*** “The indefensibility of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is becoming a part of the national conservative creed.”***
He would have a different opinion if HE would have been the first person in a landing craft shot dead when he stepped ashore in Japan! The A-bomb kept my dad, just back from Europe, from having to invade Japan.
The ONLY gripe they have about the Atomic bomb is it was one plane with one bomb that did all that damage.
If we had used 500 planes all loaded with firebombs and killed the same number of people people would say...”So what! it’s war!”
Just for the record, a day or two after the Nagasaki bombing we hit Japan with a large bombing force loaded with conventional bombs. Killed thousands and no one here complained.
Good point. The Tokyo firebombing the night of March 9-10 killed more people than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, maybe both. And most of them in a most horrible manner. But no one now mentions this, or probably even knows about it. All they care about is the A-bomb. And they lose sight of the fact that if a country goes to war, the whole country generally suffers. We lucked out because at the time the technology available just wasn’t quite enough to bridge the oceanic isolation of the Western Hemisphere (although in a few years that would have changed). Japan never did quite attain the jumping-off points to make direct attacks on the US mainland possible.