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Courtesy National Archives.ĭuring the war, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey was famous for his bloody-minded tirades against the Japanese. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying woman and children.” Admiral Bill Leahy, the senior most active-duty US officer of the Second World War, left a scathing passage in his memoir, charging that the United States had “adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. Yet it is clear that many military leaders thought the atomic bombings unjustified and even immoral. Remarks of this sort can be understood in the context of internal military politics and budgetary positioning. Several leading air commanders, including Generals Hap Arnold and Curtis LeMay, said that the atomic bombs were unnecessary because conventional bombing had already brought Japan to its knees. Admiral Ernest King, the chief of naval operations, told his co-author that he did not like the atomic bomb “or any part of it,” and said that the air-sea blockade would have been enough to force a Japanese surrender. Eisenhower had learned of the Manhattan Project, several weeks earlier, he had urged against dropping the bomb on Japan: “I disliked seeing the United States take the lead in introducing into war something as horrible and destructive as this new weapon was described to be.”Īmong the Navy brass, feelings ran strong against the bombings. General Douglas MacArthur confided his thoughts to his personal pilot, who recorded in his diary on August 7: “General MacArthur definitely is appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster.” When Dwight D. Among the dissidents were some of the highest-ranking officers in the military. A few iconoclasts protested that Truman had needlessly undercut the country’s international moral standing. Pondering the news that one bomb carried by one plane had leveled a city, servicemen and civilians grasped that humanity, for the first time, wielded the power to cause its own extinction. Muffled by the general revelry and applause, however, there were notes of doubt, pangs of regret, and even righteous anger. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.” To Robert Edson Lee, a sailor in the Pacific, the bomb meant simply “that we could go home, and that ended our moral concern.” Paul Fussell, a 21 year old Army lieutenant, recalled of his unit: “We cried with relief and joy. It was a godsend, an unexpected reprieve, a stay of execution. To Pacific War veterans, who had dreaded an invasion of Japan, the atomic bomb meant even more. An earlier draft had called it “ purely a military base.”
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The White House statement misleadingly identified the target as an “important Japanese army base,” rather than as a large Japanese city with a base in it.
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At first, few Americans even paused to consider that Hiroshima was a city. All the major combatant nations had engaged in “terror bombing” of enemy cities. Attacking cities from the air was no longer seen as unjustified. After almost four years of savage war, few were inclined to shed tears for the fate of Japanese civilians on the ground. Truman Library and Museum.Īmericans greeted the news with unbridled jubilation. President Harry Truman dines with sailors aboard the USS Augusta on his way to the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.” It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. Later he read a statement for a film crew in his stateroom: “It is an atomic bomb. He read the dispatch to a mess deck crowded with sailors, who erupted into cheering.
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“The greatest thing in history,” he exclaimed to his staff. Congratulated and feted, they drank an extra ration of cold beer, danced in a jitterbug contest, and watched thea technicolor movie, “It’s a Pleasure.” President Harry Truman, returning by sea from Europe on the cruiser Augusta, received the news by radio dispatch. Landing on Tinian eight hours later, the crew was greeted by an ebullient crowd of servicemen, journalists, and photographers. I think the foremost thing in all our minds was that the thing was going to bring an end to the war, and we tried to look at it that way.” My God, what have we done?” Radar operator Joe Stiborik was “dumbfounded.” He judged that the crew was in a “state of shock. Co-pilot Robert Lewis wrote in his mission log, “Just how many Japs did we kill?. The Enola Gay’s 12-man aircrew fell silent as they returned to base. The devastated landscape of Hiroshima in the aftermath of the atomic bombing on August 6, 1945.