It's Hiroshima time, when Harry's second-guessers all come out to say what they'd have done

There's a thread on nuking Japan in the Amazon.com History discussion forum, and every anniversary of our nuking H&N we hear how Harry shoulda coulda woulda.

One repeated the old saw about a demonstration bombing in Tokyo Harbor. I said:

Sorry, Bro, it couldn't have been done in any better way.

Do your homework. For starts, we couldn't reach Tokyo harbor with a B29 with either Fat Man or Little Boy in its belly. So that option was out.

Moreover, do you have any idea how rational the Japanese high command was not? Opposition to surrendering was so great even after nuking two cities that they almost didn't. Anything less and they would have armed the Japanese populace with sharpened bamboo spears and waited for us on the beaches, figuring--probably correctly--that they were more willing to die than we were, and that we'd eventually give up.

Read Von Clausewitz. Or if that's overly tough slogging, try his most outstanding modern interpreter, the late Col. Harry G. Summers. He didn't write a book on WWII, but his classic purely military apolitical On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War provides a great intro to Von Clausewitz for the lay reader.

If you want to know what the Japanese high command was like and how it was thinking during that critical week, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Modern Library War)--amazingly well-researched and studiously nonpartisan. First-class historical research.

The real alternatives we faced were to either nuke them or go home. America is a democracy. Germany had already surrendered. We could not have mounted a blockade or a land invasion--the national will wasn't there. Maybe if we were a strong monarchy, but that wasn't the America we had.

So then you have to play out the consequence of leaving Japan in a state of war with us.

Good Japanese historians know the first thing that would have happened: the Soviet Union would have invaded, taking Hokkaido and possibly even northern Honshu. The Russian people were exhausted too, but Stalin wasn't, and he got what he wanted. And he wanted ports on the Pacific.

The Japanese were desperately trying to forge an alliance with Stalin, but that was a bizarre fantasy. Shows how desperate they were. And imminent Russian invasion helped persuade them to surrender to us, but it wasn't enough by itself, because the Japanese high command had gotten into a Gotterdammerung mindset.

So we'd have had an expanded Soviet Union, a Japanese nation south of the Soviet conquest still at war with us though helpless to do anything about it until they could rearm and find sources of raw materials. We might have been able to keep raw materials from flowing into the country. Of course countless Japanese would have starved to death with the rest suffering every day under a fanatical regime.

Which is wny astute Japanese historians believe, but can't say out loud, that we did them a favor by nuking them.

One tiny current hint as to the Japanese mentality: their domestic Olympics coverage. You think ours is rah-rah America jingoism? Theirs is nothing but Japanese. You'd think no one else was in the Olympics. The only thing the Japanese public wants to hear about is what and how Japanese did there. Period.

Every Hiroshima anniversary people come out and make confident declarations about the morally and strategically superior decisions they would have made if they were in President Truman's position.

They all sound vastly worse to me, both for the American people and the Japanese people.

Lastly, conquering them the way we did helped convince them to surrender without guerrilla warfare, and the kindness with which we treated them astonished them and made them into a staunch ally to this day.            

We were right to nuke Japan

The Texas Board of Education's new social studies curriculum befits a state whose popular governor recently threatened secession from the United States.

But as much of a travesty as it is, as much of a virtual salute to the Confederacy that it is...the Left has done as badly, and, I suspect with less public outcry.

Today the Tucson Unified School District offers a Mexican American Studies curriculum based on a South American Marxist's "anticolonial" pedagogy that bluntly and unapologetically anti-American, teaching that the Southwest is really part of Mexico.

It's hardly alone. Across the Southwest, you can find this sort of thing wherever Mexicans have managed to establish a major presence in American communities--through a combination of illegal and legal immigration, previous amnesties and a high birthrate. Yet American leftists vigorously support it because they've adopted an ideology that's condemns America as simplistically as right wingers deify it.

A prime example is our nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. Leftist historical revisionists have adopted Emperor Hirohito's stance in which he based his surrender on American barbarity--as shown by our using nukes against the Japanese.

This reveals the appalling ignorance of historical reality by leftists in America and abroad.

By August 1945 America was economically and spiritually exhausted. The war effort had cost many, many thousands of American lives, and the invasion of Okinawa revealed such ferocity on the part of the Japanese--soldiers and civilians--that we realized a million American lives could be lost in an invasion of Japan. And we didn't have the resources to mount a decades-long total blockade, the only viable alternative. Plus American public opinion at the time absolutely demanded unequivocal victory. If Truman hadn't done it the voters would have replaced him with someone who would.

PBS recently aired a somber, realistic documentary titled "Victory in the Pacific" that detailed what the situation really was like then. It totally refutes leftist revisionism--so remember this fact the next time someone mentions PBS's leftist tilt. Sometimes it does tilt that way, but more often as not it's as fair-minded as this documentary.

In the documentary a guy who'd been a marine in the Okinawa invasion recounted how he once saw an old Japanese woman come out of one of the many caves Japanese had been hiding in. She was responding to American soldiers calling into the cave, telling them to surrender. The Americans didn't know that the Japanese government had told civilians that if anyone surrendered for any reason, their family would be shamed forever, and that the Americans would murder the men immediately, then rape all the women before running them over with tanks.

This woman must have believed that, because, the soldier said, she pulled an American grenade out of her kimono, pulled the pin and threw it at the nearest American soldier. It exploded, killing the soldier. And the guy recounting his eyewitness account of this incident said "Then I shot her."

If you had polled the American soldiers like this Marine who were poised to invade the Japanese mainland later that month, and asked them whether they approved nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 99% of them would have said "Go for it." Ditto their families and friends back home. And they would have supported nuking every other Japanese city, one after another, if the Japanese failed to surrender, rather than invade or blockade.

Before we nuked Hiroshima the Japanese government had decided to reject our calls to surrender--in fact, they thought we were bluffing, and that a spirited defense against invasion would force us to give up and allow the Japanese military to remain in charge.

What's astonishing is that after we bombed Hiroshima, the head of the Japanese military told the government that we only had one of these bombs--and they decided that the only way they'd surrender would be if we left Japan's military government intact and didn't occupy the homeland.

And even after we nuked Nagasaki, they still almost didn't surrender. Junior officers, hearing of the Emperor's surrender document, stormed government buildings in an attempt to mount a coup d'etat and destroy the document. They might well have succeeded if Inami, the head of the military, had supported them.

After the surrender, Hirohito said that the Japanese military had relied too much on "spirit" and not enough on science.

My favorite comment came from the Empress, however. She wrote about seeing waves of B-29s flying over Tokyo during those last days before surrender, and noted that "unfortunately, the B-29 is a splendid airplane."