A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On Quora, the debate over whether the U.S. should have sought other ways to end the Pacific War instead of dropping atomic bombs on Japan continues. Yesterday, I replied to this question by James Germain: Did the atomic bomb really have to be dropped as U.S history books state? It’s not just “U.S. history books” that state the necessity for the use of atomic weapons against Japan; many Japanese historians also say the same thing. Now that we’ve got the “handwringing over the bomb” part out of the way, let’s consider the alternatives that were available to President Harry S Truman, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur: Before President Truman decided to use atomic weapons to shock the Japanese militarists into accepting the Potsdam Declaration and agreeing to surrender unconditionally (with, perhaps, private guarantees that the Emperor could retain his position as a  ceremonial  head of state), he had several alternatives, non...

American military history - as well as that of our adversaries - is full of controversies. And even though the Second World War is a rare case where the morality of the Allied cause is indisputable, the nature of the conflict and the fateful decisions made by the Axis and Allies still stir up heated debates about how it was fought - and how it was brought to an end. As historian Richard B. Frank writes in his introduction to Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, "[h]ow World War II ended in the Pacific remains one of the great controversies in American - and Japanese - history. At the center of this controversy is the atomic bomb. Indeed, almost all accounts of this period position atomic weaponry as the hub around which other considerations orbit. This approach, however, profoundly fails to recreate history as it originally unfolded." As a result of this fixation with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a mythology has been created in both the U...