How Did Harry S. Truman's Decision To Invade Japan?

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It is 1945 and a weary Germany has finally surrendered, and yet, there still isn’t complete peace on earth. Though the war in Europe was over, the war against Japan was still relentlessly continuing forward. Even though at times the war seemed as though it would go on endlessly, Japan was weakening and it wouldn’t be long until their surrender. At this same time, president Harry S. Truman had the tough decision of choosing between bombing or invading Japan in order to stop the war. Looking back at Truman’s decision, many historians question the necessity of bombing two Japanese cities and thereby killing thousands of civilian lives. Japan was already on the brink of defeat but America chose to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only to end the war but also for power politics between the United States and the Soviet Union. Bombing Japan at this time was equivalent to fighting a wounded animal. Though the Japanese had demonstrated near fanatical resistance with their kamikaze soldiers, a combination of the fact that “more than 60 cities had been destroyed …show more content…

The US has been afraid of the Russian spread of communism within their views of a democratic world for quite some time now. The red scare happened during the end of World War I set a stigma that the communist views of Russians were something to genuinely fear and bombing Japan may have just been a plot “ to force Japan’s surrender before the Soviet Union could mount an invasion and subsequently occupy Japanese territory,” (Document C). The fear that a communist world power could potentially gain more land and resources was something that the United States was wary of. And anyways, the US and the USSR were long-landing rivals and it might have been so that “Japanese lives were sacrificed simply for power politics between the US and the Soviet Union,” (Document

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