This week, we commemorate the seventy-eighth anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed an estimated 140,000 civilians just before the end of World War II. Tragically, twelve courageous U.S. airmen being held as prisoners of war in Hiroshima also perished in the bombings. President Joe Biden has condemned Russian president Vladimir Putin as a war criminal guilty of genocide for the deaths of over 5,000 civilians in his continuing illegal war of aggression in Ukraine. However, few have decried President Harry Truman as a war criminal for killing twenty-eight times more civilians in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) and Truman’s fire bombings of sixty of Japan’s other largest cities.
One of the greatest popular myths of World War II is that Truman had no choice but to drop the atomic bombs on Japan since the Japanese were willing to fight to the last man, and that dropping the atomic bombs saved the lives of one million U.S. soldiers who would have died in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. In fact, the U.S. Army estimated at the time that only 44,000 troops would have died in a full-scale invasion of Japan. However, the stark truth is that the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan did not save the lives of any U.S. military service members as Japan had been attempting to surrender for several months prior to the atomic bombings. Following the U.S. capture of Marianas Island and the commencement of the B-29 firebombing campaign against Japan’s largest cities in July 1944, Emperor Hirohito ordered the Japanese government to negotiate Japan’s surrender in the belief that his refusal to do so would result in the United States exterminating the Japanese.
