JOSH HAMMER: America Must Never Apologize for Dropping the Bombs on Japan.
Critics often portray Truman’s decision as an act of monstrous brutality — a flex of raw military might by a sadistic and trigger-happy superpower. But such characterizations, drenched in presentist moral narcissism, do a grave disservice to the reality on the ground and the countless lives Truman undoubtedly saved. They are also a grave disservice to the memory of all those killed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Carlson and his fellow ultra-pacifists should visit Pearl Harbor and stand over the sunken USS Arizona, the final resting place of more than 900 sailors and marines. One can still see and smell the oil leaking from the ships, all these decades later; it is an extraordinary experience.
Shocking sensory intakes aside, the sober reality is that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no matter how morbid and macabre, were strategically and morally correct.
When Truman authorized the use of the atomic bombs, he faced a truly appalling alternative: a full-scale land invasion of Japan. Operation Downfall, the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands, had projected American and Japanese casualties potentially reaching as high as a million lives each. The Imperial Japanese, steeped in a kamikaze warrior ethos, had proven time and again — at Iwo Jima, Okinawa and elsewhere — that they would fight to the last man, woman and child. Schoolchildren were being trained to attack American troops with sharpened bamboo sticks. Fighting to the death was not mere speculation; it was core Imperial Japanese doctrine.
If the A-bombs weren’t dropped, VDH notes that there was another horrific option available to the US, either in addition to a massed invasion of Japan, or instead of it. Curtis LeMay was ready to firebomb many more Japanese cities with a combination of his fleet of B-29s and the bombers sitting idle in Europe after VE-Day. (Fast-forward to the 44:00 minute mark if this YouTube clip doesn’t automatically start there):