"take a minute to remember the other Hiroshima survivors"

Bookworm's posted a good 'un:

My Mom wasn’t in Japan when the Americans dropped the bomb.  She wasn’t anywhere near Japan.  She was in Java, a civilian in a Japanese concentration camp, on the verge of starving to death.  But for the fact that the atom bombs immediately terminated the war in the Pacific, she would have died.  She didn’t have another month or even another week.  She needed the war to end instantly.  It was the bombing at Hiroshima that enabled her to survive the war.

Nor was my mother alone.  Truman didn’t drop the bomb only to impress the Soviets or to play with an exciting new toy.  He dropped the bomb because he’d been credibly advised that the Japanese were not going to surrender, but would fight the war on their own ground — and this was true despite the fact that the Japanese knew as well as the Americans did that the Japanese could not win.  In July 1945, Truman was looking at the possibility of up to 50,000 more American deaths, plus all of the Japanese military and civilian deaths.  (And that’s not even counting the Marines already suffering unthinkable torture in Japanese camps and slave works, or American, Dutch and English civilians imprisoned all over the Pacific).  Given that the Japanese had started the war and then refused to end it (even though they were losing), one big bomb that would kill the same number of Japanese with no American casualties seemed like a very good idea at the time.

So as the media predictably inundates us with stories of Japanese Hiroshima survivors (or I assume it will based on past history), feel free to sympathize with their very real suffering.  Please, however, take a minute to remember the other Hiroshima survivors, those whose suffering at Japanese hands was ended because of that same bomb.

Food for the thoughtful.

Comments

[Joel Wickham]

I used to have mixed feelings about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes, they saved the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers, at the cost of 100,000 Japanese lives. According to some, this is a terrorist argument, since under the Geneva Convention, soldiers are supposed to protect civilians, not kill them.
Then I read Richard B. Frank's book, Downfall, which describes the last days of the Japanese empire. It describes, in detail, all things going on in Japan at the time, and the American plans to invade the home islands.
My takeaway from the book was that the bombings saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Japanese civilians. As the quote pointed out, the Japanese were not going to surrender, even though they knew they could not win. Their hope was to cause enough American casualties that we would offer conditions for their stopping the war. By that time, the B-29s were running out of targets. We had reduced most of Tokyo and other major cities to cinders using incendiary bombs (which also killed thousands of civilians.) The next step in the bombing campaign would have been to bomb the railroads and bridges from the farming areas to the cities. This would have led to mass starvation of the civilian population. Probably several million would have died.
In addition, Japan was training almost everyone to resist the American invasion. The distinction between civilian and military would have been hard when women and children started shooting at American soldiers. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of civilians would have been killed.
Unlike the author of the quote, it probably would not have affected me directly. My father was a B-24 ground crewman in England during WWII. If the war had gone on, he probably would have been retrained as a B-29 ground crewman. The major effect on him would have been that he would have delayed coming home for a long time.
However, thousands of other people alive today would not have been born because their parents were killed in combat, or died in POW and other prisoner camps. The Japanese were not going to give up, and when they realized that their situation was hopeless, often just killed the prisoners, or stopped feeding them.

[buck]

I never though about all the American prisoners. I think it was a great loss on both sides, all though we still find ourselves having to kill on the side of freedom.

[Wordpress]

Again a honesty a possessions post. Because of your friend