Sir, – Eamonn McCann's view that strong evidence exists that Japan was prepared to surrender before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is more than usually contrarian and flies in the face of an overwhelming mass of contemporaneous evidence ("Hiroshima was a crime against humanity", Opinion & Analysis, August 6th).
Eamonn McCann’s citing of a post-facto analysis which was “based on a detailed investigation of all the facts” in 1946 by an economist ignores the facts on the ground as they were known to Truman and his advisers at the time they had to make this terrible decision. (Incidentally, also in 1946, this same economist advocated a US policy of détente with the Soviet Union which was then in the very public process of gobbling up and enslaving eastern Europe).
The facts as they were known to President Truman and his advisors at the time were that Japan was waging a pitiless and ruthless war involving mass kamikaze attacks and suicidal defence to the last soldier and civilian of hopelessly lost military positions. At this stage of the war, the inhuman Japanese treatment of the civilians of occupied territories and of prisoners of war was also well known. All the intelligence evidence pointed to Japanese preparations for resistance to the last man, woman and child in an invasion of their mainland, and US military casualties in such an invasion were estimated to potentially reach two million.
It is not surprising that US Gallup polls in 1945 showed an overwhelming majority of Americans in favour of the bombings – it was their husbands, fathers and sons who were pointlessly dying in a war that had at that stage, by any sane analysis, been irreversibly lost by Japan. But the Japanese military leadership of the time was not sane – it may interest Eamonn McCann to know that after the emperor’s broadcast to his people announcing the Japanese surrender there was an attempted military coup in favour of continuing the war.
There is also the small fact that the United States did not start the war in the Pacific – Japan did.
I am no advocate of nuclear weapons but Truman and his advisers would have in dereliction of their responsibilities to their country had they not used the only weapon at their disposal which was capable of ensuring a swift end to a war which the Japanese refused to acknowledge they had lost. – Yours, etc,
ARTHUR BOLAND,
Dublin 8.
Sir, – Seventy years ago I was a 21-year-old British soldier serving with the Royal Engineers in the 14th Army in Burma (Myanmar). As a patient in the military hospital in Rangoon (Yangon), awaiting evacuation by hospital ship to Dacca (Dhaka), I heard the news of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Having witnessed the fanaticism and brutality of the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma we young soldiers were apprehensive about the possibility of our having soon to invade the Japanese homeland.
Although the dropping of the bombs could have saved my life and the lives of many others, I believed then, as I still believe, that the atom bomb was wholly immoral and that in dropping the bombs the Allies conceded any high moral ground they may have claimed. – Yours, etc,
FRANCIS CHR BAILEY.
Killiney.
Co Dublin.