The Visiting Grandson

     A grandson of Harry Truman is in Japan where he plans to visit, or has visited, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to meet with the mayors of those cities.  From what we can tell this is a mission of peace and friendship, and that's fine.  Apologies and assurances that America is always wrong, would certainly not be.
     Harry Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, had to decide whether to use the atomic bomb or not.  It was not an easy decision.  But he made a fully defensible one.  The best military minds in the United States believed that had the bomb not been used something on the order of a million lives would have been lost.  The Japanese would have fought on fearlessly for an indefinite period.  More cities might have been destroyed than were destroyed with the bomb.
     He could have asked for a truce and a negotiated peace, but American boys had died in massive numbers for what President Roosevelt had stated firmly was the object of the war, Unconditional Surrender.  That's what we fought for, with blood, treasure, energy and dedication for almost four years.  To accept less than the attainment of President Roosevelt's stated goal, which the American people accepted, for failure to use a weapon which was to accomplish that goal was not the chosen course  At last we avenged the men on the Arizona, and many, many other men at sea, in the air, and the  mosquito-ridden islands which dotted the Pacific across endless horizons.
     Various Japanese VIPs have acknowledged that Japan itself would have dropped the bomb on the United States had the situation been reversed.
     Because of a flawed sense of acceptable military behaviour, the Janpanese committed horrific atrocities in the War --- the rape of Nanking, death marches, abuse of POWs among others.  The Japanese are an enterprising and able people and these misdeeds were cultural, not a reflection of any ethnic or racial circumstance.  We can hope that the Japanese are more civilized than they were then, and there is good reason to believe that they are.  The past is past.  As the Bible says "Let the dead  bury the dead".