AUGUST 6TH – AT 8:59 A.M. ET:  Today, August 6th, we once again note the dropping of the first atomic bomb on this date in 1945.  The target was the city of Hiroshima, which had military and strategic significance.  A second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki a few days later.

World War II ended within a week.

You may be sure that we will have the usual suspects out in force – only the summer recess prevents some in the universities from going nuts today – and we'll be lectured to once again as to how horrible we were to use the bomb. 

Yes, the bomb was horrible.  But President Truman had to use it to end the war.  He had been inaugurated president of the United States, not emperor of Japan.  The safety of American troops, and the potential casualties among those troops, had to be foremost in his mind.

The year 1945 was the worst year of the war.  We were fighting on the home territory of our enemies, Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.  The last great battle in the European theatre, the Battle of the Bulge, had taken 20,000 American lives in only six weeks. (And the total American population was only 135 million.)  Iwo Jima in the Pacific, and Okinawa, added almost another 20,000.  Both had been Japanese territory before the war.

President Truman could only imagine what the casualties in the planned invasion of Japan would be.  In the years since the war, we've learned from Japanese archives that the military leaders of Japan planned to equip the civilian population with wooden spears, and force them to rush the invasion beaches.

Japanese casualties could have easily run into the millions.

And in China, occupied by Japan, hundreds of thousands were dying each month.

Oh yes, some would argue, but Japan was ready to surrender.  It is true that there was a peace faction in Japan, but those weren't the chaps in charge of the government.  It was a military government.  No Japanese unit had surrendered in World War II.  And just when would that surrender have occurred?  After the first 50,000 American dead in an invasion of Japan?

And how would the American people have reacted if they'd found out Truman had a weapon to end the war, and hadn't used it?  The United States Government would have been thoroughly destabilized, with the probably impeachment and removal of the president.  Truman, in fact, had been warned about that.

The bomb was horrible, the alternative worse.  It is time for the Japanese, who have never played it straight with their people about responsibility for World War II, reconciled themselves to the facts.

As for the American left, they never will, nor do they wish to.

We don't gloat over this day, but neither should we be humbled.

August 6, 2012