Contrary to the lies told by the U.S. government to the American people, the A-bombs were not needed to avoid a ground invasion and save the lives of American troops. I have taken the following quotations from an American studies web page publshed by a university in Colorado..
Admiral William D. Leahy described America's use of the A-bomb in the following words:
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons." (William D. Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441).
Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet stated in a public address given at the Washington Monument on October 5, 1945:
The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war. (See p. 329, Chapter 26) . . . [Nimitz also stated: "The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan. . . ."]
Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., Commander U.S. Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946: [With apologies for the ethnic slurs]
The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it. . . . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. . . . It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before. (See p. 331, Chapter 26)
In his "third person" autobiography (co-authored with Walter Muir Whitehill) the commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and chief of Naval Operations, Ernest J. King, stated:
The President in giving his approval for these [atomic] attacks appeared to believe that many thousands of American troops would be killed in invading Japan, and in this he was entirely correct; but King felt, as he had pointed out many times, that the dilemma was an unnecessary one, for had we been willing to wait, the effective naval blockade would, in the course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission through lack of oil, rice, medicines, and other essential materials. (See p. 327, Chapter 26)
On September 20, 1945 the famous "hawk" who commanded the Twenty-First Bomber Command, Major General Curtis E. LeMay (as reported in The New York Herald Tribune) publicly:
said flatly at one press conference that the atomic bomb "had nothing to do with the end of the war." He said the war would have been over in two weeks without the use of the atomic bomb or the Russian entry into the war. (See p. 336, Chapter 27)
Because this bombing was clearly both immoral and did nothing to hasten te end of the war, the carnage is especially horrible.
Survivors relate the following stories:
A woman who had taken cover in a bomb shelter recalled seeing what looked like two lizards coming at her. She realized as they drew closer that they were two human beings whose skin had been seared off by the heat of the bomb. Other survivors report seeing people with grotesquely swollen faces, torsos covered with blisters, with great sheets of skin hanging off of their bodies. This photograph depicts a situation that must have happened tens of thousands of times, as 87,000 people were killed in this bombing. http://www.exploratorium.edu/nagasaki/photos.html#journey/30.jpg
Much of the city was leveled:
The Urakami Cathedral, the larges church in east Asia, was destroyed in the blast. Nagasaki had one of the largest Christian communities in Asia.
The Cathedral was later rebuilt:
In 1985, the mayor of Nagasaki sent a replica of the Angelus bell found in the original Cathedral to the city of Richland. This "bell of peace" is rung every year on August 9 in memory of those who died at Pearl Harbor and those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The origial bell of peace rings in the reconstructed cathedral in Nagasaki.
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