[dragoon500ly]

Flipping through a variety of military histories, I don't believe that there has ever been a war in which the civilians did not suffer to some degree, but the advent of the 20th Century has seen the concept of "Total War" which seeks to not only to defeat the enemy military on the field but to destroy his means to resist and to damage his will to continue to resist.

Americans like to delude themselves that we "fight fair", that we only "fight other soldiers", that "we use every means to avoid civilian losses", nothing can be further from the truth. Using B-17s (or B-52s) to target factories that manufacture war material is a great idea, but too many factories have neighborhoods nearby that house the workers and their families...and bombing from the air is not quite as accurate as we like to believe it is. And the Air Force is not the only service with this problem. Don't forget that in the Normandy fighting, the US Army reduced the town of St. Lo to rubble in an effort to blast its defenders out of their positions, just to name one example out of thousands.

In the US, the President simply issues broad guidelines to the Joint Chiefs and it is their responibility to issue the necessary orders to the theater commanders and so forth. Truman was faced with the hardest decision that any President ever had to make, not only did he have to make the decision to use atomic bombs, he also had to approve the target list. Based on the information that he had at the time, based on the ruthlessness that the Japanese military had shown, based on the willingness of Japanese civilians to kill themselves rather than endure capture at the hands of the Americans, faced with the predicted losses that the invasion of Japan would have meant, not only to the Allies, but to the Japanese as well, he made the decision to target two, untouched cities as a demonstration that the Allies were willing to reduce Japan to ashes. Faced with the prospect, finally, the Japanese made the decision to accept the offer and surrender.

Right or wrong, his decision has been blasted for the sixty odd years since he made it. It has become popular nowdays to mock Truman, to proclaim him a racist willing to end the war, now matter how many Japanese he had to kill and so on. Even serious scholars are willingly to follow the current fad and damn him as the man responsible for directly ordering the deaths of civilians in the most horrific manner possible.

For myself, I can only sit back and wonder at the courage he showed, at his willingless to make a decision to end the most terrible of wars at any cost, and above all the manner that he lived out the rest of his life, certain that he made the only decision possible.