Madam, - An armchair general is bad enough, but surely an armchair moralist is even worse. Desmond Fennell has given his opinion of the atomic bombing of Japan in two separate letters (August 10th and 17th). His too-easy conflation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with Communist and Nazi crimes is a prime example of sloppy thinking and rushing to judgment. Neither he nor anyone else, except perhaps the Japanese, should be so quick to condemn.
The bombing came at the end of a long and bloody war, and at the time there was mostly relief that it was over. It is facile to say that "only 46,000" would have become casualties in an invasion of Japan. In my own family, we had an uncle who was a prisoner of the Japanese at the war's end. There was little doubt among my older relatives that he owed his life to the atomic bomb.
A 21-year-old US soldier wrote: "When we heard we would not have to run up the beaches near Tokyo while being mortared and shelled, we cried with relief and joy. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all."
Multiply that by the tens of thousands of young soldiers in Europe and America preparing to ship to the staging areas in Okinawa and the Philippines, and you can get an inkling of the dilemma faced by Truman, a man thrust into high office with little preparation. It was the choice between an evil, and perhaps a greater one. That is not the same as Stalin or Pol Pot pursuing death for ideological glory.
It must be said that Harry Truman became a great leader of the free world, when that phrase really meant something. Dealing with two of the worst dictators of the century, Stalin and Mao, he stood up to both.
His administration laid down the US policy by which the Cold War would never become a hot war, and by which it was eventually won. We, including the Irish who Mr Fennell believes have a special dispensation to pass judgment on Truman, are in his debt. The legacy of Harry S. Truman is not the simplistic one of a "war criminal".
On the whole, history has been (and will be) generous in its accounting of his successes and failures. - Yours, etc,
TOBY JOYCE, Navan, Co Meath.