These quotes are not the revisionist version, they are the original version by these men:
A. Major General Curtis LeMay
B. Admiral William D. Leahy
C. Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz
D. General Dwight D. Eisenhower
E. General Henry (Hap) Arnold
F. U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey
ROLEX
And, as I noted in the some 3000 words of rebuttal the last time this issue came up, each of these figures either had their ego at stake or they were making these statements at the height of the Cold War. I’ll just pull from that thread:
General Curtis LeMay - We won the war with my innovative and driven conventional bombing campaign, not some bomb.
President Dwight Eisenhower and Admiral William Leahy - cold war positions, in the face of MAD, on the morality of the nuclear genie. Leah in fact became quite the anti-nuclear activist after the war.
Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold - again, a plug to the Air Corps long running bombing campaigns as practiced in both theaters.
And three you left out this time:
General Douglas MacArthur - I WON THE WAR, who needed a bomb.
Admiral William "Bull" Halsey - We won the war with the pacific feet, not some bomb.
Admiral Ernest King, US Chief of Naval Operations, said that "the effective naval blockade would, in the course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission through lack of oil, rice, medicines, and other essential materials." (submission, of course, involving mass death through starvation)
You can substitute Nimitz for King, though his statement that “Japan had already sued for peace…” is entirely inaccurate. BTW, would the war really have been over in two weeks without the Russians or the Bomb? Same with the Strategic Bombing survey statement. Pretty optimistic (see later below).
There are plenty of other quotes by the rest of the senior military and civilian leadership saying the same thing as these distinguished men. The only 5-star ranked officer holding the minority view was Marshall.
You previously (in that other thread) listed a bunch of these. My reply there was:
…Your additional page of state department officials just serves to confirm that the decision to drop the atomic bombs was controversial. They state their opinions, with the generous use of “might,” “should,” “all probability,” “could have,” etc. Most of their opinions center on, “It would have been great if…” and in some cases contain a Western-thinking analysis of Japan’s dismal military situation that ignores the fact that the Japanese people did not really believe they were loosing the war, and that the militarist faction of the government (the dominate faction of the government since before the war) didn’t care. They believed that with added sacrifice Japan could ultimately win. If there was no militarist faction, and if the civilian faction and the Emperor were the only source of power (or even clearly the dominant source of power) then their arguments would carry more weight.
As to Marshall, the dissenter, he was also the only one, as Chief of Staff, who was had a big picture position on the issue without that “I won the war not the bomb,” bias (though that could admittedly bias his view as well).
A lot of people were cited who had their own agendas, just like the British battleship admirals with the "inhuman" submarine, the Air Corp and Navy with Billy Mitchell, the 8th AF with unescorted daylight bombardment, etc. Others were quoted at the height of the cold war when the nuclear genie prompted much retrospective thought. Frankly, there are several million men in uniform from that period of lower rank who would universally say that the atomic bomb was worth it if it meant they could live to return to civilian life. Not much of a philosophical issue there, when you’re the guy with the rifle in your hands.
The reality is the war had dragged on for 6 years and there was little patience left among the allies (leaders to people) for dragging it out for another year chatting and maybe having to invade anyway. During which times, the civilian deaths from starvation and disease would likely have dwarfed the bombings. Each month would have rapidly provided a death toll that would certainly rival the atomic bombings. Hardly a “better” alternative, to win the war whenever the civilian death toll from starvation reached a point (and I bet it would have been a high point at that) where the militaristic leadership decided to sue for peace.
Had this been carried to completion, would you now be criticizing the US for starving to death millions of Japanese civilians? It did almost happen (certainly was underway), and it might even have worked after the dead piled high enough. It’s telling that a town in Japan dedicated a monument to an American naval base commander who opened up the facility’s garbage dump to the public and saved many from starvation immediately post war. Saburo Saki talked of relatives who did not make it through those lean years.
