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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| VDH Perspective on Hiroshima |
| 2005-08-06 |
| EFL ...in August 1945 most Americans had a much different take on Hiroshima, a decision that cannot be fathomed without appreciation of the recently concluded Okinawa campaign (April 1-July 2) that had cost 50,000 American casualties and 200,000 Japanese and Okinawa dead. Okinawa saw the worst losses in the history of the U.S. Navy. Over 300 ships were damaged, more than 30 sunk, as about 5,000 sailors perished under a barrage of some 2,000 Kamikaze attacks. And it was believed at least 10,000 more suicide planes were waiting on Kyushu and Honshu. Those who were asked to continue such fighting on the Japanese mainland â as we learn from the memoirs of Paul Fussell, William Manchester, and E. B. Sledge â were relieved at the idea of encountering a shell-shocked defeated enemy rather than a defiant Japanese nation in arms. About a month after Okinawa was finally declared secure came Hiroshima. Americans of that age were more likely to wonder not that the bomb had been dropped too early, but perhaps too late in not avoiding the carnage on Okinawa â especially when by Spring 1945 there was optimism among the scientists in New Mexico that the successful completion of the bomb was not far away... Hiroshima, then, was not the worst single-day loss of life in military history. The Tokyo fire raid on the night of March 9/10, five months earlier, was far worse, incinerating somewhere around 150,000 civilians, and burning out over 15 acres of the downtown. Indeed, âLittle Boy,â the initial nuclear device that was dropped 60 years ago, was understood as the continuance of that policy of unrestricted bombing â its morality already decided by the ongoing attacks on the German and Japanese cities begun at least three years earlier. |
| Posted by:Crereth Elminemble7566 |