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As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown definitively in his new book, “Racing the Enemy” - and many other historians have long argued - it was the Soviet Union’s entry into the Pacific war on Aug. For one thing, the Smithsonian downplayed the casualties, saying only that the bombs “caused many tens of thousands of deaths” and that Hiroshima was “a definite military target.”Īmericans were also told that use of the bombs “led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands.” But it’s not that straightforward. The exhibit, which had been the subject of a bruising political battle, presented nearly 4 million Americans with an officially sanctioned view of the atomic bombings that again portrayed them as a necessary act in a just war.īut although patriotically correct, the exhibit and the narrative on which it was based were historically inaccurate.
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A decade ago, on the 50th anniversary, this narrative was reinforced in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first bomb. This powerful narrative took root quickly and is now deeply embedded in our historical sense of who we are as a nation. had been required to invade mainland Japan.
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To many Americans at the time, and still for many today, it seemed clear that the bomb had ended the war, even “saving” a million lives that might have been lost if the U.S. 14, 1945 - just five days after the Nagasaki bombing - Radio Tokyo announced that the Japanese emperor had accepted the U.S. The magnitude of death was enormous, but on Aug. Three days after Hiroshima was obliterated, the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar fate. At least half of the victims died of radiation poisoning over the next few months. One hundred and forty thousand people were killed, more than 95% of them women and children and other noncombatants. SIXTY YEARS ago tomorrow, an atomic bomb was dropped without warning on the center of the Japanese city of Hiroshima.