

[See UPDATE below.]

Two months ago, we celebrated the 70th anniversary of V-E Day, the end of the war in Europe.  I wrote a post, then, about V-E Day from the view of a wife whose husband was fighting in the Pacific.  We are now reaching the 70th anniversary of V-J Day, i.e., victory over Japan on August 15*.  We will see what is said about that.

Before that, however, we have the 70th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9).  I have written about this subject before (here and here), so I will keep my comments short.

First, one of the better articles I have read about President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan was in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.  You can, hopefully, find it here.  If that link does not work, try searching on the complete title of the article: “Watching the Atomic Bomb Blast as a POW Near Nagasaki”.

I think this article is particularly useful because it addresses the key question:  Was it necessary to drop the atomic bombs?  Many people, including military men such as General Dwight Eisenhower, thought it wasn’t.  Looking at what they saw as the situation, they did not think Japan could have gone on.  Japan was beaten and would have had to surrender even without the atomic bombs.  But this article, as others have, points out the difference that so many people miss: Japan, the Japanese leaders and the Japanese people, did not think like we did.  Maybe we would not have gone on under the circumstances Japan faced, maybe even Adolf Hitler’s Germany would not have gone on under those circumstances, but that does not mean Japan, before the bombs, was going to quit.

The Japanese thought differently than we did.  Their views and their values were different than ours.  That is what people like General Eisenhower did not understand, perhaps because they had not been fighting Japan. [See FURTHER UPDATE below.]

How many tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of not just casualties, but deaths should Harry Truman have accepted by deciding not to drop the bombs?  In my mind, the question answers itself.  The number of casualties in Hiroshima and Nagaski were less than what have resulted from not dropping the bombs.  If you doubt that, look at what Emperor Hirohito said, and how he said it, even after the dropping of the bombs.  The language evidences a country that was convinced to give up only by the sudden and terrible costs of the atomic bombs.  The same number of casualties, even a much larger number of casualties, coming slower, over a longer period of time, would very possibly have not resulted in surrender, but merely continued fighting.

President Truman did what he had to do.  America did what it had to do.  V-J Day is a day for celebration just as great and just as true as V-E Day was two months ago.
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* V-J Day is also said to be August 14 (it was August 14 in the United States when Emperor Hirihito announced Japan’s surrender) and September 2 (the day the surrender was signed on the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay).

UPDATE (8/28/15 1:50 pm): This is embarrassing.  I just realized that I misspelled "Nagasaki" not only in the body of this post, but also in the title.  I have corrected the spelling in the body of the post.  I cannot change the title without causing some issues.  Therefore, I will post a link to this now-corrected article in a new post with the title spelled correctly. 
FURTHER UPDATE (8/5/20 9:25 pm): In re-reading this post, I realized that I needed to add "because" in the fifth paragraph to get the meaning right.