Author Greg Mitchell argues in The Huffington Post that the nuking of Nagasaki, Japan, three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, was completely avoidable. It was not only unnecessary, it was a war crime:
"Truman (as recorded in his diary and by others) was well aware that the Japanese were hopelessly defeated and seeking terms of surrender — and he had, just two weeks earlier, written “Fini Japs” in his diary when he learned that the Russians would indeed attack around August 7. Yet Truman, on this day, did nothing, and the second bomb rolled out, and would be used against Nagasaki, killing perhaps 90,000 more, only a couple hundred of them Japanese troops, on August 9...
Historian Martin Sherwin has observed, “If Washington had maintained closer control over the scheduling of the atomic bomb raids the annihilation of Nagasaki could have been avoided.” Truman and others simply did not care, or to be charitable, did not take care...
As months and then years passed, few Americans denounced as a moral wrong the targeting of entire cities for extermination. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, however, declared that we never should have hit Japan “with that awful thing.” To those who claim “you weren’t there” or “you are military” the fact is a large number of high-ranking Americans expressed doubts about the need to use the Bomb at the time or later, including (besides Eisenhower), Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Gen. Hap Arnold, and Truman’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral William Leahy. And you can add to that the future hawkish Eisenhower secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and John J. McCloy—among many others.
The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right by Sally Denton. When Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency in March, 1933, America was desperate. This book explores two startling events that have been largely ignored by historians: "anarchist Giuseppe Zangara's assassination attempt on Roosevelt, and a plutocrats' plot to overthrow the government that would come to be known as the Wall Street Putsch." Washington Post review:
Denton quotes the historian William Manchester: “The evidence strongly suggests that had Roosevelt in fact been another Hoover, the United States would have followed seven Latin American countries whose governments had been overthrown by Depression victims.” ...American fascist parties formed paramilitary groups called the silver shirts, the khaki shirts or the black shirts, a Crayola box of colors inspired by Hitler’s brownshirts and Mussolini’s blackshirts. “Dangerous or not,” Denton notes, “America was awash with right-wing groups overtly bent on government takeover outside the bounds of the democratic electoral process.” The largest effort was a well-financed Wall Street plot to organize the American Legion to march on Washington, seize the White House, overthrow the president and install a famous military hero, Smedley Darlington Butler, as leader of a fascist state modeled after Italy. Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor recipient and firm supporter of Roosevelt, turned the ringleaders in.
""There was a lot at play. It could have gone very different directions," Denton told NPR. An excerpt from the book is included here.
Yet President Franklin Roosevelt was not so sure. A disturbing episode is documented in the book, FDR, by Jean Edward Smith. During the 1932 campaign, while lunching at Hyde Park with his aide Rexford Tugwell, Roosevelt called Gen. Douglas MacArthur "the most dangerous man in America." Observing MacArthur's violent dispersal of downtrodden military veterans seeking their bonuses in Washington in July of that year, in apparent defiance of an order by President Hoover, Roosevelt saw MacArthur as capable of violating civilian control of the military. He told Tugwell:
“You saw how he strutted down Pennsylvania Avenue. You saw that picture of him in the Times after the troops chased all those vets out with tear gas and burned their shelters. Did you ever see anyone more self-satisfied? There’s a potential Mussolini for you.”
MacArthur was said to be a back-up general in the Business Plot against the U.S. government, though he denied it at the time. He was later accused of defying an order from President Harry S Truman not to invade North Korea at the 38th parallel, and seeking war with China. He did publicly disagree with President Truman, saying he wanted to topple the communist Mao Tse Tung and restore the Nationalist Chinese Dictator Chiang Chi Shek to power on the mainland. As a result, Truman fired the widely popular General MacArthur in April 1951, almost setting off a public revolt in America. Right-wingers accused the president of being soft on communism and losing China to the communists. But the principal of civilian control of the U.S. military ultimately endured.
These events do make one wonder: what if Franklin Roosevelt had been assassinated in 1933? Might the U.S. have succumbed to military dictatorship? What if General MacArthur were more defiant of President Truman, or if the military leadership was unified against the president's policies? Could they have staged a military coup?
"If only the Roman Empire could have been created without killing millions of Gauls and Greeks, if the United States could have been built without killing millions of Native Americans, if these and countless conflicts could have been resolved by discussion instead of force. But this did not happen. People almost never give up their freedoms — including, at times, the right to kill and impoverish one another — unless forced to do so; and virtually the only force strong enough to bring this about has been defeat in war or fear that such a defeat is imminent." -- Washington Post article by Ian Morris, a professor of classics at Stanford University, and the author of “War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots.”
