“We have ordered our government to communicate to the governments of the United States, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union that our empire accepts the provisions of their joint declaration” that called for Japan’s unconditional surrender, he said in a tone so soft it seemed out of character for a man who’d had been considered a god until that moment.
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“Eleanor hates war, I hate war and even our dog Fala hates war” is the quote attributed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt following the brutal attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor December. 7, 1941. Most of its merchant marine had been sunk, and its air force consisted mostly of hastily trained kamikaze pilots.
The Manhattan Engineer District estimated that there were 255,000 people living in Hiroshima before the blast, which it says killed 66,000 people and injured 69,000 more. When U.S. personnel examined our beach after the war, they found the cliff we faced to be replete with artillery emplacements, including battleship guns.
Yet the total defeat and occupation of Japan offers the clearest example of how to use American military power to create stability and security in a tumultuous region.
“On the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, I bow my head deeply before the souls of all those who perished, both at home and abroad”, he said.
One more survivor of the Nagasaki bombings, Sanae Ikeda, 82, recalls how he lost his brothers and a sister in the tragedy.
Target committee members believed an atom bomb could destroy the infrastructure of Japan without the need for an invasion, so the cities of Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, Kokura, Niigata, and even Tokyo were identified as potential areas for destruction. Japan has been lucky not to have seen a war since, he said.
U.S. imperialism’s first atomic bomb was detonated in a test on July 16, 1945. The goal of the bombing was not just to make sure that the U.S. and its allies won the war, but more significantly, to make sure that the U.S. and the U.S. alone would benefit from Japan’s surrender.
The writer also used a common propaganda device that powerful entities such as the Pentagon, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the nuclear-weapons industry have been using forever when writing or attempting to rewrite history.
“The thing about VJ day is that veterans feel they were forgotten”. That’s what the Japanese rulers feared more than the atomic bombing of their population.
I don’t know the cause of his death, but many people who entered Hiroshima soon after the bomb suffered radiation sickness and later died of cancer. And if Japan did invent its own megaweapon… The bomb suddenly had made mass death not honorable and courageous, but meaningless.
Seventy years ago today, millions in Japan – factory and office workers in big cities, farmers in isolated rural communities – huddled around radios for what was to be a major announcement.
At the time, he began searching for diaries, eventually collecting more than 150.
Thus with their shock and horror, the atomic bombs broke the political deadlock on both sides – relieving Japan of what it had considered its duty to fight to the last, and relieving the United States of what it had considered its duty to bring down the leader of the criminal Japanese regime. Three days later another such bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
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Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.
