Use of the Atomic Bomb
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No single military event in history had long term consequences so profound as the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. It was not simply that a city full of people died horribly that had happened, before, and even on a slightly larger scale, in several conventional "fire raids" during World War II. But those previous raids had required on the order of a thousand planes; Hiroshima was destroyed by a single plane dropping a single bomb. By simple extension, a thousand nuclear armed planes could destroy a thousand cities in a single raid: civilization could be incinerated in a day. It is usually in the broad, long term and moral context that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (and of Nagasaki three days later) has been considered. But it was also a military operation of war and seemingly a decisive one, since Japan surrendered unconditionally within days. President Harry Truman called it "the greatest thing in history."1 Other Americans at the time greeted the atomic bombings with almost universal relief, even joy none more so than the half million men who were slated to hit the beaches of Japan in an amphibious invasion planned for 1946. Based on the experience of invading Japanese held Pacific islands such as Iwo Jima, they had every reason to expect the worst.2 American military planners anticipated that casualties in the invasion and reduction of Japan would be comparable to the total already suffered in both the European a
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th the Jimmy Doolittle raid over Tokyo in 1942. Not until 1944, however, did the advance of the Allies against Japanese island bases in the Pacific reach the point at which strategic air power could be directed against Japan, on an effective scale, by the new B 29 bomber. Once the bombers were in reach, air raids against Japan proved more effective than those against Germany. Japanese cities crowded, tighly packed, made up largely of flimsy wooden houses were particularly vulnerable to incendiary attack, while by late 1944 Japanese air power was already too depleted to seriously challenge bombers over Japan. Fire attacks at low altitude proved devastatingly effective: the great fire raid against Tokyo on March 10, 1945, is estimated to have killed some 300,000 people more, probably, than the combined death toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.5
By the middle of 1945, each of the components of the U.S. armed forces had evolved its own strategy for the final assault on Japan.6 The Air Force plan was simply to keep up its program of fire raids until Japan surrendered, or until there were no Japanese cities left to burn. The Army (and Marine Corps) began to draw up plans for an amphibious assault that would dwarf Norm
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Approximate Word count = 2094
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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