It’s that time of year — time for right-wingers to reflexively defend the nukings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Bob McManus receives 2023’s award for Harry Truman Posterior Kissing. The film Oppenheimer, the New York Post’s former editorial-page editor averred, offers a reminder that the 33rd chief executive was a “hero who ended the killing.” The subhead of McManus’s facile screed claims that “there’s no question Truman was right.”
Hmm — “no question”?
“Bull” Halsey “drove back the Japanese from Guadalcanal to Rabaul with a fierce, unwavering determination.” He earned the Navy Cross, Navy Distinguished Service Medal, Army Distinguished Service Medal, and Presidential Unit Citation. Halsey’s assessment, in 1946:
The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. … It was a mistake to ever drop it. …[the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. … It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before.
Another America-hating peacenik was Douglas MacArthur. He believed that Japan was “already beaten.” (On August 7th, 1945, the personal pilot of the commander of U.S. Army Forces in the Far East wrote in his diary: “General MacArthur definitely is appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster.”)
“[A]tomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse,” according to “Hap” Arnold. Curtis LeMay went further: “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.” In his memoirs, William Leahy thundered that the “barbarous weapon ... was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower spent nearly his entire adult life in national service — from West Point to the White House. He had “grave misgivings” about going nuclear, believed “that Japan was already defeated,” and thought “that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.” (Almost two decades after V-J Day, Ike told Newsweek that “it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”)
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