Writing on his website “Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey,” on Aug. 1 Brian McGlinchey takes on the ongoing justification of the use of atomic weapons in Japan, by citing U.S. military officials at the time, who disagreed with the horrific decision to use the bomb. McGlinchey otherwise provides a useful historical study of the process of negotiations at the time, and further makes the case that the terms of a Japanese surrender had already been agreed before the bombs were dropped—something that few authors outside of the Executive Intelligence Review have shown. It should be noted that McGlinchey had formerly run 28pages.org, which had played an important role in the campaign to declassify the “28 pages” of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which showed that the FBI knew of involvement by officials from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia organizing that terrorist activity.
McGlinchey’s piece in Stark Realities begins:
“The anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki present an opportunity to demolish a cornerstone myth of American history—that those twin acts of mass civilian slaughter were necessary to bring about Japan’s surrender, and spare a half-million U.S. soldiers who’d have otherwise died in a military conquest of the empire’s home islands.
“Those who attack this mythology are often reflexively dismissed as unpatriotic, ill-informed or both. However, the most compelling witnesses against the conventional wisdom were patriots with a unique grasp on the state of affairs in August 1945—America’s senior military leaders of World War II.
“Let’s first hear what they had to say, and then examine key facts that led them to their little-publicized convictions” he writes; the following quotes are excerpted from McGlinchey’s piece.
General Dwight Eisenhower on learning of the planned bombings: “I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and voiced to [Secretary of War Stimson] 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.’ ”
