Letter By Harry S About The Bomb

[Subdeacon Joe]

[MizPete]

I remain a fan of HST.  My Dad hated his guts for firing McArthur.

[Tell Sackett SASS 18436]

Harry did the right thing!

He saved millions of lives on BOTH sides!!

War IS hell, so best not to start one you can’t win!

[Cold Lake Kid, SASS # 51474]

By then, we had learned about the Bataan Death March, the treatment of the captured Winnipeg Rifles from Hong Kong, Camp 731 and many other atrocities as well .

In my view, if every citizen of the allied nations,  even knowing the events of the next 20 years, had a choice about the bombs falling or not, the bombs would have fallen.

[Subdeacon Joe]

2 hours ago, MizPete said:

I remain a fan of HST.  My Dad hated his guts for firing McArthur.

 

My dad and most of the men in his VFW Post were big fans of Harry S for both of those. 

[watab kid]

ive always felt the same way tell sacket does 

[watab kid]

2 hours ago, Subdeacon Joe said:

 

My dad and most of the men in his VFW Post were big fans of Harry S for both of those. 

so were most all my fathers friends at the local AMVETS club , my dad was on saipan when the bombes left tinian [next door] he said that the end of the war saved a lot of lives 

[Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984]

Later dialogs might indicate that two bombs was always the plan, at the time it was figured that we could produce a Fatman every ten days and Little Boy every month or two.

 

That would have, as Curtis Lemay once said, bombed ‘em back to the Stone Age.

 

 

Edited December 10, 2024 by Marshal Mo Hare, SASS #45984

[Chantry]

Even after both atomic bombs there were elements in the Japanese military that would have rather died as a people then surrender.

 

See the ends of the books: 

John Toland's 2 volume work 'The Rising Sun' which tells the Japanese side of the war and is based heavily on interviews with important surviving Japanese officers and politicians.  It got him the 1971 Pulitzer Prize.  Toland's wife was first generation Japanese-American and did the translating.

 

Admiral Matome Ugaki  'Fading Victory: The Diary of Admiral Matome Ugaki 1941-1945' a senior Japanese Admiral who was Yamamoto's chief of staff and wasin the other Betty bomber when Yamamoto was shot down.  He also command the Battleship Division 1 (Yamato, Musashi and Nagato during the Battle of Leyte Gulf and commanded the 5th Air Fleet until the surrender.  Disagreeing with the surrender, he flew in a Japanese dive bomber on an attempted suicide mission when he was probably shot down by US Navy anti-aircraft fire.

 

[Sedalia Dave]

JMNSHO but the atrocities committed by the Japanese was not the reason Truman decided to use the bomb. Rather it was the belief that if we tried to defeat Japan on the ground, it would have cost hundreds of thousands of American and Australian lives.

 

All one has to do is look at what it cost us to take the island of Iwo Jima. A war of attrition in the Pacific was not going to work. The cost in lives was not sustainable for the US and it was obvious that the Japanese were willing to wage a war of attrition that included every man woman and child on mainland Japan.

 

Before the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima Japan believed they could win a ground campaign by making the cost in lives unpalatable to the US. However after seeing that the US could literally bomb Japan off the face of the earth without ever setting foot on mainland they changed their tune.

 

Edited December 11, 2024 by Sedalia Dave

[DeaconKC]

Estimated casualties for an invasion were 1 million American and 4 million Japanese. The bomb gave Japan the ability to surrender.

[Trailrider #896]

From a tactical standpoint, presuming we could continue to supply 21st Bomber Command with napalm and incendiaries (we were running low at the time), it would have been the choice of massive conventional B-29 raids, like the one that destroyed a good portion of Tokyo and other cities, or using the nukes. 

 

Interestingly, the Japanese were working on their own nuclear program. They had moved it to the Chosin Resevoir in North Korea because of the conventional bombing and the hydroelectric power available.  When the first A-bomb went off, the head of their program knew exactly what it was!  Had the war not ended when it did, who knows how close Japan was to having a true nuke or at least a dirty bomb?  When Germany surrendered, a submarine, ironically designated U-234 was on its way to Japan possibly with some uranium and a disassembled Me-262!  Gross Admiral Doenitz ordered all German subs to surface and surrender to the nearest allied ship, which they did. 

 

My Dad, who voted for Gov. Tom Dewey, for FDR  in '44 and Truman in '48, later told me he thought Harry S Truman was possibly the finest president we had. BTW, his name was Harry S (no period after the S) Truman. Many authors put the period after the letter, but Truman never had a middle name, just the initial. 

 

Oh, and the 509th Composite Group, which flew out of Saipan's North Field, was disliked by the other B-29 outfits due to the seeming "easy" missions the 509th flew with "pumpkin".  They coined a little ditty, which ended sarcastically, "...And the 509th is winning the war!" When they dropped the two nukes, they did end the war. And guess who flies the B-2 bombers, out of Whiteman AFB? Yup, the 509th Heavy Bombardment Wing!  And guess what airfields are being refurbished...the ones at North Field on Tinian!

[Subdeacon Joe]

33 minutes ago, Trailrider #896 said:

Interestingly, the Japanese were working on their own nuclear program. They had moved it to the Chosin Resevoir in North Korea because of the conventional bombing and the hydroelectric power available.  When the first A-bomb went off, the head of their program knew exactly what it was!  Had the war not ended when it did, who knows how close Japan was to having a true nuke or at least a dirty bomb?  When Germany surrendered, a submarine, ironically designated U-234 was on its way to Japan possibly with some uranium and a disassembled Me-262!  Gross Admiral Doenitz ordered all German subs to surface and surrender to the nearest allied ship, which they did. 

 

https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-japan-bomb-20150805-story.html

 

 

 

Shortly after WWII there were rumors that Japan had possibly tested it nuclear weapon.  From Wikipedia:

 

 

 

"

 

Reports of a Japanese weapon test

edit

On 2 October 1946, the Atlanta Constitution published a story by reporter David Snell,[20] who had been an investigator with the 24th Criminal Investigation Detachment in Korea after the war, which alleged that the Japanese had successfully tested a nuclear weapon near Hungnam (Konan) before the town was captured by the Soviets. He said that he had received his information at Seoul in September 1945 from a Japanese officer to whom he gave the pseudonym of Captain Wakabayashi, who had been in charge of counter-intelligence at Hungnam.[21][22][23] SCAP officials, who were responsible for strict censorship of all information about Japan's wartime interest in nuclear physics,[24] were dismissive of Snell's report.

 

Under the 1947–1948 investigation, comments were sought from Japanese scientists who would or should have known about such a project. Further doubt is cast on Snell's story by the lack of evidence of large numbers of Japanese scientists leaving Japan for Korea and never returning.[22] Snell's statements were repeated by Robert K. Wilcox in his 1985 book Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb. The book also included what Wilcox stated was new evidence from intelligence material which indicated the Japanese might have had an atomic program at Hungnam.[25] These specific reports were dismissed in a review of the book by Department of Energy employee Roger M. Anders which was published in the journal Military Affairs,[26] an article written by two historians of science in the journal Isis,[27] and another article in the journal Intelligence and National Security.[28]"

 

 

 

 

 

[Cypress Sun]

 

I had two close friends that were WWII vets, both passed away some time ago.

 

Benny was in the PTO for the battles on Saipan, Okinawa and another smaller island that I can't remember the name of. He told me that he was very glad that the bombs ended WWII as he knew that the invasion of the Japanese home islands were next...and he'd already pushed his luck much further than allowed. He did tel me a couple of things though, he and the men he fought along side did NOT take prisoners under any circumstances and, even though the Japanese surrendered, he wished that they'd have bombed all of the major cities with the A-bombs. He hated the Japanese for the rest of his life.

 

Jerry was in the ETO as a P-47 Jug pilot. He flew missions from slightly after D-Day on over a wide range of area. After a while, there were few German planes that came up to meet them so they looked for ground targets to destroy. He was REAL glad that they dropped the bombs on Japan as the talk was that they were going to pack up and join the invasion of Japan. He never had the hate in his heart for the Germans that Benny had for the Japanese. The only thing that Jerry hated was taking off and landing on steel matting.

 

I miss those two guys. We had a bunch of conversations over a couple of beers (okay, a s***load of beers) over the years. They both had nightmares about the war until the day they passed away.

[Forty Rod SASS 3935]

On 12/9/2024 at 4:58 PM, MizPete said:

I remain a fan of HST.  My Dad hated his guts for firing McArthur.

I like Truman because he always did what he thought was right based on the best info he had at the time, and he always took personal responsibility for his decisions.  "The Buck Stops Here" was more than a sign on his desk.

 

McArthur was a showboat ass who was openly insubordinate to the President who was The Commander In Chief of ALL US forces.. He deserved to be fired and should have been Court Martialed as well.