A haunting anniversary

Early August 1945 was a confusing time for many Americans, who were experiencing some combination of celebration, sadness and foreboding.

The war in Europe was over, bringing home thousands of gleeful troops by ship. Yet newspapers were still catching up on reports of individual soldiers killed during winter and spring, while men continued to die in the Pacific.

What would it take to defeat Japan and finally bring World War II to a close? The conventional wisdom was pessimistic — only a U.S. ground invasion would bring down the empire, requiring the deployment of 1 million men to Japan at a cost of hundreds of thousands more American lives.

And then suddenly, 75 years ago, the world changed forever, in ways grasped immediately, excitedly, but also hinted at darkly. On Aug. 6, 1945, an American B-29 obliterated Hiroshima, Japan, with a secret weapon of ferocious untamed power — the first atomic bomb. On that day, at 9 a.m. E.T., President Harry Truman announced the existence of the bomb and reported the destruction of Hiroshima. The bomb, he warned, represented a revolutionary escalation of warfare. “It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe,” Truman declared. “The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”

When Japan refused to surrender, the United States dropped a second bomb Aug. 9 on Nagasaki, leveling that city. The death toll from the two attacks totaled at least 225,000. Many victims suffered terrible burns and radiation sickness that would linger and kill later.

While it took Japan until Aug. 15 to announce its surrender, Americans recognized immediately after Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the war soon would be over, the invasion of the Japanese main islands could be called off and the terrible burden of fighting — and losing more young men — finally would lift.

The debate over whether the decision to drop the bomb was right, was moral, is easily misdirected. Japanese military leaders could not win the war, nor could they bring themselves to concede defeat. Until the A-bombing, fighting was certain to continue at tremendous cost to the people of both America and Japan.