"Why We Did It!"

"The blast at Hiroshima echoes 56 years later.  But what did the decision look like at the time, to the men who chose to drop the bomb, that summer of 1945".

     In August 1945, the GI's waiting to invade Japan had no doubt about the wisdom of obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons.  Upon hearing the news, "we whooped and yelled like mad, we downed all the beer we'd been stashing away," one dogface later recalled.  "We shot bullets in the air and danced between the tent rows."  Paul Fussel, a 21-year-old second lieutenant leading a rifle platoon, remembered that "for all the fake manliness of our facades, we cried with relief and joy.  We were actually going to live.  We were going to grow up to adulthood after all."

     More than a half century later, relief has given way to uncertainty and regret.  According to a recent Gallup poll, senior citizens and "baby-boomers" still approve of the bombing, but younger Americans, particularly those under the age of 30, believe that dropping the bomb on Japan was wrong.  The Smithsonian Institution had to drastically scale down a 50th anniversary exhibit on the flight of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb, because angry veterans protested that the museum's politically correct curators made the Japanese look like innocent victims.  Some modern historians (revisionists) argue that dropping the bomb was not only immoral but unnecessary.  They contend that Japan was beaten by the summer of 1945 and would have collapsed without an invasion.  Indeed, a few argue that the bomb actually prolonged the war.  The real reason we dropped the bomb, they say, was not to finish off Japan but to intimidate our next enemy - the Soviet Union.

     Such judgments have the quality of perfect hindsight, declaring not only what we should have done, but what we should have thought.  The more revealing question may be, what were decision makers saying and thinking at the time?  What pressures did they labor under?  Through the diaries and contemporaneous accounts of President Truman and his top advisers, Newsweek has reconstructed a narrative of the decision to drop the bomb.  What emerges most strikingly is the sense of urgency and anxiety - and the lack of a clear, cogent debate.  The American public in the summer of 1945 was war-weary, far more disgruntled than we now remember.  The scientists working on the bomb were not quite sure what they were making - or if it would even work.  The top policymakers were worried about trying to end the war quickly, not abstract notions of morality.  The decision they made was understandable, even inevitable, under the circumstances.  In a real sense, there was no decision, no careful weighing of the pros and cons.  Like most acts of embattled governments in times of war, this one was driven by the interplay of temperament and personality and the sheer momentum of events.

     With each passing year, Harry Truman has become identified in the public mind with decisiveness and common sense.  "the buck stops here" and "Give 'em hell Harry" have become comforting cliches.  But when Truman succeeded Franklin Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, he was in a state of shock.  "I'm not big enough.  I'm not big enough for this job," he told a friend, Sen. George Aiken of Vermont.  "Boys," he said tearfully to a group of reporters, "if you ever pray, pray for me now."  

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