Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Books like this do a great disservice to history and to humanity. They make the survivors of the atomic bombs victims of the U.S., which in fact they were only the victims of their own militaristic government which refused to surrender even long after they had lost the war. The Japanese had committed horrendous crimes against humanity from China to Pearl Harbor and all with the support of the same people who lived in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I lived through World War. My father was permanently injured by a Japanese shell on Midway on Dec. 7, 1941 and my father in law, a B-25 pilot, was killed after being shot down. I visited Hiroshima in 1951 and was trained in Radiological Defense at a Army base nearby. I witnessed an atomic explosion at the Las Vegas Test Range and with a MS in Nuclear Physics, I became a Nuclear Weapons and Planning Officer. There is nothing I dread more than seeing another nuclear weapon used. That nations like Israel and N. Korea have nuclear weapons terrifies me. But the US using atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and demonstrating that the US has the will power to use the bombs in my opinion, has prevented their use by any nation since WWII. I have studied WWII extensively. The apologists for the use of the atomic bombs skew history to support their case as does Susan Southard. The Japanese were helpless after the Battle of the Philippines Sea when their Navy was virtually destroyed as well as much of their airpower. Yet they did not surrender. They fought to the last man in losing at Iwo Jima which opened the door to the mainland. They had no defense against American bombers and our ships shelled them at will but they did not surrender. They fought even more fiercely in losing Okinawa but were so desperate that they resorted to hurtling suicide planes and submarines at American and British ships but they still lost. With the Allies at their doorstep, they did not surrender. Instead, they began arming Japanese civilians with whatever weapons they could provide and instructed them to make suicide charges to defend their homeland including blowing themselves up with grenades when in the midst of Allied troops. Mr. Taniguchi Sumiteru who was badly injured in the Nagasaki bombing in all probability would have made a suicidal Banzai attack on the invading Allied troops if the war had not ended. I find it pure balderdash that the Japanese were about to surrender after Hiroshima. Yes, they were negotiating an end but the militarists in the government who faced hanging if Japan surrendered, were unwilling to surrender because they believed that the US used its only atomic bomb at Hiroshima. It was only after Nagasaki that the militarists lost their influence. My source. In 1952, I met a former civilian minister in the Tojo government who had been just been released from prison for being involved in war crimes. I had become a friend of his daughter, an English teacher. He told me a lot about what happened. That the Americans especially preserved Hiroshima and Nagasaki as targets for the atomic bomb is nonsense. Neither city was the center fro either industrial or military activities and thus had been not bombed because it was not an efficient use of men, planes, and bombs to bomb them. But the Japanese were not going to waste air defenses on one or two planes bombing non-military targets so these cities were chosen. My son who is history teacher and has spent years in Japan provided me a copy of Southards book. He, like my daughter who spent ten years teaching in Japan, are absolutely disgusted with the book. It plays right into the hands of the Japanese nationalists who refuse to acknowledge their guilt before and during WWII. With few facts and a lot of ignorance, Susan Southard has concocted a fiction that the ignorant and gullible eat up. What they do not know is that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved millions of Japanese lives and most importantly saved humanity.