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These elements in fact contributed significantly to Japan's surrender on August 15.
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Some combination of the Soviet Union's August 8 entry into the Pacific war, modification of unconditional surrender terms, a blockade, and conventional bombing most likely would have forced the Japanese to surrender without the use of the A-bomb before the planned allied invasion of November 1, 1945.Many historians have concluded the administration saw deterrence of the Soviets as a secondary benefit they generally agree that ending the war quickly was the dominant reason. Archival evidence reveals that a number of factors contributed to Truman's decision to drop the bomb, including bureaucratic momentum, political imperatives, psychological factors and the desire to contain an expansionist Soviet Union.No documents back up claims made by Truman and others that an invasion of Japan would have cost as many as 1 million American casualties (see "How Many Casualties?" page 25).President Truman did not face the stark choice of either an invasion or the bomb.
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The other ver&ion comes from historians who, since the mid-1960s, have been reassessing Truman's decision in light of documents and memoirs. This position was defended by veterans groups, most prominently the American Legion and the Air Force Association, which campaigned vigorously against the initial plans for the exhibit. The conventional view reflects the sober accounts of Truman and his secretary of war, Henry Stimson: The A-bombs saved as many as 1 million American soldiers who would have been killed or wounded in an invasion of the Japanese mainland "Our Boys or the Bomb?" as one Washington Post op-ed headline put it. The controversy was largely fueled by media accounts that uncritically accepted the conventional rationale for the bomb, ignored contrary historical evidence, and reinforced the charge that the planned exhibit was a pro-Japanese, anti-American tract. The dispute that brought about this truncated exhibit was over which version of atom bomb history would be highlighted. Hallion, a former science and technology curator at the Air and Space Museum and an exhibit adviser, ruefully calls the exhibit "a beer can with a label." Instead, the exhibit is not much more than the 60-foot fuselage of the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, instantly killing at least 70,000 Japanese. Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb. Following months of text changes, charges of anti-Americanism, and the resignation of the museum's director, an exhibit originally scheduled to open in May is finally open this month, a pared down version of what was supposed to be a complex retelling of President Harry S. bombing missions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ideological fallout from the atomic bomb has settled over the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. Uday Mohan is a graduate student in the history department at The American University.įifty years after the U.S. The media covered the charges and coutercharges but ignored the underlying historical debate. An aggressive public relations campaign by the Air Force Association and the Smithsonian's tepid response doomed the museum's plans for a full-fledged exhibit on the atomic bomb.