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“The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower
“In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. … The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer
The men who reinvented warfare Malcolm Gladwell’s new book
The Bomber Mafia and the visionaries who wanted to make conflict “clean”. When Curtis LeMay was five years old, standing in his family’s backyard in Columbus, Ohio, in about 1912, the future Air Force general saw his first aeroplane. He would recall in his memoir: “Suddenly, in the air above me, appeared a flying machine. It came from nowhere. There it was, and I wanted to catch it.” The boy was enchanted by the “wonderful sound and force and the freakish illusion of the Thing”. He chased it down the street, and when he couldn’t catch it he cried, recounts Malcolm Gladwell in this important and characteristically readable new history.