Joe_Cavalry All Day Every Day

Supporters of President Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons against Japan tend to paint the decision as a difficult choice between two stark options—it was either American boys, or the bomb. Opponents of the bomb are adamant that there were other options available to the President, which at the very least should have been tried before resorting to the bomb. The most important alternative to both the bomb and the land invasion was to modify the demand for unconditional surrender and allow the Japanese to keep their emperor. Of course, he would have to be demoted to a powerless figurehead.

Opponents of President Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb argue that racism played an important role in the decision; that had the bomb been ready in time it never would have been used against Germany.

We had news this morning of another successful atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki. These two heavy blows have fallen in quick succession upon the Japanese and there will be quite a little space before we intend to drop another.

Henry L. Stimson

In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.

Wilfred Burchett

After World War II, most of Hiroshima would be rebuilt, though one destroyed section was set aside as a reminder of the effects of the atomic bomb. Each August 6, thousands of people gather at Peace Memorial Park to join in interfaith religious services commemorating the anniversary of the bombing.

Even before the outbreak of war in 1939, a group of American scientists–many of them refugees from fascist regimes in Europe–became concerned with nuclear weapons research being conducted in Nazi Germany. In 1940, the U.S. government began funding its own atomic weapons development program, which came under the joint responsibility of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the War Department after the U.S. entry into World War II.

There were 90,000 buildings in Hiroshima before the bomb was dropped; only 28,000 remained after the bombing. There were 1,780 nurses before-only 150 remained who were able to tend to the sick and dying.

Students will explore major events occurring at the end of World War II, including the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the forced relocation of Japanese Americans into internment camps, and America’s use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Students will explore primary sources, read poetry and a narrative, and discuss the US government’s choices in depth while examining the affect on America, Japan, and the world community at large. In fact, Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans had long been characterized as a foreign "Yellow Peril" that was a threat to the United States. Prejudice against Japanese Americans, including laws preventing them from owning land, existed long before World War II. Even though Japanese Americans largely considered themselves loyal and even patriotic Americans, suspicions about their loyalties were pervasive.

Life in the camps was hard. Internees had only been allowed to bring with then a few possessions. In many cases they had been given just 48 hours to evacuate their homes. Consequently they were easy prey for fortune hunters who offered them far less than the market prices for the goods they could not take with them. On February 19th 1942 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Under the terms of the Order, some 120,000 people of Japanese descent living in the US were removed from their homes and placed in internment camps.

This is why this power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and much of Oregon, Washington and Arizona, except for those in internment camps." Of 127,000 Japanese Americans living in the continental United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, 112,000 resided on the West Coast.