'The Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945…up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; …if such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the [atomic] bombs'. - Herbert Hoover
The fire bombing of Japanese population centers leading up to the nuclear bombings were much more costly in human lives, additional hundreds of thousands of burned, cooked and melted men, women and children who hadn't themselves taken part in any war crimes, except being the victims of one. The eye-witness descriptions are quite vivid and I urge anyone with an opinion on the bombings to look them up.
After so many years of total war everyone was virtually desensitized and mass-murder of civilian populations was everyday business. We shouldn't claim any policy makers on any side acted with any sort of morality as it is simply contrafactual.
It's true the allies bombed commercial and industry areas populated by civilians to win the war, Germany and Japan had started this horrible trend by introducing these tactics to every country they attacked purposely targeting civilians over military targets.
Yes the Japanese also had an army of over a million troops still in China and all around the south pacific, they wanted to negotiate a separate peace with the USSR and USA which would leave them in possession of all their newly conquered territories which was not acceptable.
Hoover was not a factor for the US during ww2 he was president from 1921-28 and a member of the Republican party, so it's fitting that the communist author would take select quotes from him as the end all of answers to support his strange conspiracy theory. Of course in a war of that scale civilians are unfortunately killed, but the US was the most humane of all parties involved when it came to avoiding civilian casualties and you can't argue against the the statistics. The Japanese acted barbaric and savage and got little sympathy from the small price they paid for the massive amount of needless killing they orchestrated, the Japanese killed more civilians than Albert did during their Imperial conquests.
That being said Japan is a wonderful country now and nothing like they were in the past, so of course we feel sympathetic with what happened, an unfortunate but necessary use of force was needed to stop their savagery.
Poll