Not With a Whimper, But With a Bang

Hiroshima was bombed in the first attack using an atomic weapon, 64 years ago today.

70,000 people were killed that day, possibly as many as 250,000 died over the long term.

My father and other members of his generation in my family were in the pipeline for Operation Olympic. Given that my father was trained by the Army to defuse Japanese landmines, it is probably a safe bet that he would not have come home from that, as it is entirely possible that Americans deaths in the invasion would have been over a million. Japanese casualties would have easily been several times that and may even have exceeded those suffered by China or the USSR.

I suspect that of the readers of this blog, a significant fraction had fathers, uncles, and grandfathers who survived the war because the atomic bombs were dropped.

Do I think the atomic bombings were a good idea? Yes, I do.

I do not believe that Japan would have surrendered easily. Given the conduct of the war to August of 1945, forcing Japan to surrender by conventional means would have required killing a significant fraction of the Japanese people. The 20th Air Force had conducted massive fireraids that had burned almost every city in Japan to the ground. The only other course of action would have been a massive siege operation that would have taken years, would have starved millions of Japanese civilians to death and probably would have taxed the patience of the Allies.