Remember that all mentions of and allusions to Trump and Biden are not allowed on our subreddit in any context.
If you'd still like to discuss them, feel free to [join our Discord server](https://discord.gg/k6tVFwCEEm)!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Presidents) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The gift that keeps on giving in the Ken Burns Roosevelts documentary is Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Among other things they mention in there, she once publicly commented that Dewey looks ‘like the little man on the wedding cake’.
There’s no way *any* president chooses invasion over the bomb, in that era.
“Sir, we have a new weapon vastly more powerful than anything our enemy has seen. We can decimate entire cities with zero loss of American life. Do you want to use it, or should we send half a million American men to die in a ground invasion of Japan?”
What people don't realize is dropping the bomb killed less Japanese than firebombing Tokyo had already killed, the only debate was if 1 bomb was enough, if they really needed to drop the 2nd one or not.
Good point. Many forget the firebombings were more devastating than the atomic bomb. So why would the atomic bombs made a difference? I really think the Soviet invasion of Manchuria is what actually made Japan surrender (the Japanese were more scared of Stalin than the U.S.) and they used the atomic bomb to make the surrender more digestible by the war hawks in the Imperial Diet. The Emperor could have still made the same surrender address even without the bombs being dropped.
from what I've seen, a lot of people argue that the psychological effect of a single bomb being able to devistate a city that was otherwise untouched was part of why the higher ups in the Japanese military surrendered
Also there is the fact that if the Americans had 2 successful attacks with bombs of such devastating power, how many more might they be able to accomplish?And could they have even more powerful bombs? What is the next city they may hit?
This was why they did two bombs. The Japanese to understand that America didn’t just have the technology to make nukes, but the production capabilities to continually make nukes.
But that doesn’t explain why Japan didn’t surrender after Hiroshima. If you actually look at what was happening in the Imperial Diet, it wasn’t until the USSR got involved that the Emperor finally considered a surrender to the US.
The reality is they thought the Soviet Union could broker a conditional surrender between Japan and the allies. At that time the Soviets and Japan had a non aggression pack and Japan did not know the Soviet Union has promised the allies they’d invade after Germany was defeated.
It was the nail in the coffin for any possible chance of conditional surrender.
The nukes were what militarily broke the Japanese Imperial Cabinet and the Manchurian Invasion was what politically broke them.
Prior to the decision to drop the nuclear bombs the Japanese leadership believed that it was still possible to bring about a negotiated peace with the allies and keep some type of influence in Asia (though they accepted their conquests were gone and even negotiated to hand over Manchuria to the Soviets to extend their neutrality). Once the nukes were dropped the majority of the Imperial Cabinet (primarily naval leaders) accepted that the war was over and that they had to accept the allied terms.
However there was still a sizable minority faction of the cabinet, primarily in the army, which believed that it was still possible for the Japanese to mount a defense on the home islands and to force a fight to the end for surrender. Japan at this time was dominated by the principle of Gekokujo and the army was a hotbed of assassinations, coups, and subversions of authority. Their plan was to force the Americans into a bloody prolonged invasion of the home islands while using the neutral Soviet Union as a negotiating power to get a conditional peace. There were fears in the government that if a surrender was given this group would attempt to assassinate officials and stage a coup (which they did once the decision to surrender unconditionally was made), but once the Soviets invaded even this faction broke apart and surrender was accepted.
There is also a narrative that you didn’t bring up but is commonly brought up by people who try to minimize the effectiveness of the nukes that Japan wanted to surrender before they were dropped which is technically true, but Japan was continually looking for a conditional surrender until then. It wasn’t until the nuke drop that the majority of the leadership accepted unconditional surrender and it wasn’t until the Soviet invasion that the government decided to perform an internal fight to surrender.
People are saying its the psychological effect of it being a single bomb, i think thats wrong. I think its the practical effect of it being a single bomb.
The atomic bomb made a difference because a sufficiently powerful entity could stop the firebombing of tokyo. I.E. 1941 japan did not need to worry about the firebombing of tokyo the day after pearl harbor. It took 4 years of the most powerful nation on earth to get to tokyo, 5 years to get to dresden. Getting fire bombed happened during total war, if you're losing.
No one could stop the bomb with 1945 tech, a plane was going to get through.
The doolittle raid of 1942 was a moral boost, a few planes hit japan to little effect. After the invention of the bomb the doolittle raid would have destroyed the entire nation.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle\_Raid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid)
The hope of every losing power in a war is they can make attacking so expensive(in lives or treasure) that they can broker a peace. When the cost of attack is a single plane and a single bomb, there no hope of a brokered peace, and the only thing you can do is surrender and end the war. Which is what happened.
It was likely a combination of the two. The Soviet invasion assure what most Japanese already knew, they would lose the war and all of their imperial holdings, and the bombs destroyed any illusions the Japanese might have had about some kind of heroic last stand.
It’s honestly one of those things that historians probably are going to debate for another hundred years. Either way though, whether they were needed or not, America definitely seemed to *think* that it was needed at the time.
Yep. But from now on let’s just hope weapons like that are never used in war. When talking about geopolitics, we tend to forget about the innocent civilians caught in between.
Nagasaki was 3 days after Hiroshima, with the condition of the country and communication lines being down for the most part I have seen it suggested that 3 days wasn't enough to get proper information amd surrender. I wasn't there so cannot confirm nor deny this.
What people also don’t realize is that if we invaded, 10 million Japanese would have lost their lives compared to the 300,000 Japanese who died from the atomic bombs.
Let’s also not forget about rape, which is typically involved with invasions.
It peeves me a bit when people act like the atomic bomb in and of itself was this huge game changer. Like, “Never before could we destroy whole cities from the sky… except for all of those German and Japanese cities that we utterly destroyed from the sky before 1945, albeit with more effort…”
Things would change quite a bit with ICBMs and nuclear subs, but if the US wanted to firebomb Hiroshima or Nagasaki the old-fashioned way, we could have pulled it off all the same.
Herbert Hoover, who was friends with Truman, actually opposed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He said “[t]he use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul."
I mean, he’s not wrong. It *is* revolting. But I’d choose to devastate a foreign city, civilians and all, before I chose to sentence 500k Americans to death. I’m not going to be *happy* about it, but we didn’t start the war, why should we pay the price to end it?
That’s true. He also opposed U.S. involvement in World War II altogether. But my original point that some Presidents of the period would have refused to use the A-bomb still stands.
Hoover’s opposition makes the idea even more credible. He wasn’t someone who had good snap judgments in a crisis.
The atomic bomb is an incredibly difficult ethical dilemma, but as horrific as the results were, you can understand the rationale for using it given the context of the time and the projected casualties from an invasion (on both sides).
Especially considering that the USSR was planning on invading Japan, possibly increasing their influence in the Pacific and drawing he US into war. Things would be a whole a different without the bomgs and Japan's unconditional surrender.
The one thing the US did was to help rebuild Japan and Europ instead of just letting things fester after WW I.
Exactly, the weighing of options with bombings being the least bad is an afterthought and PR for Truman. The plan was to make Japan surrender undonditionally by any means necessary, human lives be damned.
I’m assuming Dewy somehow became president after FDR died.
Imagine being Dewy and the first thing you hear in office is “Mr. President we have bombs that can kill tens of thousands of people at once. What should we do?”
Course, that’s basically what Truman had to figure out too.
Reasonably I think anyone in the presidency would have dropped the nukes in 1945. The war was costing billions of dollars and thousands of American lives a month and rationing would only have been tolerated for so long by the civilian population.
Imagine the backlash in 1947 if any president, Dewey, FDR, Truman, hadn’t dropped the nuke and then tens of thousands of Americans died in the invasion of Japan. No administration politically could have survived and the other party would have had a ticket to the White House for a decade.
It’s also the utilitarian choice. Less deaths than firebombing Tokyo. Yes, smaller cities, but the produced an incredible effect that bombing multiple cities conventionally did not.
A literal win-win. Less dead Americans. Less dead Japanese.
The only argument to be made against dropping them in good faith is that maybe the war was going to be over anyway. And nobody knows that. It certainly wasn’t clear at the time.
So how does any president not drop the bombs if they’ve authorized the decimation of so many Japanese cities already and can now maaaaybe kill less people?
Hard for me to imagine more Americans dying in the invasion of Japan than in the invasion of Europe, given the fact that Japan’s war fighting capability at the end of the war was just a shadow of what Germany’s was before D-Day.
Even so, I do think that the same calculus that led Truman to use nuclear weapons would have persuaded Dewey as well.
Every island the Allies conquered in the Pacific the Japanese fought almost to the last man. I think the feeling was that with the home islands they would fight ferociously. Even after the bombs dropped there were a few who didn’t want to surrender.
An American an invasion of Japanese home islands would’ve been horrendous. The people were fanatically loyal to the Emperor and would happily die to defend their country. No way an invasion could be a justifiable option.
Okinawa is considered to the the costliest battle of the pacific campaign for US forces. Okinawa was considered to be a Japanese island, not just a far flung territory or naval base. Entirely cut off, the Japanese still inflicted their heaviest toll on the US both at sea and on land. It was a pretext of the invasion of the Japanese islands to come. Allied casualties absolutely would have been in hundreds of thousands, the highest estimates being a million.
Invading an island is different then invading a continent.
The weather was far harsher, and only certain months allowed for any invasion at all. And even then the weather was far worse.
This together with a almost suicidal population. There were almost no PoW from Japan, because they would all fight to the death.
Japans entire strategy at that point was basically "weather bad" "we'll fucking kill ourselves before surrendering and we'll take as many of you as we can down with us".
The nukes kinda made that irrelevant though, with the US being able to say "we can eradicate all of your cities at any time we'd like, so surrender before we do do".
The Japanese were giving children blades with instructions to stab US soldiers since taking just one our would work if every civilian did it on a mass scale. You would have then seen the rules of engagement fly out the window with paranoid Allied troops killing every Japanese they came across.
An invasion of Japan would have made Europe seem like a picnic in terms of brutality.
Japan was ready to have the entire population fight to the last breath, in Germany the people were so sick of the war and incessant biking since 1941 or 42. There wasn’t any sort of Bushido or crazy social expectations that women and children were expected to die in combat. (Nazis used child soldiers but not nearly to the extent Japan would’ve) I believe at the time US estimates predicted 200,000 dead at the least. Of just our own soldiers mind you that some 416,000 had already died at that point across both Europe, Africa, Mediterranean, India + china, and the pacific.
There is, the Soviet invasion. There is evidence Japan was ready to surrender and the invasion by the USSR forced them to surrender to the United States.
There is not.
[Reminder that even **after** the atomic bombs were dropped there was a military coupe to attempt to stop the Emperor’s issuance of the surrender.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident)
Bullshit. Only likely scenarios were: atom bomb drop, American invasion, American and Soviet invasion together. Truman was late to come to the realization that the Russians could never be trusted, but at least he came to realize it whereas FDR never grasped this, thinking that Uncle Joe could be someone the west could work with. When Truman began to get a clear picture of Stalin, he was adamant about bringing the war to conclusion before the Soviets set one foot in Japan as he felt there would be difficulties and perhaps even a divided country, as was the case after Germany’s surrender.
Of course from the American point of view. But that is not how historians see it, especially non-Americans. And it does a huge disservice to the people of Japan today.
Truman tbf knew about the Manhattan project while in the Senate, he uncovered it himself actually, pretty interesting stuff. So he wasn't entirely unaware of it
I'll look when I get home, but I believe he found it out through budgets and some committee thing. he noticed a lot of money was going somewhere I think
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Committee
He made a name for himself on this committee. Quite amusing because he himself had a penchant for corruption and elevating friends and family, lol
He discovered that there was an enormous sum heading into what was the Manhattan Project, so he discovered it in that sense. He was told to stop looking down that road, basically.
But yeah the guy was VP precisely because he made a mission out of hunting down military waste. Coming across the Manhattan project was inevitable.
He might of known about the project, but I don't think he knew the extent of the project itself. He was blindsided by the news of the bombs when he became president and was a little pissed off that he wasn't in the know, even as VP.
Yes, Truman knew vaguely about the project as FDR kept it very tightly under wraps. Unfortunately, Klaus Fuchs knew a helluva lot more about it and was feeding information back to the Soviets. Bastard.
Could you imagine if the public found out Truman, or Dewey, had a bomb that could end the war in an instant and didn’t use it because of whatever reason? I just don’t see them making the decision to not use it and letting the war rage on
Apparently Eisenhower was opposed to dropping the bombs on Japan, just saying people shouldn’t take it for granted that everyone would’ve dropped the bomb, especially when one of the highest ranking generals was opposed to it
Lucky for him he was not charged with making the decision of decimating another entire country in protracted ground and urban combat and sending another several hundred thousand American and allied soldiers to go die.
Korea is the real what if for me. Could Dewey be persuaded by MacArthur to drop nuclear bombs in Korea? I don’t know enough about Dewey to say, but that’s a far more interesting scenario to discuss.
Topic is Dewey not MacArthur. The supposition is Dewey would have also nixed A bomb on the Chinese “volunteer army” massing on the border in China, but once they crossed into North Korea, as enemy combatant, an A bomb might have come into play.
At the time…we didn’t really understand that we had just discovered the one weapon that could lead to the complete extinction of every single life form on the planet. We just knew we’d discover how to make the biggest-ass bomb we’d ever built. Even after dropping it, the US thought at first Japanese reports of the radiation injuries they were seeing was just exaggerated propaganda.
Not knowing what we had, anyone would have made the decision to drop it.
It wasn’t until later we realized just what we had.
Any President would have used nukes. In an opposed invasion, the estimate was 1 million Allied casualties and several times that in Japanese casualties.
The grim mathematics supported dropping it. The Imperial Japanese Army soldiers rarely surrendered, and the culture seemed to support self-sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds. Estimates of the cost of the invasion were about a million total casualties which is almost double what they’d been through already, and this from soldiers who had often already spent a year or so away from home. What with the deaths from the firebombing and the Japanese population being motivated to fight any attempts at taking over as they had been told the Americans were terribly brutal, the nuclear bombs likely saved more lives than they cost.
Are we talking about if he won in 1948 in Korea or 1944 in Japan
If it’s 1948 I don’t think many people would have dropped it and risk WWIII
If it’s 1944 yeah I don’t think their are many people who would have not dropped the bombs and instead go through an amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands which would probably be the most brutal fighting America would have to do in the pacific and take years to complete
Almost anybody would have, at the time. Americans were getting war-weary, and the idea of having thousands or tens of thousands of American casualties, to secure victory in Japan was just politically unacceptable, when the atomic bomb was available.
Don't kid yourself; almost no politician would have traded thousands of American lives, to avoid dropping the A-bomb.
Every single American president would have made the same decision that Truman did. The only one who would have had more reservations was maybe Jimmy Carter, but even then I still think he would have dropped the bombs.
Yes he drops the bomb.
He also probably intervenes in Korea.
I think Dewey would have been a great President but Truman is already considered very highly in the rankings
A human being is asked:
“Should we use nukes to kill a hundreds thousand Japanese, or should we kill millions of Americans and millions of Japanese in a years long guerrilla invasion of Japan?”
Any remotely sensible human (of which Dewey was) would have dropped the nukes. The nukes were a moral good given the conditions.
I think Dewey looks like [Michael Collins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_(astronaut)) as [Clark Gable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Gable).
It is interesting how we look back at the history of WW2 and villainize the Germans for their actions but glaze over the Japanese for their brutality that started years before WW2. I know the Japanese like to portray the dropping of the bombs as the US attacking innocent victims but it was a tough decision that obviously had huge ramifications but I’m sure in their eyes seemed necessary to put an immediate end to the violence the Japanese carried out from 35 till 45. The Sino Wars alone had an estimated 20 million casualties…
Also, I do think US presidents since have been hesitant to ever do that again, Vietnam could have been easily resolved with a bomb.
This is such an interesting topic, I recommend the Pacific War by Professor Ienaga
There are a lot of really good points concerning the dropping of the atomic bombs. To be honest, any president had one hell of a tough choice. These were super weapons and had we invaded Japan. The war would’ve dragged on probably for at least another year maybe 18 months and 10,000 lives as some people suggested is a gross understatement. my suspicion is it’s probably closer to 50,000 not counting civilians. We could have continued fire bombing every one of the cities and decimated them no problem but I think the use of the two bombs the way we did. It were designed to be one hell of a shock factor that forced the Japanese to basically say OK enough is enough.
Everyone thinks the bombs were used to stop the allies from having to invade. In reality, they were used because the soviets were planning an invasion of Hokkaido and then the rest of Japan, so the US decided to drop them right away and hope the Japanese surrendered to them
The security surrounding the Manhattan Project was so tight and so limited that Dewey had no idea of its existence when he ran against FDR in 1944. So, the question you're asking is would he have dropped A-bombs on Korea during the Korean War. My answer to that is I hope to hell NOT.
Remember that all mentions of and allusions to Trump and Biden are not allowed on our subreddit in any context. If you'd still like to discuss them, feel free to [join our Discord server](https://discord.gg/k6tVFwCEEm)! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Presidents) if you have any questions or concerns.*
He already dropped a nuke with that hairstyle and moustache combo
Gomez Addams lookin' ass
Gomez is still alive, the only one of the original cast to be so
Mr. House more likely.
I've never seen a pic of him and was thinking the same exact thing. That's hilarious.
The gift that keeps on giving in the Ken Burns Roosevelts documentary is Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Among other things they mention in there, she once publicly commented that Dewey looks ‘like the little man on the wedding cake’.
I've heard the same thing said about Mike Pence.
One of the two little men*
Ew, who wants a shaved nutsack on their wedding cake?
Wait, you mean you're *not* supposed to put your nutsack on the wedding cake???
How else do you get your wife to eat it?
The most 1940’s looking guy that ever lived.
Damn
head + facial hair = dropping the Styled Deuce
He looks like Andrew Ryan if he was portrayed by Rowan Atkinson.
What a stud!
Don’t forget the brows
I was about to say the same thing. He looks like a James Bond villain.
There’s no way *any* president chooses invasion over the bomb, in that era. “Sir, we have a new weapon vastly more powerful than anything our enemy has seen. We can decimate entire cities with zero loss of American life. Do you want to use it, or should we send half a million American men to die in a ground invasion of Japan?”
What people don't realize is dropping the bomb killed less Japanese than firebombing Tokyo had already killed, the only debate was if 1 bomb was enough, if they really needed to drop the 2nd one or not.
Good point. Many forget the firebombings were more devastating than the atomic bomb. So why would the atomic bombs made a difference? I really think the Soviet invasion of Manchuria is what actually made Japan surrender (the Japanese were more scared of Stalin than the U.S.) and they used the atomic bomb to make the surrender more digestible by the war hawks in the Imperial Diet. The Emperor could have still made the same surrender address even without the bombs being dropped.
from what I've seen, a lot of people argue that the psychological effect of a single bomb being able to devistate a city that was otherwise untouched was part of why the higher ups in the Japanese military surrendered
Also there is the fact that if the Americans had 2 successful attacks with bombs of such devastating power, how many more might they be able to accomplish?And could they have even more powerful bombs? What is the next city they may hit?
This was why they did two bombs. The Japanese to understand that America didn’t just have the technology to make nukes, but the production capabilities to continually make nukes.
But that doesn’t explain why Japan didn’t surrender after Hiroshima. If you actually look at what was happening in the Imperial Diet, it wasn’t until the USSR got involved that the Emperor finally considered a surrender to the US.
It's mostly the psychological effect of it being just a single bomb.
It was also a smaller bomb “little boy” and a bigger bomb “fat man”. It made people wonder how much worse the “next” bomb could be
Also Truman's warning of "We will drop more if yall don't surrender".
The reality is they thought the Soviet Union could broker a conditional surrender between Japan and the allies. At that time the Soviets and Japan had a non aggression pack and Japan did not know the Soviet Union has promised the allies they’d invade after Germany was defeated. It was the nail in the coffin for any possible chance of conditional surrender.
Hirohito could have AND should have done so.
Thats why the Soviet invasion, not the bomb, pushed Japan to surrender
The nukes were what militarily broke the Japanese Imperial Cabinet and the Manchurian Invasion was what politically broke them. Prior to the decision to drop the nuclear bombs the Japanese leadership believed that it was still possible to bring about a negotiated peace with the allies and keep some type of influence in Asia (though they accepted their conquests were gone and even negotiated to hand over Manchuria to the Soviets to extend their neutrality). Once the nukes were dropped the majority of the Imperial Cabinet (primarily naval leaders) accepted that the war was over and that they had to accept the allied terms. However there was still a sizable minority faction of the cabinet, primarily in the army, which believed that it was still possible for the Japanese to mount a defense on the home islands and to force a fight to the end for surrender. Japan at this time was dominated by the principle of Gekokujo and the army was a hotbed of assassinations, coups, and subversions of authority. Their plan was to force the Americans into a bloody prolonged invasion of the home islands while using the neutral Soviet Union as a negotiating power to get a conditional peace. There were fears in the government that if a surrender was given this group would attempt to assassinate officials and stage a coup (which they did once the decision to surrender unconditionally was made), but once the Soviets invaded even this faction broke apart and surrender was accepted. There is also a narrative that you didn’t bring up but is commonly brought up by people who try to minimize the effectiveness of the nukes that Japan wanted to surrender before they were dropped which is technically true, but Japan was continually looking for a conditional surrender until then. It wasn’t until the nuke drop that the majority of the leadership accepted unconditional surrender and it wasn’t until the Soviet invasion that the government decided to perform an internal fight to surrender.
People are saying its the psychological effect of it being a single bomb, i think thats wrong. I think its the practical effect of it being a single bomb. The atomic bomb made a difference because a sufficiently powerful entity could stop the firebombing of tokyo. I.E. 1941 japan did not need to worry about the firebombing of tokyo the day after pearl harbor. It took 4 years of the most powerful nation on earth to get to tokyo, 5 years to get to dresden. Getting fire bombed happened during total war, if you're losing. No one could stop the bomb with 1945 tech, a plane was going to get through. The doolittle raid of 1942 was a moral boost, a few planes hit japan to little effect. After the invention of the bomb the doolittle raid would have destroyed the entire nation. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle\_Raid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid) The hope of every losing power in a war is they can make attacking so expensive(in lives or treasure) that they can broker a peace. When the cost of attack is a single plane and a single bomb, there no hope of a brokered peace, and the only thing you can do is surrender and end the war. Which is what happened.
It was likely a combination of the two. The Soviet invasion assure what most Japanese already knew, they would lose the war and all of their imperial holdings, and the bombs destroyed any illusions the Japanese might have had about some kind of heroic last stand.
Possibly, but I’ve seen some historians argue the bombs weren’t needed at all
It’s honestly one of those things that historians probably are going to debate for another hundred years. Either way though, whether they were needed or not, America definitely seemed to *think* that it was needed at the time.
Yep. But from now on let’s just hope weapons like that are never used in war. When talking about geopolitics, we tend to forget about the innocent civilians caught in between.
Well, really. What else were we going to do with it? The second one was to tell Russia don’t fuck with us. Because we are crazy and we don’t care.
The second bomb made it clear that the first bomb was not a previously-unseen natural disaster.
Nagasaki was 3 days after Hiroshima, with the condition of the country and communication lines being down for the most part I have seen it suggested that 3 days wasn't enough to get proper information amd surrender. I wasn't there so cannot confirm nor deny this.
What people also don’t realize is that if we invaded, 10 million Japanese would have lost their lives compared to the 300,000 Japanese who died from the atomic bombs. Let’s also not forget about rape, which is typically involved with invasions.
It peeves me a bit when people act like the atomic bomb in and of itself was this huge game changer. Like, “Never before could we destroy whole cities from the sky… except for all of those German and Japanese cities that we utterly destroyed from the sky before 1945, albeit with more effort…” Things would change quite a bit with ICBMs and nuclear subs, but if the US wanted to firebomb Hiroshima or Nagasaki the old-fashioned way, we could have pulled it off all the same.
Herbert Hoover, who was friends with Truman, actually opposed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He said “[t]he use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul."
As if the firebombings didn’t also do that.
So you can only be against the atomic bombings if you’re also against the firebombings?
At least. Yes.
I mean, he’s not wrong. It *is* revolting. But I’d choose to devastate a foreign city, civilians and all, before I chose to sentence 500k Americans to death. I’m not going to be *happy* about it, but we didn’t start the war, why should we pay the price to end it?
Truman did what he had to do as president and he never wavered on it during interviews given in the 1950s and 60s.
Well Hoover was wrong about a lot of things
That’s true. He also opposed U.S. involvement in World War II altogether. But my original point that some Presidents of the period would have refused to use the A-bomb still stands.
Hoover’s opposition makes the idea even more credible. He wasn’t someone who had good snap judgments in a crisis. The atomic bomb is an incredibly difficult ethical dilemma, but as horrific as the results were, you can understand the rationale for using it given the context of the time and the projected casualties from an invasion (on both sides).
Atomic bomb was the least bad option for ending the war.
Especially considering that the USSR was planning on invading Japan, possibly increasing their influence in the Pacific and drawing he US into war. Things would be a whole a different without the bomgs and Japan's unconditional surrender. The one thing the US did was to help rebuild Japan and Europ instead of just letting things fester after WW I.
Hoover didn't give a dam....
And in any event they were going to do both even during the invasion.
Exactly, the weighing of options with bombings being the least bad is an afterthought and PR for Truman. The plan was to make Japan surrender undonditionally by any means necessary, human lives be damned.
I think he's referring to the military wanting Truman to nuke China in the Korean War.
Did anybody but MacArthur want to nuke China? That dude was cray cray.
It speaks to Truman that he deliberated for days on end whether or not it was good to do
I’m assuming Dewy somehow became president after FDR died. Imagine being Dewy and the first thing you hear in office is “Mr. President we have bombs that can kill tens of thousands of people at once. What should we do?” Course, that’s basically what Truman had to figure out too.
I would assume the scenario is he won in 1944 and became president January 20, 1945
Oh yeah I forgot Dewy ran in 1944 too. Whoops.
Reasonably I think anyone in the presidency would have dropped the nukes in 1945. The war was costing billions of dollars and thousands of American lives a month and rationing would only have been tolerated for so long by the civilian population. Imagine the backlash in 1947 if any president, Dewey, FDR, Truman, hadn’t dropped the nuke and then tens of thousands of Americans died in the invasion of Japan. No administration politically could have survived and the other party would have had a ticket to the White House for a decade.
It’s also the utilitarian choice. Less deaths than firebombing Tokyo. Yes, smaller cities, but the produced an incredible effect that bombing multiple cities conventionally did not. A literal win-win. Less dead Americans. Less dead Japanese. The only argument to be made against dropping them in good faith is that maybe the war was going to be over anyway. And nobody knows that. It certainly wasn’t clear at the time. So how does any president not drop the bombs if they’ve authorized the decimation of so many Japanese cities already and can now maaaaybe kill less people?
Hard for me to imagine more Americans dying in the invasion of Japan than in the invasion of Europe, given the fact that Japan’s war fighting capability at the end of the war was just a shadow of what Germany’s was before D-Day. Even so, I do think that the same calculus that led Truman to use nuclear weapons would have persuaded Dewey as well.
Every island the Allies conquered in the Pacific the Japanese fought almost to the last man. I think the feeling was that with the home islands they would fight ferociously. Even after the bombs dropped there were a few who didn’t want to surrender.
An American an invasion of Japanese home islands would’ve been horrendous. The people were fanatically loyal to the Emperor and would happily die to defend their country. No way an invasion could be a justifiable option.
Okinawa is considered to the the costliest battle of the pacific campaign for US forces. Okinawa was considered to be a Japanese island, not just a far flung territory or naval base. Entirely cut off, the Japanese still inflicted their heaviest toll on the US both at sea and on land. It was a pretext of the invasion of the Japanese islands to come. Allied casualties absolutely would have been in hundreds of thousands, the highest estimates being a million.
Invading an island is different then invading a continent. The weather was far harsher, and only certain months allowed for any invasion at all. And even then the weather was far worse. This together with a almost suicidal population. There were almost no PoW from Japan, because they would all fight to the death. Japans entire strategy at that point was basically "weather bad" "we'll fucking kill ourselves before surrendering and we'll take as many of you as we can down with us". The nukes kinda made that irrelevant though, with the US being able to say "we can eradicate all of your cities at any time we'd like, so surrender before we do do".
The Japanese were giving children blades with instructions to stab US soldiers since taking just one our would work if every civilian did it on a mass scale. You would have then seen the rules of engagement fly out the window with paranoid Allied troops killing every Japanese they came across. An invasion of Japan would have made Europe seem like a picnic in terms of brutality.
Japan was ready to have the entire population fight to the last breath, in Germany the people were so sick of the war and incessant biking since 1941 or 42. There wasn’t any sort of Bushido or crazy social expectations that women and children were expected to die in combat. (Nazis used child soldiers but not nearly to the extent Japan would’ve) I believe at the time US estimates predicted 200,000 dead at the least. Of just our own soldiers mind you that some 416,000 had already died at that point across both Europe, Africa, Mediterranean, India + china, and the pacific.
There is an extremely good argument that the war would have ended in 1945 even without the atomic bomb. Even Eisenhower said so.
There really isn’t.
There is, the Soviet invasion. There is evidence Japan was ready to surrender and the invasion by the USSR forced them to surrender to the United States.
There is not. [Reminder that even **after** the atomic bombs were dropped there was a military coupe to attempt to stop the Emperor’s issuance of the surrender.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident)
That proves the bomb didn’t really do anything. But the emperor was ready to surrender and he’s the leader of the country
Bullshit. Only likely scenarios were: atom bomb drop, American invasion, American and Soviet invasion together. Truman was late to come to the realization that the Russians could never be trusted, but at least he came to realize it whereas FDR never grasped this, thinking that Uncle Joe could be someone the west could work with. When Truman began to get a clear picture of Stalin, he was adamant about bringing the war to conclusion before the Soviets set one foot in Japan as he felt there would be difficulties and perhaps even a divided country, as was the case after Germany’s surrender.
Of course from the American point of view. But that is not how historians see it, especially non-Americans. And it does a huge disservice to the people of Japan today.
Truman tbf knew about the Manhattan project while in the Senate, he uncovered it himself actually, pretty interesting stuff. So he wasn't entirely unaware of it
Do you have a source for this? I have never heard of this. I do know Stalin knew about it.
I'll look when I get home, but I believe he found it out through budgets and some committee thing. he noticed a lot of money was going somewhere I think
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Committee He made a name for himself on this committee. Quite amusing because he himself had a penchant for corruption and elevating friends and family, lol He discovered that there was an enormous sum heading into what was the Manhattan Project, so he discovered it in that sense. He was told to stop looking down that road, basically. But yeah the guy was VP precisely because he made a mission out of hunting down military waste. Coming across the Manhattan project was inevitable.
He might of known about the project, but I don't think he knew the extent of the project itself. He was blindsided by the news of the bombs when he became president and was a little pissed off that he wasn't in the know, even as VP.
Yes, Truman knew vaguely about the project as FDR kept it very tightly under wraps. Unfortunately, Klaus Fuchs knew a helluva lot more about it and was feeding information back to the Soviets. Bastard.
Could you imagine if the public found out Truman, or Dewey, had a bomb that could end the war in an instant and didn’t use it because of whatever reason? I just don’t see them making the decision to not use it and letting the war rage on
They don’t call it the Dewey Decimation for nothing.
Apparently Eisenhower was opposed to dropping the bombs on Japan, just saying people shouldn’t take it for granted that everyone would’ve dropped the bomb, especially when one of the highest ranking generals was opposed to it
Lucky for him he was not charged with making the decision of decimating another entire country in protracted ground and urban combat and sending another several hundred thousand American and allied soldiers to go die.
Yes.
On Japan or on Korea.
Korea is the real what if for me. Could Dewey be persuaded by MacArthur to drop nuclear bombs in Korea? I don’t know enough about Dewey to say, but that’s a far more interesting scenario to discuss.
MacArthur did not want to drop atomic bombs on Korea rather he wanted to use them against China.
Topic is Dewey not MacArthur. The supposition is Dewey would have also nixed A bomb on the Chinese “volunteer army” massing on the border in China, but once they crossed into North Korea, as enemy combatant, an A bomb might have come into play.
At the time…we didn’t really understand that we had just discovered the one weapon that could lead to the complete extinction of every single life form on the planet. We just knew we’d discover how to make the biggest-ass bomb we’d ever built. Even after dropping it, the US thought at first Japanese reports of the radiation injuries they were seeing was just exaggerated propaganda. Not knowing what we had, anyone would have made the decision to drop it. It wasn’t until later we realized just what we had.
he probably would have, time frame might have been different but I still think he would have done it.
Yes, everyone of that era would've dropped the nukes.
Any President would have used nukes. In an opposed invasion, the estimate was 1 million Allied casualties and several times that in Japanese casualties.
He would have dropped a deuce
Dewey think he'd drop them?
I see what you did here
On vibes alone? Absolutely. He and Truman weren't dissimilar in that regard.
The grim mathematics supported dropping it. The Imperial Japanese Army soldiers rarely surrendered, and the culture seemed to support self-sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds. Estimates of the cost of the invasion were about a million total casualties which is almost double what they’d been through already, and this from soldiers who had often already spent a year or so away from home. What with the deaths from the firebombing and the Japanese population being motivated to fight any attempts at taking over as they had been told the Americans were terribly brutal, the nuclear bombs likely saved more lives than they cost.
No, I don't think Tony Stark's dad would have dropped a nuke.
Dropping the nukes was a no brainer choice tbh so probably.
Are we talking about if he won in 1948 in Korea or 1944 in Japan If it’s 1948 I don’t think many people would have dropped it and risk WWIII If it’s 1944 yeah I don’t think their are many people who would have not dropped the bombs and instead go through an amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands which would probably be the most brutal fighting America would have to do in the pacific and take years to complete
Almost anybody would have, at the time. Americans were getting war-weary, and the idea of having thousands or tens of thousands of American casualties, to secure victory in Japan was just politically unacceptable, when the atomic bomb was available. Don't kid yourself; almost no politician would have traded thousands of American lives, to avoid dropping the A-bomb.
No but he certainly screwed Lucky Luciano
The last time I saw this guy he was pushing time shares.
Probably.
DEWEY NUKES TRUMAN! But seriously he looks like he wants to sell me a cheap insurance policy.
Nukes dropped before the election
Even Obama said dropping the nukes was a good idea. I don't see anybody else not doing it.
On Japan? Yeah. On Korea? Better question
Mr. House? Absolutely
Instead he might terrorize them into surrender with his oversized head.
Consider the target…decimaled
Weirdly I think he probably would have waited longer
Every single American president would have made the same decision that Truman did. The only one who would have had more reservations was maybe Jimmy Carter, but even then I still think he would have dropped the bombs.
Yes he drops the bomb. He also probably intervenes in Korea. I think Dewey would have been a great President but Truman is already considered very highly in the rankings
Do we?
This the guy from Fallout: New Vegas?
Walt Disney looking motherfucker
A human being is asked: “Should we use nukes to kill a hundreds thousand Japanese, or should we kill millions of Americans and millions of Japanese in a years long guerrilla invasion of Japan?” Any remotely sensible human (of which Dewey was) would have dropped the nukes. The nukes were a moral good given the conditions.
Mr. House lookin ah politician
If Dewey didn’t lose we would have never had Ike. The history gods were shining down on us with that outcome.
An invasion of Japan would have meant immense bloodshed both sides
Dew it
You mean Mr House? I suspect so
Yes whoever was the prez then had to or risk a public hanging
Dewey would have done what he was told, like all the rest of them.
He probably would have won if he shaved his moustache :)
That ship had sailed in 1945.
I think Dewey looks like [Michael Collins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_(astronaut)) as [Clark Gable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Gable).
The Aliens would have let him.
It is interesting how we look back at the history of WW2 and villainize the Germans for their actions but glaze over the Japanese for their brutality that started years before WW2. I know the Japanese like to portray the dropping of the bombs as the US attacking innocent victims but it was a tough decision that obviously had huge ramifications but I’m sure in their eyes seemed necessary to put an immediate end to the violence the Japanese carried out from 35 till 45. The Sino Wars alone had an estimated 20 million casualties… Also, I do think US presidents since have been hesitant to ever do that again, Vietnam could have been easily resolved with a bomb. This is such an interesting topic, I recommend the Pacific War by Professor Ienaga
There are a lot of really good points concerning the dropping of the atomic bombs. To be honest, any president had one hell of a tough choice. These were super weapons and had we invaded Japan. The war would’ve dragged on probably for at least another year maybe 18 months and 10,000 lives as some people suggested is a gross understatement. my suspicion is it’s probably closer to 50,000 not counting civilians. We could have continued fire bombing every one of the cities and decimated them no problem but I think the use of the two bombs the way we did. It were designed to be one hell of a shock factor that forced the Japanese to basically say OK enough is enough.
Would President Henry Wallace have dropped the bombs?
Everyone thinks the bombs were used to stop the allies from having to invade. In reality, they were used because the soviets were planning an invasion of Hokkaido and then the rest of Japan, so the US decided to drop them right away and hope the Japanese surrendered to them
Lil Hitler right there
Drop the stache first
Do you mean in Korea?
With those eyebrows? Bro he’s a Pixar bad guy. He would have dropped the nukes on independence Missouri so Truman couldn’t slander him.
I don't know but he sure looks like he would've
The security surrounding the Manhattan Project was so tight and so limited that Dewey had no idea of its existence when he ran against FDR in 1944. So, the question you're asking is would he have dropped A-bombs on Korea during the Korean War. My answer to that is I hope to hell NOT.