Just before dawn on that morning in 1945 a light called flashed across the desert. It was bright in the pre-dawn darkness, but had it been high noon on a clear day, the flash of light would have eclipsed the sun. With that flash, atomic explosions moved from theory to reality. Within two weeks the light flashed two more times thousands of miles away. This time they were not in a test range, but above two Japanese cities. They were both devastated, destroyed in an instant. The controversy that surrounds these events has burned hot at times, even till today there are questions. I would like to address a few of them including one that I have not seen in print.
We did not need to drop the bomb.
Let us look at that question. But let us base our thinking on what our leaders knew at the time the decision was made. Let us go back and make the decision as they did, without the supposed wisdom of 20/20 hindsight and without the filter of political correctness. In mid-1945 we were planning an invasion of Japan to end the war. It would be a repeat of the campaign in Europe that began on June 6, 1944 at Normandy and ended in May 1945 with the surrender of Germany. Aircraft would bomb and strafe the landing area. Heavy guns of battleships would blast the hardened fortifications. Landing craft would approach the beach. The enemy would return fire. The landing would be forced at great cost on both sides. There was no reason to think Japan would capitulate, the suicidal divine wind of the Kamikaze was just additional proof of an impending fight to the death. The islands of the South Pacific would only be the prelude to the final invasion. The Allied planners looked back to landings at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Tarawa and Leyte as well as the ones in Europe. In Europe resistance was often stronger as we approached the end. The Battle of the Bulge and the bitter fights for the Remagen and Ahrnem bridges were recent memories as were the hedgerows of Normandy. Based on these landings they expected hundreds of thousands of casualties unless the Japanese did not defend the homeland. Nobody in their right mind thought there was any chance they would capitulate without being defeated on the field. In the Pacific, our combatant kill rate, Japanese to Allies was about ten to one. We killed about ten of their soldiers for each one of ours. Had we lost 100,000 men in the landings, not an impossible number, and continued that kill ratio, we would have killed nearly one million Japanese soldiers. More realistic numbers based on Normandy would have been 30,000 American deaths mapping to over 300,000 Japanese Soldiers killed. Notice I am careful to use the word soldiers. We would have killed a significant number of Japanese civilians, easily more than one quarter of a million, had they not resisted the Americans, based on the losses of French and Dutch. Had they resisted, the toll would have easily doubled or tripled. Once civilians started resisting killing civilians on suspicion would have become a norm. Remember we were into the fifth year of a war that was bleeding American lives. The pre-invasion air assault and shore bombardment would also have taken its toll of civilians. Even if those numbers are high, the losses at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still much lower!
Why did we first use the bomb in Japan? I have heard racist reasons raised. These are blatantly not true, in fact the Japanese were given a bye on war crimes trials that were not afforded the Germans. But then the most of their victims of genocide were yellow! Let's look at the timetable. The first bomb existed in August 1945 after a crash program. When Germany fell earlier in the year it was still being fabricated. At the time of VE day there was not enough bomb material to make even a single bomb and the engineering to make it go bang was not complete. Even in early August, there was only enough for three bombs, one gun bomb using U-235 and two implosion bombs using P-239. When the bomb fell on Nagasaki, the American nuclear weapon cupboard was bare. Additional weapons would not be available for several more weeks. Making U-235 and P-239 was a painstaking and slow process then, and still is today. The scientists were
sure as they could be that the Uranium gun bomb would work without a test but it was an expensive bomb in terms of the fissionable material needed. They felt the Plutonium implosion weapon, which used less material per bomb must be tested before a drop. So the P-239 for one bomb must be used on the desert. The day of that test the psychologists were concerned for the mental states of the scientists if it failed, such was the gloom. That left two for Japan, one U-235 gun bomb and one P-239 implosion weapon. Based on the fire bombing of German cities in early 1945, I have no doubt that had an atomic weapon been available in August 1944, it would have been used. A British Lancaster would have delivered it if the B-29 was not available, it had a much larger bomb load than the B-17 or B-24. War had hardened the Americans and British. We had no problem burning German cities to the ground and killing its citizens.
