Sixty-six years ago, B-29 bombers from the US Army-Airforce dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. The first, codenamed ‘Little Boy’ was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August, while the second, ‘Fat Man’ was dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August.
Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000-166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000-80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day. The Hiroshima prefectural health department estimates that, of the people who died on the day of the explosion, 60% died from flash or flame burns, 30% from falling debris and 10% from other causes. During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness. In a US estimate of the total immediate and short term cause of death, 15-20% died from radiation sickness, 20-30% from flash burns, and 50-60% from other injuries, compounded by illness. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians.
The US government expected to have another atomic bomb ready for use in the third week of August, with three more in September and a further three in October!
The publicly-stated rationale for the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare so far was to end the war in such a way as to save lives, both US and Japanese, which would otherwise have been lost in occupying and ‘pacifying’ Japan. This was (and still is) one of the greatest LIES ever told.
US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Harry S Truman that he (Stimson) was fearful that the US air force would have Japan so bombed out that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength.” He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb.” His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip.” General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified, “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.” The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, Truman (who, in typically sententious American fashion, had invoked the blessing of his invisible friend on the act) voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success of the experiment.” Dropping the atomic bomb was merely a war-crime, only one in a long line committed by the European-descended inhabitants of the United States, from the Pequot War of 1636, through My Lai in 1968 to Fallujah in 2004 — and if it hadn’t been for Philby, Burgess and McLean, the US would have been holding the rest of the world hostage for 66 years instead of just the past 20.
And one can make a good case that it was the USSR that was responsible for the final defeat of the Japanese Empire. The US had rebuffed Japanese offers to surrender from as early as 1943, and decided to fight it out. The US airforce had been bombing Japan around the clock for months before dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August and the second on 9 August
On 9 August 1945 a large Soviet army under General Afanasiy Pavlantevich Byeloborodov entered the war against Japan, launching several offensive operations simultaneously, in North-east China, North Korea, South Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands. Over a short period of time, the Russian armies with naval support cleared the Japanese forces from vast expanses of East Asia, leaving no alternative to Hitler’s Far Eastern ally. Between 9 August and 20 August about 80,000 men of the Kwangtung Army – Japan’s strongest — were killed and. 600,000 taken prisoner. Approximate Russian losses were 8,000 dead and 22,000 wounded. Twenty-two Japanese divisions were routed.
Japan waited five days before capitulating and eleven before signing the actual document of surrender. Tokyo’s leaders saw the impossibility of continuing the war only after Russia declared war on Japan. On the same day (9 August) that Russia entered the war in the Far East, Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki said, “The entry into the war of the Soviet Union this morning puts us in an utterly hopeless situation and makes further continuation of the war impossible.”
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