“...The quote was merely reported in 1963, in Newsweek.
Eisenhower actually spoke those words in 1945 to Secretary of War Stimson:
It’s only the middle of March. August - marking the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the Atomic Bombs - is four months in the future, and the revisionist anti-nuke, anti-British, anti-American flummery is already gaining momentum (it started last month, when UK’s BBC broadcast a veritable orgy of hysterical self-blaming, in honor of the 70th anniversary of RAF and USAAF air strikes against Dresden).
One cannot help but predict, we are in for some heavy lifting, if we are to re-establish historical verisimilitude.
Gen Eisenhower was not an aviator and had no experience leading the fight against Imperial Japan (to tell the truth, he had no experience at all: never went through one single minute of combat, never heard a shot fired in anger). But he wasn’t unique: several senior US military officers expressed a lack of conviction after the fact. Some were leaders of the country’s air forces (USAF did not yet exist). Not terribly startling: all had been born before 1900 and were products of the 19th century, a gentler time (despite the obtrusion of the Napoleonic Wars, and the American Civil War). Indubitably, a more moral time.
All were also politicians, to some degree. When it became clearer which way popular opinion was starting to drift, many quickly tried to surf the wave and boost their reputations, by speaking out about how they’d been against The Bombs “all along.” Crass? Possibly.
At least the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, and later came out against nuclear weapons, had the moral courage to follow their own consciences, without wetting a finger to test the political winds.
Ike’s purported misgivings also cannot be divorced from the inter-Service rivalries of the day (yes, those clashes predated WWI, carried straight on through both World Wars without letup, and sharpened later). It’s less than pretty, but it’s a perennial pastime inside the US military establishment.
Essentially, ground forces and naval forces (who had practiced their rivalries for generations on end) were deeply offended by the conclusion of WWII: USAAF came out of nowhere - in terms of the doddering timeline, backward-gazing viewpoint, and self-satisfied lassitude that shaped American military corporate culture before 1939 - and had the temerity to win the war before this cohort of tradition-bound, ambition-driven GOFOs could carve out a place for themselves in the earth-shattering events of the day, and one-up each other while doing so. Lost chances at military glory wound senior officers deeply, right in the old ego. It’s easier to endure physical wounds sustained in actual battle.
Captain Peter Blood recommended _Downfall_ by Richard B. Frank, and deserves thanks from the entire forum. One hopes more actually read it, and obtain a better grasp on events at the end of the Second World War.
The USAAF didn’t play a role in the decision to use the atomic bomb and they really didn’t have a clear understanding of what it would do. Hap Arnold mentions his own surprise that it inspired Japan to surrender.
The decision to drop the bomb was made by Stimson, Marshall, Groves, a few Manhattan Project people, and of course Truman. It wouldn’t necessarily be more destructive than massed conventional bombing but they knew it would inflict an enormous psychological shock. Oppenheimer pointed out that the visual effect of a 20,000 foot mushroom cloud would be tremendous. They guessed right.