Madam, - The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was no more nor less moral than the fire-bombing of Hamburg and Dresden. That is, it was not moral at all. However, more people were killed by a single American fire-bombing raid on Tokyo than were killed at Nagasaki. Does anyone suppose that the victims of Nagasaki would have felt any better had they been killed by so-called conventional bombing?
And yet, even after that raid on Tokyo (it burnt down a quarter of the city) the militarist fanatics who controlled Japan would not consider surrender. Indeed, surrender came after Nagasaki only at the insistence of Emperor Hirohito in the face of stiff resistance from militarists who were determined to fight on.
As for any invasion of Japan, a letter to this page from Dr Desmond Fennell (August 10th) suggested that American fatalities might have been as low as 20,000 to 63,000. That is an unusual choice of estimate. In the last great battle of the war, Okinawa, 12,000 Americans were killed and 38,000 wounded, many of them terribly. It was estimated subsequently that hundreds of thousands of Americans would have died in any invasion of Japan.
While it is conceivable that the Allies could have blockaded Japan and then stood off to await collapse, who knows how many thousands of civilians and allied POWs would have died in the meantime in atrocious circumstances in Japanese-occupied territories? Moreover, had it not been for the atomic bomb it is highly likely that the Japanese military would have led their country to a fight to the death that might have cost millions of Japanese lives.
Truman dropped the bomb for many reasons in addition to the above. The Soviet threat was beginning to rear its head, and had Truman shown any lack of resolve to use the atomic bomb we may be sure that Stalin would not. The sheer material cost of the war should not be forgotten either. Truman would have felt little obligation to maintain the allies on a war footing for an indeterminate period of months or years while waiting for Japan to become accustomed to the idea of unconditional surrender.
In addition, millions of allied soldiers were living in tough conditions thousands of miles from home and they wanted to return to their families; it is unlikely they would have felt they owed too much to the unfortunate citizens of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. - Yours, etc,
JOHN STAFFORD, Chesterfield Grove, Dublin 15.