XPost: aalt.war.world-war-two

Except, it is not a myth.
This has same old lies and bullshit.

from
https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/article291127690.html

It’s time to end the myth that the US needed to drop atomic bombs to end World War II | Opinion BY MICHAEL CHILDERS SPECIAL TO THE KANSAS CITY
STAR AUGUST 18, 2024 6:07 AM Experts then and now agree: By June 1945,
Japan had been militarily defeated and President Truman didn’t need to
bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Library of Congress It was disappointing to
see debunked myths about World War II published recently in The Kansas
City Star as if they were undisputed facts. Those assertions were that: President Harry Truman’s use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
was necessary to end the war. The war was then only at a midpoint. The
use of these weapons saved “half million lives.”

In truth, by June 1945, Japan had been militarily defeated, its once
powerful Imperial Navy and air services capable of little resistance,
according to Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical
Review, in his 1997 essay, “Was Hiroshima Necessary?” Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower said of these bombings: “The Japanese were ready to
surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
Most American military leaders criticized the bombings publicly after
the war, including Truman’s chief of staff, Adm. William D. Leahy and
even the well-known war hawk Gen. Curtis LeMay, who led the bombings
over Tokyo, and who said in a press conference on Sept. 20, 1945: “The
war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and
without the atomic bomb.” When asked to clarify, LeMay said, “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.” Gar Alperovitz — perhaps the historian who knows the issue best, having written the books “Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam” and ”The Decision To Use The Atomic Bomb,” with seven collaborators and 112 pages of endnotes — says that the 1990 declaration by J. Samuel Walker, chief historian of the
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, convinced him that the use of atomic weapons on Japan was unnecessary. Walker said: “The consensus among
scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan
to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that
alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisors knew
it.” On Aug. 5, 2005, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, co-authors of “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” wrote an article in The Los Angeles Times entitled “The myths of Hiroshima.” In it, they said: “The hard truth is that the bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the
man who first popularized this figure, later confessed that he had
pulled it out of thin air in order to justify the bombings in a 1947
Harper’s magazine essay he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry
L. Stimson.” (Since the total American casualties in WWII were 405,000,
the suggestion of an invasion of Japan taking one million or half a
million American lives is ludicrous, and Bundy vacillated between one
million and half million.) “By the time historians were given access to
the secret files necessary to examine this subject with care, the myth
of huge numbers of American, British and Japanese lives saved had
already achieved the status of accepted history,” Rufus E. Miles Jr.
wrote in the journal International Security in fall of 1985. Had they
focused on the “striking inconsistencies between” the wartime documents
and “those parts of the principal decision-makers’ memoirs that dealt
with estimates of lives saved. Had they done so, and followed the
subject where it led, they would have been forced to conclude that the
number of American deaths prevented by the two bombs would almost
certainly not have exceeded 20,000 and would probably have been much
lower, perhaps even zero,” Miles concluded. The real truth was
suppressed for some time, but now that the records are available, it is
time for the real story to come out. Michael Childers is a consultant
and journalist in Kansas City. He has been published regularly in
Aircraft Interiors International magazine, Experience Magazine, Inflight magazine and others.

Read more at: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/article291127690.html#storylink=cpy

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)