August 6, 1945
On August 6, 1945 an American B-29 bomber nicknamed the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Enola Gay was named after the pilot's mother only the day before the flight. Paul W. Tibbets was the pilot. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally ended the Second World War.
Time Magazine slide show on the Hiroshima bombing. General Paul Tibbets website.
Surprisingly, the Guardian has a piece by Oliver Kamm that slaps down the revisionist history that is so fashionable on the left.
This alternative history is devoid of merit. New historical research in fact lends powerful support to the traditionalist interpretation of the decision to drop the bomb. This conclusion may surprise Guardian readers. The so-called revisionist interpretation of the bomb made headway from the 1960s to the 1990s. It argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the concluding acts of the Pacific war than the opening acts of the cold war. Japan was already on the verge of surrender; the decision to drop the bomb was taken primarily to gain diplomatic advantage against the Soviet Union.
Yet there is no evidence that any American diplomat warned a Soviet counterpart in 1945-46 to watch out because America had the bomb. The decision to drop the bomb was founded on the conviction that a blockade and invasion of Japan would cause massive casualties. Estimates derived from intelligence about Japan's military deployments projected hundreds of thousands of American casualties.
Truman had to take account of this, and dropped the bomb for the reasons he said at the time. Contrary to popular myth, there is no documentary evidence that his military commanders advised him the bomb was unnecessary for Japan was about to surrender. As the historian Wilson Miscamble puts it, Truman "hoped that the bombs would end the war and secure peace with the fewest American casualties, and so they did. Surely he took the action any American president would have undertaken." Recent Japanese scholarship provides support for this position. Sadao Asada, of Doshisha University, Kyoto, has concluded from analysis of Japanese primary sources that the two bombs enabled the "peace party" within Japan's cabinet to prevail.
Had the US been forced to invade the Japanese home islands, as many as 2 million Japanese and hundreds of thousands of Americans would have become casualties.
By Chris, Monday, 6 August , 2007 @ 1:52 pm
Quite possibly more than 2 million dead Japanese. I believe I read somewhere that Curtis LeMay (I think) recommended simply blockading Japan and starving them into submission.
By drillanwr, Monday, 6 August , 2007 @ 6:16 pm
After Germany fell, the Germans sent materials and scientists to Japan. Japan was danger close to completing its own bomb … and would not have thought twice about using it.
Japan’s Secret War: Japan’s Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb, by Robert K. Wilcox
By Bleepless, Monday, 6 August , 2007 @ 6:53 pm
Thanks to geography, there are not many places to invade the home islands so, naturally, the
Japanese knew where we would land. Also,
impromptu airstrips hid large numbers (the actual figure is vague) of planes, each of which was crammed with explosives and enough fuel for a one-way trip to the beach. In addition, the high command had no intention of removing civilians from combat areas, in hopes of getting the morally-debilitated Yankees to hesitate shooting.
By the way, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, decrypted Japanese official communications mentioned their intention of playing upon sentimentalism by portraying themselves as victims. Note that they haven’t stopped yet.