Atomic bomb survivors want an apology from Obama.

[mjk45]

Nuvendil said:

Soundwave said:

Japan was pretty much on its knees by this point in the war though, the US had them effectively surrounded and cut off from resupply/oil/etc. 

From here

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-real-reason-america-used-nuclear-weapons-against-japan-it-was-not-to-end-the-war-or-save-lives/5308192

According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was “looking for peace”. Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.

“Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan,” says Selden.

And others will contradict that guy.  I don't take sides much on this and really rarely comment.  Cause frankly both sides always wind up shouting at each other in rage, usually with gobs of misinformation or just insults.  My point was that Japan's helplessness on other islands hadn't stopped them before.  And for a country on their kneesknees they sure were still gearing up to make a campaign of attrition.  I have no doubt that impressing Russia was on their mind.  But they could have done that within the parameters of Operation Downfall.  Or they could have targeted a far larger city.  This image usually painted by anti-hiroshima people is of a cold, unthinking, murderous government.  Me?  I don't *know* what went on in those meetings, I don't *know* what Truman was thinking.  I just know that the War was hell, Japan did  lenty if terrible things themselves, and the circumstances that lead to their surrender were sure as hell better than Operation Downfall which would have killed far more civilians and military due to the measures Japan took in Operation Ketsugo.

 

Also, the Japanese government wanted peace, we wanted surrender.  Very different things.  That was the point of Ketsugo.

All I know Is it saved my grandfathers life , he was a POW in Japan at the time and told me that there where documents sent out to all the prisons ordering that in the case of an allied invasion  the staff  where to kill all POW's by any means neccesary including shooting ,beheading  ,strangulation etc.