Madam, - Dermot Meleady (August 13th) displays an astonishing propensity to swallow US propaganda on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Predictably, he describes as "revisionists" those who dare to deviate from the official line.
However, the facts found in the expert literature contradict the official fairytale spun by the US and its Irish apologists.
By August 1945 the US had almost total domination of sea and air in the Pacific. Tokyo was in ruins and, apart from a few isolated skirmishes, no fighting was taking place. The war was effectively over.
The US knew there were routes to a Japanese surrender:
1) Allow the Japanese to keep the emperor they considered a divinity (the US deleted all reference to this in the Potsdam Proclamation - against the objections of its own allies). 2) Wait for the shock of the August 8th Russian declaration of war on Japan (the Russians had previously a neutrality agreement with Japan). 3) The combination of (1) and (2) occurring simultaneously would have been, pardon the phrase, the "nuclear option" that was sure to end the war. Crucially, the Truman administration knew this to be the case.
The US military that had fought in Guam, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa did indeed estimate that the maximum US casualties in an invasion would be 46,000 (not very surprising, given the balance of force and power).
Contrary to Mr Meleady's claims that this "can only be based on early, and highly optimistic, reckoning of the possible casualties", this was, in fact, the US military's worst-case scenario. Subsequent Truman administration estimates of 500,000 or one million casualties were pure (post-facto) fabrications.
Finally, there was no immediate urgency to drop the bomb on Japan.
The earliest possible date of an invasion was March or April 1946, while an initial exploratory invasion of Kyushu would not occur until November 1st, 1945.
There was, therefore, plenty of time to allow the options I outlined above to work.
As Eisenhower put it: "It was not necessary to hit them with that awful thing".
Thus, Mr Meleady is wrong on every point.
But, then, when have the facts ever interfered with the profound musings of our own armchair warriors? - Yours, etc,
MARK O'LEARY, Swords, Co Dublin.