Fat Man and Little Boy not "the Bombs" we think they were? Seems so. (More fodder against atom bombs ending WWII)

Two Fridays ago, I wrote about how and why the atom bombs dropped on Japan were not justified acts.  The arguments I included in that post were moral ones.  What follows are factual arguments against the conclusions that the bombs ended the war at all.  Today I came across an article from the AP that reports on a new book detailing a tremendous Russian presence that seems to have had a far greater effect on Japan than the bombs, believe it or not:

Historians rethink key Soviet role in Japan defeat
By SLOBODAN LEKIC (AP)

As the United States dropped its atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, 1.6 million Soviet troops launched a surprise attack on the Japanese army occupying eastern Asia. Within days, Emperor Hirohito’s million-man army in the region had collapsed.

…

But following the German surrender on May 8, 1945, and having suffered a string of defeats in the Philippines, Okinawa and Iwo Jima, Japan turned to Moscow to mediate an end to the Pacific war.

However, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had already secretly promised Washington and London that he would attack Japan within three months of Germany’s defeat. He thus ignored Tokyo’s plea, and mobilized more than a million troops along Manchuria’s border.

Operation August Storm was launched Aug. 9, 1945, as the Nagasaki bomb was dropped, and would claim the lives of 84,000 Japanese and 12,000 Soviet soldiers in two weeks of fighting. The Soviets ended up just 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Japan’s main northern island, Hokkaido.

I’ve never heard of Soviet troops being so numerous or so close to Japan.  30 miles is nothing—that’s practically a walk from my apartment in Washington Heights down to Wall Street and back.  The NYC subway would let me make the journey in two hours.

So, that’s how close they were to invading Japan (yes, I know the A Train doesn’t travel between Gornozavodsk and Hokkaido, but you get the point).

On top of that, there’s the part where in May, 1945, Japan tried to talk peace with Russia.  They were interested in an end to the fighting two months before and if Stalin had been more interested in peace, perhaps the end of the war would look very different to us now.

Regardless, this is proof that the atom bombs were not necessary to ending the war. Plain and simple.

65 Years Ago, Today, One of the Most Efficient Killers to ever have existed was Let Loose on Hiroshima. Us.

I posted this on my contrarian blog website666com:

Many people on the street were killed almost instantly. The fingertips of those dead bodies caught fire and the fire gradually spread over their entire bodies from their fingers.

A light gray liquid dripped down their hands, scorching their fingers. I, I was so shocked to know that fingers and bodies could be burned and deformed like that. I just couldn’t believe it. It was horrible. And looking at it, it was more than painful for me to think how the fingers were burned, hands and fingers that would hold babies or turn pages, they just, they just burned away.

via gizmodo.com

Those words came from a post on Gizmodo today quoting Akiko Takakura. She was 20 years-old when she miraculously survived, just 300 feet, from where the atom bomb over Hiroshima detonated, 65 years ago, today. Read the rest of Takakura-san’s account and the accounts of other witnesses/survivors at Voice of Hibakusha (hibakusha=atomic bomb survivors).

To anyone who still maintains this action was justified, I simply say this:

With a single act, more than 50,000 people were wiped out. By the end of that year, an estimated 150,000 people had died from the bomb’s effects.

Did we need to become such efficient killers? Or could we have ended the war another way, without staining our hands with the blood of 150,000?

This isn’t about whether “they deserved it” or not. It’s about what we made ourselves on that day. It’s about what we continue to make ourselves any time we wage war. Is anything we gain worth that kind of violence, pain, destruction and loss?

A great documentary to see is Erol Morris’s Fog of War.  It’s mostly about Robert S. McNamara and Vietnam, but the beginning details his time involved in the firebombings of Japan before the bomb was dropped.   That movie was the first time I had learned about the firebombings and from the sound of it, the atom bomb was just a more efficient version of it.  A disgusting chapter of human history, to be sure.  I only wish that chapter was over.