However, terror(fire)-bombing was not very successful in defeating the enemy’s war machine. Nearly every Japanese city was also bombarded and civilian targets in particular. This attack was initially championed by no other than Winston Churchill, who undoubtedly followed American Air Force General LeMay’s motto “ bomb and burn them until they quit”. The allied forces were already firebombing cities and civilians savagely in terror attacks from the air that were even later equated with the Holocaust, as the one that occurred in Dresden, Germany, when 100.000 civilians were killed in one single night. The immediate aftermath of the dropping of the bomb at Hiroshima with the typical-for-nuclear-bomb “mushroom” cloudĪfter Pearl Harbour in 1941, the Bataan Death March of 1942, and the memories of the barbaric way the Japanese treated civilians and prisoners-of-war, the US government (and the public) understandably wanted blood. EVENTS LEADING UP TO THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS: Since the scope of the book and the topic is so broad, I have decided to structure my review in the following manner: (i) Events leading up to the atomic bombings (ii) Four myths and four corresponding realities (iii) Immediate aftermath and (iv) Long-term consequences. The result is a well-researched book about one of the most unbelievable and traumatic events in the world history. Starting in winter 1945, when “ Roosevelt and Churchill arrived bound by a private agreement…not to share with the Soviet Union…the development of an extraordinary new weapon”, continuing to the secret development of the world’s first atomic bomb, and ending with the aftermath of the tragedy, the author goes into incredible depth about what happened in the final year of the war, demonstrating the situation through statistics, broader situation invoking key actors and through personal accounts. ![]() Paul Ham is an Australian author and correspondent, who in his non-fiction Hiroshima Nagasaki presents a true account of what happened to the two Japanese cities in 1945, dispelling myths that still persist about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, including that the bombs were somehow “necessary”, or that their usage led to Japan’s surrender. “ The Japanese collectively were to blame…Truman drew no distinction between civilian and soldier mother and murderer child and monster” “ America annihilated 100.000 persons, most of them civilians, at Hiroshima…and then…,in spite of the “universal horror”, repeated the performance at Nagasaki”. “ An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” M.
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