Quote:
Originally Posted by steveo395
On July 26, we gave the Japanese a chance to surrender in the Potsdam Declaration. They said no, so we dropped the first bomb on August 6. Then we gave them another chance to surrender and they didn't. On August 9, we dropped another bomb and the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria. This finally made them surrender.
The Japanese were going to fight to the bitter end. We would have had to invade if we didn't have the bomb, which would have caused a lot more casualties than the bomb did.
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Wrong. The Japanese were willing to surrender as early as May, 1945 with the only stipulation being that they wanted to keep their Emporer. This didn't fit Truman's definition of "unconditional surrender". They dropped the bombs, and still wound up allowing Japan to keep its Emporer.
So in effect, Truman actually accepted the Japanese terms of surrender, but dropped the bombs anyway. You can read any number of sources from Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Admiral William Leahy, to Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, to U.S. Fleet and Naval Operations chairman Ernest J. King, to Eisenhower who all agreed that the Japanese had already been defeated, and it was completely unnecessary to use the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Make no mistake - the decision to use the bomb was political, and not based out of concern for the military.