Reply #104: Irrelevant?! [View All]

I'm not at all sure how you can justify a statement like that. If the Japanese military kept fighting, the war was, by definition, not over. The thousands of Allied soldiers that were still fighting all over the pacific rim would certainly not consider it "irrelevant" that the Japanese military was not surrendering.

Truman's motivations were to satisfy a bloodthirsty American public and scare the Russians.

That's not accurate. America's mood in August 1945 was far, far more war-weary than bloodthirsty. Truman certainly considered the bombing as a statement to the Soviets, but that does not negate the larger, more direct purpose that the bombings served (namely, the immediate end to a war that had claimed tens of millions of lives).