Ryan McCoy McCoy 1
Professor Pentecost
Comp I
11 February 2015
Another Perspective on “Thank God for the Atom Bomb” Fussell ends quoting Harry Truman saying “Having found the bomb, we have used it. … We have used it to shorten the agony of young Americans.” Although I do believe this is a good way to think of it, I don't think it does it justice. Truman seemed like he regretted making that decision, as I think most people would in that situation... but he's not accounting for the future generations of people, like myself, who's very existance could rely on the use of that horrid weapon. My closest relatives all had someone in their immediate family who had been in the military. My mom's dad and my dad's dad had served their time in the military; and even my mom was a veteran. My mother's dad, we called him “Grandpa Dutch” when my brother and I were kids, was a ranger in the army and met my grandmother, a native born japanese, when he served in Japan. Their relationship is an interesting one... many things happen between them in the years that the war was happening that I don't think I'll ever know about, even if I do gain the courage to start asking the right questions. Although it has little relevance my father on the other hand was born in Yokota Air Base in Japan, it was many years after the war, but my grandfather on my dad's side was in the air force and moved around often according to where he was stationed, Japan happened to be where he was when my grandmother was due. I've got a fairly delicate or fragile lineage when you think about the atom bomb. Fussel mentions John Kenneth Galbraith who said that an invasion was not necessary and
McCoy 2 that the atom bomb was also unneccesary at the time. Galbraith said the atom bombs would have only made “a difference, at most, of two or three weeks.” and Fussel quickly shuts him down, saying that “I don't demand that he experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn't.” He makes a very valid point here when he mentions the losses between the bombs dropping and the surrender, it was business as usual. If they had not dropped those bombs in an attempt to expedite the war or atleast make the Japanese reconsider their position in war, it could have lasted much longer. Longer war would have meant more American soldiers, more Japanese soldiers and civilians dead. If anything it is efficient, we've been napalm or incendiary bombing all over for years and now we've found a weapon that can do all of that work but in one trip. As Fussel mentioned, “ We’d been doing that for years, in raids on Hamburg and Berlin and Cologne and Frankfurt and Mannheim and Dresden, and Tokyo...” If we had not invented the atom bomb, we would have definitely lost more American soldiers, because either way we were going to bomb them, if it didn't exist then we would have bombed them with