I could cite at length from historians detailing why the bombing wasn't necessary. But those will be "Monday Morning Quarterbacking". So how about we look at the opinions of the military and government experts at the time? All quotes taken from
Hiroshima: Quotes and
Guide to Decision: Part I, but I've verified them elsewhere and they check out.
"The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it. . . . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. . . . It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before."
- Admiral William F. Halsey Jr., Commander U.S. Third Fleet
"The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war....The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan."
- Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief U.S. Pacific Fleet
"we brought them [the Japanese] 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 we knew we didn't need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs."
- Brigadier General Carter Clarke, officer who prepped intercepted Japanese cables for Truman
"It is my opinion at the present time that a surrender of Japan can be arranged with terms that can be accepted by Japan and that will make fully satisfactory provisions for America's defense against future trans-Pacific aggression."
- Fleet Admiral William Leahy, Chairman of Chiefs of Staff
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
- Chairman of Chiefs of Staff William Leahy
"General MacArthur definitely is appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster [the bomb]. I had a long talk with him today, necessitated by the impending trip to Okinawa."
- Weldon Rhoades, transport pilot for Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur, writing in his diary the day after the Hiroshima bomb was dropped
"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 mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."
- Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
- former President Dwight Eisenhower
"MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."
- Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur
"On the other hand if they knew or were told that no invasion would take place [and] that bombing would continue until the surrender, why I think the surrender would have taken place just about the same time."
General Carl Spaatz, Commander of U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific
"The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air....
it always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse."
- Commanding General of U.S. Army Air Forces Henry H. "Hap" Arnold
"I didn't like the atom bomb or any part of it."
- Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations
"Russia's entry into the Japanese war was the decisive factor in speeding its end and would have been so even if no atomic bombs had been dropped."
- General Claire Chennault, Army Air Forces Commander in China
"Both men . . . felt Japan would surrender without use of the bomb, and neither knew why the second bomb was used."
- private notes of former Ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman, describing the opinions of General Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, commander of the U.S. Army Strategic Air Force and deputy commanding general Frederick L. Anderson
"said flatly at one press conference that the atomic bomb "had nothing to do with the end of the war." He said the war would have been over in two weeks without the use of the atomic bomb or the Russian entry into the war."
- Major General Curtis E. LeMay, Commander of the Twenty-First Bomber Command
"Obviously . . . the atomic bomb neither induced the Emperor's decision to surrender nor had any effect on the ultimate outcome of the war."
- Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, in charge of psychological warfare on MacArthur's staff
