Thank God for the Atomic Bomb...

Dropping the A-Bomb on Japan actually saved lives.

Ten years later, the revisionists are still going strong. An article in the radical journal CounterPunch, for example, labels the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki "the worst terror attacks in history," and trots out the old canard that their real purpose was to intimidate the Soviet Union. In the Los Angeles Times the other day, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin asserted as "unpleasant historical facts" that "the atomic bombings were unnecessary," serving only to devastate an "essentially defeated enemy."

But the vast majority of Americans who lived through World War II would have regarded such glib judgments as preposterous. Paul Fussell, the historian and literary critic, spoke for millions when he titled his famous essay on the end of the Pacific war "Thank G-d for the Atom Bomb."

Like countless young men in August 1945, Fussell was waiting to be shipped off to Asia for the planned invasion of Japan. He didn't expect to survive it. The fighting in Okinawa and Iwo Jima had already resulted in a horrific bloodbath and that was but a fraction of the toll that could be expected in the battle for Japan itself.

"On Okinawa, only weeks before Hiroshima, 123,000 Japanese and Americans killedeach other," Fussell wrote. A 21-year-old infantry officer, he had already been wounded twice in Europe; "the very idea of more combat made me breathe in gasps and shake all over." So when the atom bombs were dropped, "we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow to adulthood after all. The killing was all going to be over."

More than ever before, the historical record confirms what those soldiers knew in their gut: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hideous as they were, shortened the war that Japan had begun and thereby saved an immensity of lives. Far from considering itself "essentially defeated," the Japanese military was preparing for an Allied assault with a massive buildup in the south. It was only the shock of the atomic blasts that enabled Japanese leaders who wanted to stop the fighting to successfully press for a surrender.

"We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war," Kido Koichi, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest aides, later recalled. Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief cabinet secretary, called the bomb "a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war." That is still the right way to see it. President Truman's decision to use the new weapons stopped a war that would otherwise have raged savagely on, and made possible the transformation of Japan from vicious aggressor to peaceful democracy. Six decades after August 1945, it is clear: The bomb made the world a better place.