Grab Some Oven Mitts. Huff Po is Coming in Hot with an A-Bomb Take!

(Huff Po) - President Barack Obama will be the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima this month. However, his administration is refusing to apologize for the dropping of the two atomic bombs and has embarked on a trillion-dollar program to revitalize America’s nuclear arsenal which threatens to provoke a new global nuclear weapons race.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said he thought that Obama “appreciates that President Truman made the decision [to drop the bomb on Hiroshima] for the right reasons. Those reasons included a focus on the security of the United States and ending a terrible war. I think given the way that President Truman approached this dilemma and given the outcome, I think it’s hard to look back and second guess him too much.”

Considerable historical evidence however refutes this viewpoint. We now know that the Truman administration deliberately inflated casualty estimates for a planned invasion of Kyushu after the war. Declassified files reveal that US military planners projected 20,000-46,000 American lives as the cost of landing, and not one hundred thousand or a million as some later officials claimed.

We also know that given the destruction of Japan’s air and naval power, and Soviet plans to enter the war, Japan’s surrender could have likely been secured before this invasion took place. There is even the possibility the government deliberately prolonged the war so as to test its new super-weapon on the Japanese in order to justify the billion dollar taxpayer investment in the Manhattan project.

The moral of the story is that the Pacific War was not necessarily a contest between good and evil as it is presented in U.S. nationalist mythology. If the Times is going to criticize Hiroshima’s peace park, it should push for acknowledgment of the complexity of the war’s origins and mutual blame all around, which should be featured in U.S. museum sites like Pearl Harbor too.

Since Obama won’t do it, his successor at the same time should apologize once and for all for the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This would give some weight to any genuine push in the direction of a nuclear free world, which is something we should all be striving for.

First, I would love to see some sourcing on the claim that the Truman administration overstated casualty estimates because I have yet to find support for his claim.

I did however find the Journal for Military History's published findings about similar claims.

"In its 30 August 1944 annex, the planners noted the number of Japanese troops which could be made available to defend the Home Islands--- 3,500,000 --- and extrapolated that number against a not yet complete count of the destroyed Japanese garrison. The JPS committee concluded: 'In our Saipan operation, it cost approximately one American killed and several wounded to exterminate seven Japanese soldiers. On this basis it might cost us half a million American lives and many times that number wounded . . . in the home islands.'"

From this point forward, military strategist adopted the Saipan ratio to determine the approximate number of casualties for a battle with the Japanese.

For the record, the projection that American would suffer two million casualties, was overstated. The decision makers agreed.

"Eventually those numbers would reach what General LeMay described as “well up into the imaginative brackets and then some,” because it was clear that American forces would have to fight literally “millions of well-trained men.” And unlike the final death throes in Germany, which saw Soviet troops engage the bulk of German strength and suffer 352,475 casualties (including 78,291 dead) during their final, twenty-three-day assault on Berlin and centralGermany, the twin U.S. invasions of the Japanese Home Islands were to be conducted almost exclusively by American forces." 

"The implied top-end figure of approximately 1,700,000 to 2,000,000 battle casualties built on the basis of the Saipan ratio was slashed down to a best-case scenario figure that was not so huge as to make the task ahead appear insurmountable, and use of a 500,000 battle casualty figure was “the operative one at the working level” during the spring of 1945." 

"This smaller figure, however, was based on the assumption that the U.S. military would learn to counter Japanese tactics, and it neglected the fact that, as evidenced by the casualty ratios then emerging from Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the Imperial Japanese Army was likewise learning from its experiences. Thus, the “low” 500,000 number for total battle casualties, used widely in briefings, was a best-case estimate not accepted for strategic planning purposes, and it had no effect on the greatly increased Selective Service call-up, the expansion of the Army's training base, or the plans of the Transportation Corps, Medical Corps, and other U.S. Army organizations. For example, at the same time that the lower figure came into use, the Army Service Forces was working with an estimate of “approximately” 720,000 for the projected number of replacements needed for “dead and evacuated wounded” through 31 December 1946."

So, let me get this straight. The Japanese refusal to surrender in spite of certain defeat should not be supportive evidence to the fact that they were unlikely to surrender given an invasion? Ok...What else you got?

Also, they knew that we were going to have to invade, and they knew where we were going to have to invade. If only we had an example during this time period of what would happen during such an event....Today must be our lucky day because in fact we do.

Let's see the Allies suffered at least 225,000 casualties during the Normandy invasion while the Germans suffered at least 400,000 with some estimates reaching as high as 530,000, but no, you keep digging in on this unreasoned stance.

That fact doesn't even account for the reality that Germans wished to surrender to Allies rather than other enemies because they would be treated more humanely, but keep doing you.

And to your final point that while the Japanese did evil things, we weren't innocent either. Skrong take.

The war in the Pacific was brutal. Yes, atrocities were committed by both sides. But refusing to take prisoners on the account that it could make you vulnerable to an ambush isn't exactly the same as a democide of six million people. It is war after all.

I'd also like to submit another sourced fact that Japanese POW death rate at the hands of the US army was "relatively low" while the American POW death rate at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army was 27 percent according to Yuki Tanaka. #FactsOnly

However, all of these facts are useless because the entire premise of the Historian, Intellectual, Activist's (his words, not mine) argument is that the Imperial Japanese Army would surrender when every shred of evidence doesn't support his claim. The fact remains that the Japanese were given ample warning on June 26, 1945 unless you don't consider the following a warning.

"We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction." 

I could see how those words could be left to interpretation.

PS - We're all in agreement that the President leans a little to the left and has earned the label as an ideologue with some reasonable evidence. If anyone were to sympathize with this cause, it would be the President. He's actively digging in on not. Shouldn't that fact deserve some merit?