Recently the History channel interviewed many aides to Harry Truman and James Byrnes, his Sec. of State, and in a documentary they showed concrete evidence that Truman knew the Japanese wanted to surrender well before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but he was advised by Byrnes to use the bomb anyway as an intimidating tool against the Russians...Thus began The Cold War and the targeted deaths of innocent civilians, mostly men and women in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  War criminal might sound over the top, but if its good enough to condemn Japanese and Germans for their war-time brutality, its good enough to call a spade a spade...Harry Truman, war criminal.

I swear some people can't remember s**t!!

BTW, if the Japenese wanted to surrender, all they had to do was surrender. The problem was they wanted to surrender on their terms, which was RIGHTFULLY unacceptable.

No, you're off here.  I saw the same thing, and 'concrete evidence' that the Japanese wanted to surrender is not an accurate statement, nor does it state the whole story.

What it said was that we intercepted instructions to the Jap amb to USSR to approach Stalin about surrendering.   Did NOT say what the terms might be, and presumably those were to be discussed.   Any historian can tell you that you do NOT stop fighting whenever somebody says they want to talk.  If the Japs were that determined, they could have gone to ANY embassy, or contact us directly.  A white flag would have done fine.

Remember that the cabinet was divided until after the 2nd bomb, when the emperor intervened; and even then, some military officers attempted a coup to fend off surrender.  So a mere half-hearted attempt to communicate is a long way from surrender, especially considering the people we were dealing with.

They raise good questions, but in the end, Monday morning quarterbacking is easy, and I seriously doubt anybody could have done any differently.  When a vicious opponent is on the ropes, you don't hesitate because you think maybe they might want to surrender.  You finish it off, as quickly and surely as you can.

I think that to find Truman a war criminal, you have to find there is no proper motive - ulterior motives won't suffice.  Nor can you say that the Japanese were not getting a dose of their own medicine, considering their own values at Nanking and the rest of China, to say nothing of Pearl Harbor and the murder of countless POWs.

I think that the war crime here was against the Chinese; and afterwards, it was like many wars, the genie's out of the bottle.

At the Potsdam Conference (July, 1945) in defeated Germany, President Truman told Stalin that the U.S. "had a new weapon of unusual destructive force."

The Potsdam Conference occurred immediately after the successful Trinity test in New Mexico in July, 1945, but before the U.S. used the A-bomb in Japan. Indeed, the conference was delayed until the Trinity test was completed.

Reports vary as to Stalin's reponse, but it's clear that he didn't ask any specific questions of Truman. According to General Zhukov, however, Stalin immediately ordered his own scientists to speed up their own atomic bomb program. Truman was not aware that Klaus Fuchs (and other spies) had already revealed much of the Manhattan project secrets to the Soviets.

As alluded to in the above post, possibly Truman felt committed to using their two atomic bombs on Japan, in an attempt to further intimidate Stalin. If this was indeed the purpose, it was a major failure. It hastened the Soviets' own program, and did nothing to stop Eastern European countries from becoming Soviet satellites.

-- Modified on 8/8/2005 6:41:49 AM

conditional surrender, but they were not willing to surrender unconditionally.  In the meantime, they were massing troops and supplies for a "to the death" defense of Japan itself.  Based on the incredible casualties the Japanese took on both Iwo Jima and Okinawa (4 to 1 on kills alone), estimates were that there would have been about a miilion American deaths and about 4 million Japanese deaths, NOT INCLUDING CIVILIANS, in an invasion of Japan.  Truman dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring the war to an immediate close, and thus prevented the deaths of millions.  Truman saved millions of lives, and was certainly NOT a war criminal.  These attempts to change historical truth never cease to amaze me.  Unconditional surrender was the goal to end WWII in the Pacific, and Truman chose the quickest means possible with the LEAST loss of life.

Operation Olympic was not scheduled for another 3 months; but in that time, plenty of US airmen, sailors, etc would have died; and anybody who has ever been in a real fight knows that you don't back off because the other guy MIGHT want to give up; you MAKE SURE he HAS TO GIVE UP before you back off.

It's easy to see the mistakes you make; not so easy to see the ones you avoided.  If we had not used it, the Soviets may well have ended the war in possession of the Korean peninsula, and been much more aggressive in Europe.   Western Europe hung by a thread many times in the postwar years.

Of course I feel sorry for every individual who suffered and died; but I don't feel sorry for the nation that invaded China, raped Nanking, ambushed us at Pearl Harbor, and tortured and executed countless POWs.  What goes around, comes around.

The etiquette of modern warfare MARK STEYN, THE JERUSALEM POST Aug. 3, 2005

Until 60 years ago, all Nagasaki meant to most westerners was the setting for Madame Butterfly and a novelty pop song from the 1920s: Back in Nagasaki where the fellers chew tobaccy / And the women wicky-wacky-woo

Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, the Mills Brothers, Benny Goodman, Django Reinhardt – there was no shortage of recordings of "Nagasaki" through the Thirties and early Forties – up to, oh, about two minutes past 11 on the morning of August 9th 1945. And since then, well, you don't hear the song too much anymore.
Nagasaki joined Hiroshima as a one-word shorthand for events beyond the scale of Tin Pan Alley exotica.

Sometimes the transformative event comes in an instant, as it did out of the skies from a B-29 60 Augusts ago. Sometimes the transformation is slower and less perceptible: The United States that so confidently nuked two Japanese cities is as lost to us as the old pre-mushroom cloud Nagasaki. In what circumstances would Washington nuke an enemy today?

Were we to re-run World War Two, advisors to the president would counsel against the poor optics of dropping the big one, problems keeping allies on board, media storm, Congressional inquiries, UN resolutions, NGOs making a flap, etc. And chances are the administration would opt to slug it out town for town in a conventional invasion costing a million casualties.

There's no doubt the atomic bomb wound up saving lives – American, Japanese, and maybe millions in the lands the latter occupied. The more interesting question is to what degree it enabled the Japan we know today. They were a fearsome enemy, and had no time for decadent concepts such as magnanimity in victory. If you want the big picture, the Japanese occupation of China left
15 million Chinese dead. If you want the small picture, consider Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. It fell to the Japanese shortly after Pearl Harbor, when the 22 British watch keepers surrendered to vastly superior forces. The following year, the Japanese took their British prisoners, tied them to trees, decapitated them, and burned their bodies in a pit. You won't find that in the Geneva Conventions. The Japs fought a filthy war, but a mere six decades later and America, Britain and Japan sit side by side at G7 meetings, the US and Canada apologize unceasingly for the wartime internment of Japanese civilians, and an historically authentic vernacular expression such as "the Japs fought a filthy war" is now so distasteful that use of it inevitably attracts noisy complaints about offensively racist characterizations. The old militarist culture – of kamikaze fanatics and occupation regimes that routinely tortured and beheaded and even ate their prisoners – is dead as dead can be.

Would that have happened without Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the earlier non- nuclear raids? In one night of "conventional" bombing – March 9th – 100,000 Japanese died in Tokyo. Taking a surrender from the enemy is one thing; ensuring that he's completely, totally, utterly beaten is another. A peace without Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been a different kind of peace; the surrender would have been, in every sense, more "conditional:" Japanese militarism would not have been so thoroughly vanquished, nor so obviously responsible for the nation's humiliation and devastation, and therefore not so irredeemably consigned to history. A greater affection and respect for the old regime could well have persisted, and lingered to hobble the new modern, democratic Japan devised by the Americans.

WHICH BRINGS us to our present troubles. Nobody's suggesting nuking Mecca. Well, okay, the other day a Republican Congressman, Tom Tacredo, did – or at any rate he raised the possibility that at some point America might well have to "bomb" Mecca. Even I, a fully paid-up armchair warmonger, balked at that one, prompting some of my more robust correspondents to suggest I'd gone over to the side of the New York Times pantywaists. But forget about bombing Mecca and consider the broader lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: an enemy folds when he knows he's finished. In Iraq, despite the swift fall of the Saddamites, it's not clear the enemy did know.

Indeed, the western peaceniks pre-war "human shields" operation proved to be completely superfluous mainly because the Anglo-American forces decided to treat not just Iraqi civilians and not just Iraqi conscripts but virtually everyone other than Saddam, Uday and Qusay as a de facto human shield.
Washington made a conscious choice to give every Iraqi the benefit of the doubt, including the fake surrenderers who ambushed the US marines at Nasiriyah. If you could get to a rooftop, you could fire rocket-propelled grenades at the Brits and Yanks with impunity, because, under the most onerous rules of engagement ever devised, they wouldn't fire back just in case the building you were standing on hadn't been completely evacuated. Michael Moore and George Galloway may have thought the neocons were itching to massacre hundreds of thousands, but the behavior of the Ba'athists suggests they knew better: they assumed western decency and, having no regard either for enemy lives or for those of their own people, acted accordingly.

Was this a mistake? Several analysts weren't happy about it at the time, simply because Washington and London were exposing their own troops to greater danger than necessary. But, with hindsight, it also helped set up a lot of the problems Iraq's had to contend with since: not enough Ba'athists were killed in the initial invasion; too many big shots survived to plot mischief and too many minnows were allowed to melt back into the general population to provide a delivery system for that mischief. And in a basic psychological sense excessive solicitude for the enemy won us not sympathy but contempt. Better Nagasaki than a lot of misplaced wicky-wacky-woo.

The main victims of western squeamishness in those few weeks in the spring of 2003 turned out to be not American or coalition troops but the Iraqi civilians who today provide the principal target for "insurgents." It would have better for them had more Ba'athists been killed in the initial invasion. It would have been preferable, too, if the swarm of foreign jihadi from neighboring countries had occasionally been met with the "accidental" bombing of certain targets on the Syrian side of the border. Wars fought under absurd degrees of self-imposed etiquette are the most difficult to win – see Korea and Vietnam – and one lesson of Germany and Japan is that it's easier to rebuild societies if they've first been completely smashed. Michael Ledeen, a shrewd analyst of the present conflict, likes to sign-off his essays by urging the administration, "Faster, please." That's good advice. So too is: Tougher, please.

The writer is senior North American columnist for Britain's Telegraph Group.

I disagree with your assertion that Harry Truman was a war criminal.  Three things:  1) America's mindset at the time was to end the War ASAP, and bring the boys back home!  Who was Harry S Truman to disagree with the American people?  2) Pearl Harbor, Bataan Death March, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, kamakazees...America's attitude towards the Japanese at the time was f-you!  Die, you b******s!  Besides, fighting these guys was bloody and gruesome!   Surrender to the Japanese was the ultimate dishonor, and thus, unthinkable.  Unless something beyond imagination was deployed...3) The Soviet Union.  After the joint vicory over Germany, WW2 morphed into into something new, and worse...discord and rivalry amongst the two emerging powers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union.  The U.S. government had spent billions in developing nuclear (not nucular) weapons, and was compelled to use thease weapons to end the war quickly, intimidate / warn the Soviets, and justify the expense and reason for thier development.  Thus, Hiroshima and Nagasaki... If you think about it, just the politics of the day...go figure...

Anyway, my first post on the Political Board...looking forward to many more!

That Japan wanted to surrender was true, but it's a lot more nuanced than that.  The emperor knew Japan was defeated, but to save face and salvage better terms, he would have thrown away millions of lives.  

There was another practical side of this from his point of view.  He knew that if Japan lost the territory it had taken, it would have to make due with a lower population.  Believe me, he calculated this.  

The nukes gave him an excuse for an earlier surrender.  We helped him stop procrastinating.  Believe me.  Up till that time in his life, he was never more relieved than when the nukes dropped.

You are talking about the US targeting innocent Japanese civilians.  They had nothing to do with their government's policies.  This was an Empire, not a democracy and Truman is a war criminal for deliberately targeting them, instead of a legitimate military target.  Women and children in a city are a legitimate target?

You should be ashamed for trying to defend that position.

With all due respect, that is the most ignorant comment.  Think about what you are saying?

He was relieved to see his country and himself humiliated?

Those of you who watched the show, heard countless advisers to Truman and Byrnes and countless historians say that the bomb was unnecessary to end the war, and that Hirohito would have surrendered had Truman allowed the Japanese to keep their emperor.  Truman refused, but after dropping the bomb, he relented and let Hirohito stay.  IF that doesn't show how serious he was about UNconditional surrender, then Im talking to brick walls.  He wasnt serious about unconditional surrender, he was using that as a political statement to justify using the bomb.

If Truman wanted a quick end to the war, he would have allowed the Japanese to keep their Emperor, but it is clear from the historians and the people who were in on the decision, that Truman was using the bomb exclusively as a way to intimidate the Russians.  For targeting civilians, Truman is the very definition of a war criminal.  If he had targeted a legitimate military target, it would be harder to pin that label on him, but for targeting a civilian target, he is by the very definition, a war criminal.

Who have admitted that they were being prepared to repel the invading barbarians by whatever means were needed to protect the divinity of the empire.

You need to learn more about Japanese culture during that time, as well as study the other historical aspects.

In this day of post Vietnam protesting, as well as having a chance to refelect on the horror that we all now accept from the resultant usae of nuclear weapons, it's all too easy to criticize past actions. The old addage about hindsight, and armchair quarterbacking, etc.

Look at the losses sustained in 30 days battle in a little place called Iwo Jima. Better yet, look at the stats for the casualties sustained in all the Pacific campaigns and then consider this perspective-you are the commander in chief of the armed forces, you've been engaged in a 4+ year global battle, your heaviest casualties have been recorded in small territorial battles with an enemy that embraces suicidal activities. You've been provided with estimates of losses that start at hundreds of thousnds of your people in attempting an invasion. Now you have been presented with a new weapon that is reported to be so devastating that the real possibility exists that you can end the fighting quickly with few losses.

Let us not forget it was the Nazi's who finessed the concept of Blitzkrieg, not the US.

Several historians and authors have written about the errors and evils of judging our predecessors actions based upon our modern perceptions. You really should try and judge historical actions not by wht you know now, but what occurred at the time.

You use history to teach yourself how to avoid the traps and pitfalls you encounter as you move ahead.

By your logic, the settling of America should be condemned as a blatant attempt at imeprialism in the confiscation of land from the native Americans. So everyone in the USA who cannot trace their roots to an original tribe must leave.

Or the American Revolution was an illegal action and everyone who lives on the east coast in what we now refer to the former 13 colonies must renounce their US citizenship and become British. Out here in the left coast, we must become Mexican.

I don't think so.