The Myth of the A-Bomb

On the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the A-Bomb on Japan the liberal press is again repeating the tired old myth that the American military was faced with the either/or choice of dropping the A-Bomb on Japan or invading Japan. According to the myth an invasion would have killed as many as a million American soldiers and maybe millions of Japanese. Thus the "humane" solution was to drop the Bomb. What did the military leaders of World War Two think about using the A-Bomb on Japan?

In his memoirs Admiral William D. Leahy, the President's Chief of Staff and the top official who presided over meetings of both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combined U.S.-U.K. Chiefs of Staff--minced few words: “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. In being the first to use it, we adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

The commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, said “The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell. It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.”

On September 20, 1945 the famous "hawk" who commanded the Twenty-First Bomber Command, Major General Curtis E. LeMay said flatly the atomic bomb "had nothing to do with the end of the war." He said the war would have been over in two weeks without the use of the atomic bomb or the Russian entry into the war.

General Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, who in July 1945 commanded the U.S. Army Strategic Air Force and was subsequently chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force and Spaatz's one-time deputy commanding general, Frederick L. Anderson told Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman, both men felt Japan would surrender without use of the bomb, and neither knew why the second bomb was used.

On the 40th Anniversary of the bombing former President Richard M. Nixon reported that, “General Douglas MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it. He thought it a tragedy that the Bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants. MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off. “
Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet stated, “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan.”

Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., Commander U.S. Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946, “The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. It was a mistake to ever drop it.... the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before.”

The commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and chief of Naval Operations, Ernest J. King, stated, “...had we been willing to wait, the effective naval blockade would, in the course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission through lack of oil, rice, medicines, and other essential materials. I didn't like the atom bomb or any part of it."

In his memoirs President Eisenhower reported the following reaction when Secretary of War Stimson informed him the atomic bomb would be used: I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. Again Eisenhower put it bluntly in a 1963 interview, stating quite simply: ". . . it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

August 2005