The Atom Bomb
Many understand the relationship between ending the war in the Pacific and the appropriateness of using an atomic weapon negatively; that is, using the Atom bomb was an inappropriate solution to ending the Allied War against Japan. How ever the author of “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” Paul Fussel disagrees. He claims that the United States’ use of the bomb to destroy Japanese cities and civilian lives was entirely appropriate to the situation.
Thus one cannot trust the judgment of the inexperienced are the beliefs of Paul Fussel in his attempt to show the reader necessity of the Atom bomb. James Jones was a Marine who was enlisted during the time of war. Jones, with details of the US’s plan of action, tells that it would have been another year of fighting with an estimated “1 million American Casualties” (Fussel, 788). That would be 5 times the deaths caused by the Americans bombing in just terms of American fatalities. A former Pfc. E. B. Sledge said that the fighting was getting “more vicious the closer we got to Japan,” and the US was not even within Japan’s mainland (Sledge, 789). John F. Kennedy along with Winston Churchill both believed that the atom bomb was completely necessary. Kennedy, who was a PT boat Captain, and Churchill, who was in office during the dropping the A-bomb, agree that “people who preferred invasion to A-bombing seemed to have no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves” (JFK and Churchill, 791). The people who were not able to experience and witness the fighting first hand differs from the perspective of those who experienced the reality of World War II.
Vander Post recalls that the Japanese could “withdraw from the war without dishonor because it would strike them” “as something supernatural” (Post, 792). These were the soldiers dishonoring our soldiers by “cutting off the penises of the dead to stick in the corpses’ mouths” (Halsey, 794). Many Marines carried around disembodied pieces of Japanese...