Paul Fussell Thank God For The Atom Bomb Thesis

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But even accepting Galbraith's breezy guess, three more weeks of war with Japan meant another 21,000 Allied killed and wounded.

Fussell, a combat vet wounded while fighting the Nazis in Europe, was re-assigned to a division slated to assault the Japanese island of Honshu.

Many veterans find this argument morally repugnant.

Assume, as the academic revisionists callously do, that there is some "X" number of additional GI and Japanese military and civilian deaths from "non-atom" warfare which is a "more morally acceptable loss" than 220,000 Japanese civilian and military killed by atom bombs. The critics' make much of a vague June 1945 estimate that the Kyushu assault would cost "only" 31,000 Allied casualties.

One clique maintains Truman A-bombed "yellows" in order to impress Stalin.

Truman was a calculating "racist-fascist." Such "opinions" deserve special damnation.

The President's decision was supported by the men who faced death had they been told to invade the Japanese home islands. In the end, whether it was wise to use the bomb remains one of the most controversial issues in American 20th-century history.

Initial landings, in Kyushu, would have occurred during the fall and winter of 1945-1946. No one knows how many lives would have been lost, but more than military men would have participated in the invasion. Army infantryman in Europe, said in his essay When the atom bombs were dropped and the news began to circulate that we would not be obligated in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared and shelled we broke down and cried with relief and joy. Others disagree, arguing Japan would have likely surrendered had more time passed.

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy) Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead Cocktails from Hell: Five Complex Wars Shaping the 21st Century From Amazon by Austin Bay August 2, 2005The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima (Aug. and the Destroyer Escort Underhill was lost." Fussell scorns Harvard prof and insistent anti-nuclear-nit John Kenneth Galbraith's twaddle that the A-bombs accelerated Japan's surrender by (quoth Galbraith) "at most, two or three weeks." Galbraith's estimate of Japan's resiliency is a typical figment of ivory tower fevers -- military calculations at the time suggested Japan would fight for another year.

The six days between Nagasaki and Japan's surrender on Aug. In his classic essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," Paul Fussell (World War II vet and National Book Award-winner) observes, "Allied (Pacific) casualties were running to over 7,000 per week." After Nagasaki, "captured American fliers were executed (heads chopped off); the U. submarine Bonefish was sunk (all aboard drowned); the destroyer Callaghan went down ...