08/04/2017
You are getting a preview of my next week's article in the Knoxville Focus news paper.
Let me have some feed back on your thoughts about my conclusions.
Our Veterans Next Door
Randall Baxter
About those two bombs we dropped on Japan:
All my life I have been aware of the moral, ethical, and military thought process that led our nation to the end of the war with Japan the way it was done. I recently visited Pearl Harbor. Toured the Arizona Memorial. What a dastardly attack, and who will ever know if our leaders really wanted it to happen.
The Japanese brutal Blitzkrieg on their Asia brothers, and their horrible treatment of American prisoners of war created a need for the American public to dehumanize this enemy from so far away. Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and Elmer Fudd were selling war bonds. Nipping the Nips, and overemphasizing characteristics were the norm. And why not! Hirohito had to be defeated. There had to be pay back.
But, nuclear bombs would actually save lives?
Who figured that out?
At first we could only nip away at outlying territories like Guadalcanal, Bougainville and Tarawa.
Our Japanese enemy began to learn more effective, and more atrocious tactics. We began to hate them even more. Saipan, the unneeded battle of Peleliu where parents of friends of mine , two brothers each served one as a Marine and one in the Army. The quartermaster Army soldier buried his Marine brother on that island. The Phillippines, Iwo Jima , and finally Okinawa showed increasing determination on the part of the Japanese to defend their homeland. In the USA no one felt sorry for what the Japanese people had allowed to take place. It is what happens when a people loses control of its government.
Using the battles listed above, excluding Okinawa, it was projected that the invasion of Japan would cost 2,000,000 casualties with 500,000 of those KIA. After the ferocity of Okinawa, those numbers doubled.
Japan would be a huge Okinawa if it was attacked by land, sea and air. The buck stopped at Harry’s desk.
To invade, or bomb.
Fourteen months of firebombing had not helped bring the war to an end. The Japanese were hoping that this stubborn refusal to stop the war would bring the USA and its Allies to the peace table to bargain for an end to the war with favorable options for the Empire. This was unacceptable to most people in The USA. The cost was already too high. There had to be a decisive end.
The bombs had been tested at the Trinity test site on July 16. The final parts had been delivered to Tinian on the ill-fated USS Indianapolis. The crew on the Enola Gay had been briefed and prepared .
The targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been selected. The marines and soldiers who had died at Guadalcanal to Okinawa wanted this to end as much as those who survived.
Instant death to thousands of Japanese families, with over 300,000 dying by 1950 seemed a small number when compared to a possible 1,000,000 more American lives to bring this to an acceptable end.
Ethics and logic would say it is wrong to drop bombs with such magnitude. The deaths and dying would be cruel, so many children who did not start the war, compared to all America’s children who would die conventionally. The math says it was a no brainer. What say you?
