It drives me mad to hear the opinions of the countless people who see the atomic bombings as being the most horrendous, needless, and downright evil acts in world history.
To so many, vaguely knowing the war ended shortly after the bombings, the Japanese were going to surrender anyway. To think this is to ignore history.
The Japanese wouldn't simply surrender. When islands were captured by our soldiers, the civilians tossed their infants and themselves off of cliffs. They would rather die than surrender.
We sank their navy, we destroyed their air forces, we sank their shipping, we cut off their supplies, we sank their fishing boats. We destroyed entire cities, we firebombed them, we razed Tokyo to the ground.
They didn't surrender!
We had two options. We could drop the bombs and hope they would surrender, or we could invade. Countless GI's, having survived the war in Europe were to be fed into the meatgrinder of the Pacific. These soldiers wouldn't be killing just the Japanese Army, they would have to fight the millions of children and old men prepared to die gloriously for the Emperor and the home islands.
370,000 Purple Hearts were ordered.
We could drop the bombs and kill hundreds of thousands, or we could invade and kill millions, perhaps even risk destroying Japan, her people, her culture, and her thousands of years of history.
As it happenned, the bombs were dropped, half a million Japanese were killed, and two major cities were annihilated. Even then, the Japanese military held on, leading a failed coup to keep the Emperor from admitting defeat.
Every year, the mayor of Hiroshima lectures the world about the evils of nuclear weapons, ignoring the fact that those two bombs are what saved his nation from utter and complete obliteration.
Well, those are my two cents.