Back to Article List
The Hiroshima Myth
by Gary G. Kohls on 06 Aug 2013 4 Comments
This Tuesday, August 6, 2013, is the 68th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, the whole truth of which has been heavily censored and mythologized ever since war-weary Americans celebrated V-J Day 10 days later.

 

The pitiful history lessons that were taught by my uninspired/bored history teachers (which seemed to be mostly jocks) came from patriotic and highly censored books where everything the British and US military ever did in war time was honorable and self-sacrificing and everything their opponents did was barbaric. Everybody in my graduating class of 26 swallowed the post-war propaganda in our history books. It was from these books that we learned about the “glorious” end of the war against Japan.

 

Of course, I now know that I had been given false information, orchestrated by war-justifying militarists (and assorted uber-patriotic historians) starting with General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur successfully imposed total censorship of what really happened at Ground Zero. One of his first acts after taking over as viceroy of Japan was to confiscate and/or destroy all the photographic evidence documenting the horrors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

Back in 1995, the Smithsonian Institution was preparing to correct some of the 50-year-old pseudo-patriotic myths by staging an honest, historically-accurate display dealing with the atomic bombings. Following the vehement, orchestrated, reactionary outrage emanating from right-wing veterans groups and other patriot groups (including Newt Gingrich’s GOP-dominated Congress that threatened to stop federal funding of the Institute), the Smithsonian was forced to censor-out all of the unwelcome but contextually important parts of the story.

 

So again we had another example of politically-motivated groups heavily altering real history because they were afraid of revealing “unpatriotic” historical truths that might shake the confidence of average Americans in our leaders, sort of like the near-total media black-out about the controlled demolitions of the three World Trade Center buildings on 9/11/01 that killed thousands of innocent people and unleashed the dogs of war against innocents in Afghanistan (explore  www.ae911truth.org for the  documentation of that assertion).

 

Could the Okinawa bloodbath have been averted?

 

The Smithsonian historians did have a gun to their heads, of course, but in the melee, the corporate-controlled mainstream media - and therefore the public – failed to learn an important historical point, and that is this: The war could have ended in the spring of 1945 without the summer atomic bombs, and therefore there might have been no Okinawa bloodbath for thousands of American Marines and soldiers. Also there would have been no need for an American land invasion of Japan - the basis of the subsequent propaganda campaign that justified the use of atomic weapons on defenseless civilian populations and meets the definition of an international war crime and a crime against humanity.

 

American intelligence, with the full knowledge of President Truman’s administration, was aware of Japan’s desperate search for ways to honorably surrender months before Truman gave the fateful order to incinerate Hiroshima.

 

Intelligence data, revealed in the 1980s, showed that the contingency plans for a large-scale US invasion (planned for no sooner than November 1, 1945) would have been unnecessary. Japan was working on peace negotiations through its Moscow ambassador as early as April of 1945. Truman knew of these developments because the US had broken the Japanese code years earlier, and all of Japan’s military and diplomatic messages were being intercepted. On July 13, 1945, Foreign Minister Togo said: “Unconditional surrender (giving up all sovereignty, especially deposing the Emperor) is the only obstacle to peace.”

 

Truman and his advisors knew about these efforts, and the war could have ended through diplomacy by simply conceding a post-war figurehead position for the emperor Hirohito – who was regarded as a deity in Japan. That reasonable concession was - seemingly illogically - refused by the US in their demands for unconditional surrender, initially demanded at the 1943 Casablanca Conference between Roosevelt and Churchill and reiterated at the Potsdam Conference between Truman, Churchill and Stalin. Still, the Japanese continued searching for an honorable peace through negotiations.

 

Even Secretary of War Henry Stimson, said: “the true question was not whether surrender could have been achieved without the use of the bomb but whether a different diplomatic and military course would have led to an earlier surrender. A large segment of the Japanese cabinet was ready in the spring of 1945 to accept substantially the same terms as those finally agreed on.” In other words, Stimson felt that the US had unnecessarily prolonged the war.

 

Japanese leaders knew that the war was lost and were looking for ways to honorably surrender

 

After Japan did surrender, MacArthur allowed the emperor to remain in place as spiritual head of Japan, the very condition that coerced the Japanese leadership to refuse to accept the humiliating “unconditional surrender” terms.

 

So the two essential questions that need answering to comprehend what was going on behind the scenes are these:  1) Why did the US refuse to accept Japan’s only demand concerning their surrender (the retention of the emperor) and 2) why were the atomic bombs used when victory in the Pacific was already a certainty?

 

Shortly after WWII, military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote: “The Japanese, in a military sense, were in a hopeless strategic situation by the time the Potsdam Declaration (insisting on Japan’s unconditional surrender) was made on July 26, 1945.”

 

Admiral William Leahy, top military aide to President Truman, said in his war memoirs, I Was There: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. My own feeling is that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

 

And General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a personal visit to President Truman a couple of weeks before the bombings, urged him not to use the atomic bombs. Eisenhower said: “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing…. to use the atomic bomb, to kill and terrorize civilians, without even attempting [negotiations], was a double crime.”

 

The factors leading up to the decision to use the bombs

 

There are a number of factors that contributed to the Truman administration’s decision to use the bombs.

 

1) The US had made a huge investment in time, mind and money (a massive 2 billion in 1940 dollars) to produce three bombs, and there was no inclination - and no guts - to stop the momentum.

 

2) The US military and political leadership – as did many ordinary Americans - had a tremendous appetite for revenge because of Pearl Harbor. Mercy wasn’t in the mindset of the US military or the war-weary populace, and the missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki were accepted – no questions asked - by most of those folks who only knew the sanitized, national security version of events.

 

3) The fissionable material in Hiroshima’s bomb was uranium. The Nagasaki bomb was a plutonium bomb. Scientific curiosity was a significant factor that pushed the project to its completion. The Manhattan Project scientists (and the US Army director of the project, General Leslie Groves) were curious about “what would happen if an entire city was leveled by a single uranium bomb?” “What about a plutonium bomb?”

 

The decision to use both bombs had been made well in advance of August 1945. Accepting the surrender of Japan was not an option if the science experiment was to go ahead. Of course the three-day interval between the two bombs was unconscionably short if the Hiroshima bomb was designed to coerce immediate surrender. Japan’s communications and transportation capabilities were in shambles, and no one, not even the US military, much less the Japanese high command, fully understood what had happened at Hiroshima. (The Manhattan Project was so top secret that even Douglas MacArthur, commanding general of the entire Pacific theatre, had been kept out of the loop until five days before Hiroshima.)

 

4) The Russians had proclaimed their intent to enter the war with Japan 90 days after V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day, May 8), which would have been Aug. 8, two days after Hiroshima was bombed. Indeed, Russia did declare war on Japan on August 8 and was advancing eastward across Manchuria when Nagasaki was incinerated. The US didn’t want Japan surrendering to Russia or sharing the spoils of war. Russia was soon to be the only other superpower - and a future enemy - so the first nuclear threat “messages” of the Cold War were sent.

 

Russia indeed received far less of the spoils of war than they had anticipated, and the two superpowers were instantly mired in the Cold War stalemate that led to the unaffordable nuclear arms race and the possibility of total extinction of the human race. What did happen was the mutual moral and financial bankruptcies of both nations that occurred over the next couple of generations of military madness.

 

The reality for the bomb victims

 

An estimated 80,000 innocent civilians, plus 20,000 weaponless young Japanese conscripts died instantly in the Hiroshima bombing. Hundreds of thousands more suffered slow deaths from agonizing burns, radiation sickness, leukemias, anemias and untreatable infections for the rest of their shortened lives. Generations of the survivor’s progeny were also afflicted with horrible radiation-induced illnesses, cancers and premature deaths, still going on to this very hour.

 

Another shameful reality that has been covered up is the fact that 12 American Navy pilots, their existence well known to the US command, were instantly incinerated in the Hiroshima jail on the fateful day.

 

So the official War Department-approved version of the end of the war in the Pacific contained a new batch of myths that took their places among the long lists of myths that Americans are continuously fed by our corporate, military, political and media opinion leaders, the gruesomeness of war being changed to glorification in the process.

 

Among the other censored out realities include what really happened in the US military invasions and occupations of the countries of North Korea, Iran, Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Granada, Panama, the Philippines, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, Colombia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, etc. This list doesn’t cover the uncountable secret Pentagon/CIA covert operations and assassination plots in the rest of the world, where as many as150 nations contain American military bases (permission lavishly paid for by bribery or threats of economic sanctions).

 

But somehow most of us still hang on to our shaky “my country right or wrong” patriotism, desperately wanting to believe the cunningly-orchestrated myths that say that the war-profiteering multibillionaire corporate elite (and their politicians, military leaders and media talking heads who are in their employ) only work for peace, justice, equality, liberty and “making the world safe” for predatory capitalism.

 

While it is true that the US military has faced down the occasional despot, with necessary sacrifice from dead and mortally-wounded (in body, mind and spirit) American soldiers and veterans, more often than not the rationalization for going to war are the same as those of the “godless communists”, the anti-American “insurgents” and “freedom fighters” who want to convince us Yankees to just go home where we belong.

 

August 6 and 9, 1945 are just two more examples of the brain-washing that goes on in all “total war” political agendas, which are always accompanied by the inevitable human slaughter that is euphemistically labeled “collateral damage” or “friendly fire”.

 

What happened to the humanitarian, peace-loving America that we used to know and love?

 

It might already be too late to rescue and resuscitate the humanitarian, peacemaking America that we used to know and love. It might be too late to effectively confront the corporate hijacking of liberal democracy in America. It might be too late to successfully bring down the arrogant and greedy ruling elites who are selfishly dragging our world down the road to our destruction. The rolling coup d’etat of what I call Friendly American Fascism may have already accomplished its goals.

 

But there may still be some hope. Rather than being silent about the wars that the war-mongers are provoking all over the planet (with the very willing assistance of the Pentagon, the weapons industry and their lapdogs in Congress), people of conscience need to start learning the whole truth of history, despite the discomfort we will feel (cognitive dissonance) when the truth can’t be ignored any more. We need to start owning up to America’s uncountable war crimes that have been orchestrated in our names. And then we need to go to the streets, publicly protesting and courageously refusing to cooperate with those who are transforming America into a criminal rogue nation that will eventually be targeted for downfall by its billions of suffering victims outside our borders, similar to what happened to Nazi Germany and Fascist Japan.

 

Doing what is right for the whole of humanity for a change, rather than just doing what is profitable or advantageous for our over-privileged, over-consumptive and unsustainable American way of life, would be real honor, real patriotism and an essential start toward real peace.
User Comments Post a Comment
Yep...there is a Black saying, "The White men of America invented the Atomic bomb ; actually used it on another country, race and ethnicity ; sold the technology around the world for lots of money...and now want everyone to give it up while their own arsenal of weapons, and weapons of mass destruction, grows and remains the largest in the world. The White man rapes the land, resources, people and cultures...and makes destruction a way of life and business!"

The Natives would often say, "The White man talk with a forked tongue. It is devilishness, deceit and hypocrisy all rolled into one!"

Maybe the Black insights, the Native observations and some Immigrant critiques are right.
Dr. MS
August 06, 2013
Report Abuse
Hiroshima - Another Illuminati Psy Op
By Henry Makow, Ph.D.

August 5, 2013

Hiroshima was destroyed 68 years ago Tuesday. Forget about the rationales given. According to Eustace Mullins, the Illuminati Jewish bankers shepherded the bomb into existence. It was dropped in order to paralyze the human race in a state of fear and make it forget God and accept the Cold War instead. Naturally they gave the bomb to the Russians to make it work.

The Illuminati rationale behind the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60 years ago is the same as 9-11. The purpose is to inspire fear and hopelessness, justify war, repression, debt and "world government."

A half million Japanese civilians were irradiated not to save American lives or impress Soviet Russia. They were slaughtered to force humanity to accept the Cold War, a nuclear arms race that cost five trillion dollars and accomplished nothing.

Now that the Cold War has run its course, the bankers have established the war on terror, with Islamists cast as the enemy. An external enemy is necessary so people don't realize they are being enslaved and fleeced by the central bankers who appoint the leaders, control the media and create the money.

THE $5 TRILLION COLD WAR

With World War Two winding down, the Illuminati bankers needed the "Cold War."The bankers ignored Japanese attempts to surrender because they needed to demonstrate the devastating effect of the atomic bomb.

"Our entire postwar program depends on terrifying the world with the atomic bomb," Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius Jr., left, the son of a JP Morgan partner, said. "To accomplish that goal," said John Foster Dulles, who represented Kuhn Loeb and the Rothschilds. "You will need a very good tally. I should say a million."Yes," replied Stettinius, "we are hoping for a million tally in Japan. But if they surrender, we won't have anything." "Then you have to keep them in the war until the bomb is ready," said John Foster Dulles. "That is no problem. Unconditional surrender." "They won't agree to that," said Stettinius. "They are sworn to protect the Emperor." "Exactly," said John Foster Dulles, left. "Keep Japan in the war another three months, and we can use the bomb on their cities; we will end this war with the naked fear of all the peoples of the world, who will then bow to our will."

My source here is Eustace Mullin's excellent on line essay, "The Secret History of the Atomic Bomb." Mullins, a former Library of Congress researcher, is one of a handful of courageous historians the bankers don't own. I urge you to read his 14-page essay in full.

THE BANKER'S BOMB

According to Mullins, President Truman, whose only real job before becoming a Senator had been Masonic organizer in Missouri, did not make the fatal decision alone. A committee led by James F. Byrnes, Bernard Baruch's puppet, instructed him. Baruch was the Rothschild's principal agent in the USA and a Presidential "adviser" spanning the era from Woodrow Wilson to JFK.Baruch, who was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, spearheaded the "Manhattan Project" named for Baruch's home turf. He chose life-long Communist Robert Oppenheimer to be Research Director. It was very much the bankers' bomb.

The atomic bomb was developed at the Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico. Baruch had chosen Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves to head the operation. He had previously built the Pentagon, and had a good reputation among the Washington politicians, who usually came when Baruch beckoned.The scientific director at Los Alamos was J. Robert Oppenheimer, left, scion of a prosperous Jewish family of clothing merchants.

The project cost an estimated two billion dollars, 30 billion in today's dollars. No other nation in the world could have afforded to develop such a bomb. The first successful test of the atomic bomb occurred at the Trinity site, two hundred miles south of Los Alamos at 5:29:45 a.m. on July 16, 1945. Oppenheimer, who was a Communist, was beside himself at the spectacle. He shrieked, "I am become Death, the Destroyer of worlds."

Mullins writes: "Indeed, this seemed to be the ultimate goal of the Manhattan Project, to destroy the world. There had been considerable fear among the scientists that the test explosion might indeed set off a chain reaction, which would destroy the entire world. Oppenheimer's exultation came from his realization that now his people had attained the ultimate power, through which they could implement their five-thousand-year desire to rule the entire world."


HIROSHIMA

On August 6, 1945, an uranium bomb 3-235, 20 kilotons yield, was exploded 1850 feet in the air above Hiroshima, for maximum explosive effect. It devastated four square miles, and killed 140,000 of the 255,000 inhabitants.

Mullins quotes a Japanese doctor: "My eyes were ready to overflow with tears. I spoke to myself and bit my lip so that I would not cry. If I had cried, I would have lost my courage to keep standing and working, treating dying victims of Hiroshima."( Left, Lipman Siew, a Lithuanian Jew took the name of William L. Laurence. He states in Who's Who that he "was selected by the heads of the atomic bomb project as sole writer and public relations." Laurance sat in the copilot's seat of the B-29 on the fateful Nagasaki bombing run.)When the Air Force dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the principal target was a Catholic church: "The roof and masonry of the Catholic cathedral fell on the kneeling worshippers. All of them died."

Back in the United States the news of the bombing of Hiroshima was greeted with a mixture of relief, pride, joy, shock and sadness. Oppenheimer's colleague remembers the shouts of joy: "Hiroshima has been destroyed! Many of my friends were rushing to the telephone to book tables at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe in order to celebrate. Oppenheimer walked around like a prize-fighter, clasping his hands together above his head as he came to the podium."The bankers serve a diabolical power whose goal is to thwart and enslave humanity. The Cold War served to brutalize a whole generation.

Mullins writes: "In the United States, the schools held daily bomb drills, with the children hiding under their desks. No one told them that thousands of schools children in Hiroshima had been incinerated in their classrooms; the desks offered no protection against nuclear weapons. The moral effect on the children was devastating. If they were to be vaporized in the next ten seconds, there seemed little reason to study, marry and have children, or prepare for a steady job. This demoralization through the nuclear weapons program is the undisclosed reason for the decline in public morality.


"CALL IT KARMA?

Now child-like Americans may pay the price for their indifference to the fate of the Japanese and failure to punish the perpetrators who may be preparing to do it all over again. This time, the victims won't be strange-looking people thousands of miles away. Sept 11 was the shot across the bow. The most privileged people on earth, Americans were murdered and humiliated in broad daylight. No one was held responsible for allowing this to happen, a sure sign that their own "leaders" were complicit.Are Americans going to be disinherited and destroyed? The difference between them and Iraqi insurgents: the Iraqis know they have been invaded by an alien and evil power.
H.M.
August 06, 2013
Report Abuse
Japan has agreed to surrender on 8 August 1945 to the Soviet Union, with which it had still then a non-aggression treaty.
To spoil that nuclear weapons were used by USA on 6 August on Hiroshima and 9 August on Nagasaki. On 10th August Japan surrendered to USA alone.
Soviet Union invaded Manchuria on 1o August midnight only, when Japan has already surrendered to USA and the non-aggression treaty between Japan and USSR became invalid. However, the Soviet Union never invaded Japan proper although it could without any obstacle.
D.Bose
August 09, 2013
Report Abuse
The decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which were in fact major Japanese wartime industrial production centers and military headquarters, and therefore legitimate military targets, a fact that the author ignores) has always been a controversial one. Thus it is only to be expected that the American-hating Left would attempt to demonize the decision as being motivated by rank militarism, when in fact it was wartime necessity designed to minimize casualties, and ensure an unconditional Japanese surrender, so that the fascist state could be fully dismantled and brought to justice.

The author attempts to use an appeal to emotion to portray the dropping of the bombs as a war crime, by citing the number of civilian deaths and suffering. Yet, he does not explain how one can stop a state like Fascist Japan, which brutally colonized and brazenly committed war crimes against most of East Asia, without resorting to grim methods such as this, especially in light of its refusal to surrender despite increasing American pressure. It is important to remember the situation that preceded the dropping of the bombs.

Most of Japan's major cities, including the capital of Tokyo, had been firebombed by US forces, and some had been more than half destroyed. This method, incidentally, resulted in more civilian deaths than the atomic bombs themselves. Japan had also been evicted from its colonies, and its home islands had been blockaded to deprive Japan of resources, so its population was starving. Yet, for all of the author's denouncing of the U.S., he does not condemn the Japanese government for refusing to surrender despite all of this suffering. Indeed, he seems to put Japan's precious "honor" and fear of "humiliation" over the lives and well being of its citizens. Indeed, the Japanese government itself increased the death toll caused by the bombs by not arranging evacuations of its cities following the U.S. dropping leaflets over Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and other potential targets urging evacuation.

Japan's condition of retaining its Emperor was hardly a trivial one. Far from being a ceremonial monarch, the Japanese Emperor was actively complicity in Japan's many war crimes (that the author completely fails to acknowledge) and the U.S. wanted to put him on trial. Hence, the U.S. demand for unconditional surrender was hardly "illogical", and Japan deserves condemnation for wanting to shield him from accountability and put their people through unnecessary suffering.

To say that the Japanese were looking for ways to honorably surrender is misleading. It is certainly true that there were members of the Japanese cabinet who were willing to surrender, but there were also members who were not, and wanted to continue fighting to pressure the Americans into keeping the institution of the emperor after Japan surrendered. The cabinet was very much divided, so much so that the eventual decision to surrender had to be made by Emperor Hirohito himself, in order to break the cabinet's impasse. The influence of the war faction of the military was so pervasive that Japan was literally training civilians to use sharpened bamboo poles to resist an eventual U.S. invasion. This was part of a retaliation plan known as Operation Ketsugo, designed to inflict maximum casualties upon American forces.

Hardliner Vice Admiral Tajijiro Onishi, father of Japanese kamikazi, admitted his insistence on continuing to fight, saying "If we are prepared to sacrifice twenty million lives in kamikazi effort, victory will be ours." This is 100 times the number dead in the atomic bombings. A month before the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, Emperor Hirohito himself endorsed Operation Ketsugo, saying "Japan must fight to the finish and choose extinction rather than surrender." Even after the second bomb was dropped members of the war faction of the Japanese military, like General Yoshijiro Umezu were telling the emperor things like "With luck, we will repel the invaders before they land!" in anticipation of an American attack on the home islands.

The hardline war faction was so insistent on continuing the war that some of them, led by Major Kenji Hatanaka went so far as to attempt to kill their commanding officers and kidnap the Emperor, putting him under house arrest on the day he was supposed to formally broadcast his surrender speech. This attempted coup that became known as the Kyujo Incident, was thankfully aborted at the last minute, and the conspirators forced to commit suicide. However, that Japanese War Minister General Korechika Anami was in fact aware of the plot and did not arrest the perpetrators immediately, though he eventually alerted other officers, shows just how disputed the Emperor's decision was.

Indeed, if the Japanese government was as willing to surrender as the author claims, one wonders why it took two atomic bombs to force them to do so. If the author is correct, Japan should have surrendered immediately following the aftermath of the incineration of Hiroshima, especially considering that, in the intervening days, U.S. firebombing intensified. The excuses that Japan's military leaders did not know exactly what had happened at Hiroshima, and that Japan's communication and transportation capabilities were in shambles are weak. What happened at Hiroshima was obvious: it was incinerated, and Japan knew about it well before the dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki. Moreover, weakened communications infrastructure did not stop Japan from communicating with the U.S. a day after the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. In fact, in his surrender broadcast on the radio, Emperor Hirohito specifically said that he was surrendering due to the "new and terrible weapon, with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage" possessed by the Americans, and that continuing to fight would result in the destruction of the Japanese nation and human civilization.

Had the atomic bombs not been used to force a Japanese surrender, the U.S. invasion of Japan, Operation Downfall, would have commenced, and would have had even more colossal civilian and military casualties on both sides, reaching one million dead, including Allied POWs, which is one of the justifications behind Truman's decision to use the bombs. Indeed, as Truman pointed out, an invasion of Japan would have been "another Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other" a reference to the bloody Battle of Okinawa, that had more casualties than the dropping of the atomic bombs, another fact that the author ignores. To complain about the death toll and radiation-induced suffering that the bombs created without considering them in the context of the even more heinous suffering created by conventional weapons, is to present a distorted view of the subject. The atomic bomb was the least destructive of the various alternative strategies available to the U.S.

The author cites opinions of people like Eisenhower and Stimson as evidence that the bombs should not have been dropped, but the quotes he uses were from statements made after the war was over. It is unfair to criticize the American decision to drop the bombs based on information that came to light after they were used.

In summary, the atomic bombs ended the war earlier, precluded the need for a land invasion of the Japanese home islands, saved thousands of Japanese and American and Allied lives more than they cost, and ended the barbaric Japanese colonization of Asia, liberating millions. Even Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, admitted to Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima that he had "done the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude of that time, how fanatic they were. They'd die for the Emperor...Every man woman and child would have resisted the invasion with sticks and stones if necessary."

The biggest piece of evidence that proves that the U.S. intention was to save lives was what happened to Japan after the U.S. occupation. The U.S. could have completely stripped Japan of its industrial base and reverted it to a pre-Meiji state, in order to completely remove its ability to make war, and could have easily justified it given fascist Japan's bloodstained history. Instead, they laid the foundation for Japan's eventual rebirth as a peaceful, democratic, and prosperous nation, and a friend and ally of the U.S, thereby debunking the idea that the U.S. was fanatically thirsting for revenge, as the author claims.
si91
August 11, 2013
Report Abuse