Yesterday, I heard Rush Limbaugh complain that PBS will broadcast a documentary made under the premise that the 20th century was one of constant war with a few periods of relative calm — an admission that U.N. diplomacy doesn’t exactly work? —contrary to the historical record that we fought two great wars at the interuption of a remarkable century of progress, peace and prosperity, what is commonly called The American Century.
The film will record America as the bad guy, dropping the big ones on Japan — not admitting that action saved millions of lives by foregoing an invasion — but especially for allying ourselves with the Soviet Union’s Stalin who, the film will say, was as bad or worse than Hitler. Rush got indginant, saying The Greatest Generation did not sacrafice what they did for taxpayer funded leftist propaganda directed at them.
I say Rush should be happy. All this means is that the left has finally acknowledged Stalin was as bad as Hitler. By any measure, that’s progress.
So, dropping the atomic bombs on Japan saved millions of lives because we avoided an invasion? My question is why invade OR drop the big ones. By August 1945 the U.S. Navy had virtually complete control of the Pacific Ocean. Why not simply blockade Japan to force them to capitulate? They depended almost entirely on outside sources for raw materials to keep their war effort going and for food. Everyone always says the bomb saved lives. Well, not nearly as many lives as a blockade would have saved. The cold hard truth is we wanted to test the bombs on live targets. That’s why we used different types on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for comparison purposes. Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki, and Niigata were chosen by the Target Committee because they had been relatively untouched during the war. They wanted the first bomb to be “sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it was released.”