If you thought she was being callous, I wonder what your reaction would’ve been to a full-barrel blast of pro-nuke arguments by the veterans, most notably Paul Fussell, author of a book titled Thank God for the Atom Bomb (and Other Essays). I think the Mobile lady’s exultation reflected her conviction, which I share, that using the bomb as we did was responsible for Japan’s agreeing to surrender, thus ending the war and sparing the lives of hundreds of thousands of our men in uniform, your kin included.
I was surprised by how muted that aspect of the show was, regarding the A-bomb debate in the interviews, considering how heated the A-bomb debate has been in the past decade-plus. The whole thrust of the final program’s portrayal of the Pacific theater, and indeed the documentary series’ treatment of same, had the effect of pre-determining the outcome of the contemporary (and very PC) A-bomb debate and even nullifying the debate altogether, insofar as the program steadily emphasized the brutal human toll taken by the war, even for us Americans who suffered relatively few fatalities overall and with scant damage to our homeland when compared to the losses endured by our allies in the European theater. This tone was in keeping with Burns’ focus on the interviewees and a personal, sentimental presentation of the war.
With seemingly each step in the protracted Pacific campaign, the tolls per island just kept getting higher and higher, with Saipan and Okinawa introducing a new element of horror: the needless sacrificing of thousands of Japanese civilians (due both to the munitions and to their no-surrender principles).
After Okinawa, American military planners were in disagreement over just how deadly a conventional invasion of Japan’s home islands was likely to be, but one figure was of 500,000 American dead (with far more injured). If you ask me, that figure was a lowball number, if the Japanese were indeed prepared to resist as fiercely as they had on Okinawa, only enlisting the efforts of the women and children, as well.
Leaving aside all the military, economic, political, moral, and even humane arguments for using one or both nukes – and perhaps we’d better if we don’t want this thread to become another A-bomb debate thread – I understand why it seems the vast majority of Americans at the time simply embraced the bomb as a miraculous equalizer. The only way to wipe out Japan’s defensive home field advantage was to wipe out the home field, as it were. That it did, and it ended the war immediately, and at certainly at the time there didn’t seem to be any other conclusion to be drawn.
