I'm still reading the article. And even though I knew or suspected some of the things. Some still are new:
On August 6, 1945, a uranium bomb 3-235, 20 kilotons yield, was exploded 1850 feet in the air above Hiroshima, for maximum explosive effect. It devastated four square miles, and killed 140,000 of the 255,000 inhabitants. In Hiroshima’s Shadows, we find a statement by a doctor who treated some of the victims; p.415, Dr. Shuntaro Hida: “It was strange to us that Hiroshima had never been bombed, despite the fact that B-29 bombers flew over the city every day. Only after the war did I come to know that Hiroshima, according to American archives, had been kept untouched in order to preserve it as a target for the use of nuclear weapons. Perhaps, if the American administration and its military authorities had paid sufficient regard to the terrible nature of the fiery demon which mankind had discovered and yet knew so little about its consequences, the American authorities might never have used such a weapon against the 750,000 Japanese who ultimately became its victims.”
War really is hell. Not a lot understand what that means.
Notice you aren't talking about the Rape of Nanking, in which the Japanese slaughtered 300-400,000 in that one city alone. Why? does it not fit your preferred narrative?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_MassacreThe Japanese really should have surrendered. Unconditionally. They wouldn't and didn't, and they chose their fate.
I know of those Japanese atrocities. The reason I was not speaking of them is because it's outside the scope of this article. Don't try to go personal on me. There is no "preferred narrative" to fit for me. Japan was an enemy of the country I was born in, they still, under USA's pressure did not sign a peace treaty with USSR and now, by extension, with Russia. I could tell you about other Japanese atrocities, in Mongolia and the battle USSR lead to beat the Japanese out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_GolWhat you are doing, is changing the subject. I am trying to keep the history strait. Bombing of Japan was an atrocity, a war crime, and two war crimes don't make things right again. Bombing of Japan was as "necessary" as the bombing of Dresden by the Western allies.
You say: "The Japanese really should have surrendered. Unconditionally. They wouldn't and didn't, and they chose their fate."
But they did try to surrender, multiple times, if you cared to read the article. Also remember, what unconditional and humiliating surrender of Germany after WWI brought about? A rotten peace, ready to flourish again into war at any time.
While the residents of Hiroshima continued to watch the B-29s fly overhead without dropping bombs on them, they had no inkling of the terrible fate which the scientists had reserved for them. William Manchester quotes General Douglas MacArthur in American Caesar, Little Brown, 1978, p.437
[quoting:] There was another Japan, and MacArthur was one of the few Americans who suspected its existence. He kept urging the Pentagon and the State Department to be alert for conciliatory gestures. The General predicted that the break would come from Tokyo, not the Japanese army. The General was right. A dovish coalition was forming in the Japanese capital, and it was headed by Hirohito himself, who had concluded in the spring of 1945 that a negotiated peace was the only way to end his nation’s agony. Beginning in early May, a six-man council of Japanese diplomats explored ways to accommodate the Allies. The delegates informed top military officials that “our resistance is finished”. [End quoting]
On p.359, Gar Alperowitz quotes Brig. Gen. Carter W. Clarke, in charge of preparing the MAGIC summary in 1945, who stated in a 1959 historical interview, “We brought them down to an abject surrender through the accelerated sinking of their merchant marine and hunger alone, and when we didn’t need to do it, and knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs.”
Or does this not fit
your preferred narrative?
