Truman was a small man compared to FDR, IMHO. He did much more harm (indeed long-lasting harm) than good, and was a mass-murderer due to his unnecessarily dropping of those two atomic bombs. Regardless of who developed them, Truman pulled the trigger, knowing full well he did not have to.
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Atomic Bombs: Race Hatred and Mass Murder
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x190913Atomic Bombs: Race Hatred and Mass Murder
by Mike (in Tokyo) Rogers
Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan were acts of race hatred against "Japs." They were heinous war crimes; unwarranted and premeditated mass murder on a populace that was 95% civilian – of course the vast majority were women and children. The bombs were completely unnecessary to bring about a Japanese surrender and then US President Harry S. Truman knew it. The atomic bombs did not save one million lives.
<snip>
On July 26, 1945, the Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender otherwise known as the Potsdam Declaration was issued. Article 13 of that declaration plainly states: "We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction."
<snip>
On top of that, further evidence shows that President Truman, along with his top advisers, had all agreed that Japan was trying to surrender at least three days before the first atomic bomb was dropped but feared that Japan might surrender to the Russians. Proof of this can be found in the diary of Walter Brown, assistant to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes. In his entry of August 3, 1945 it is written that the President, Byrnes, and Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to the President: "agreed Japs looking for peace. (Leahy had another report from Pacific) President afraid they will sue for peace through Russia instead of some country like Sweden." (See p. 415, Chapter 33)
Further proof that Truman ordered the atomic bombings of Japan not for the stated reason of bringing about a Japanese surrender and saving one million American lives, but to frighten the Soviets out of Eastern Europe, and to keep them from expanding influence in Asia, comes from Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard. Szilard met with US Secretary of State James Byrnes on May 28, 1945. Byrnes was Truman’s most trusted advisor and the only cabinet member who was present at Yalta.
snip
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We Shouldn't Have Bombed Hiroshima
http://www.spectacle.org/696/hiroshi.htmlSitting at Harry Truman's desk, behind the sign which said, "The buck stops here," one would be hard put not to use a major, curious new weapon, against people who had murdered civilians and prisoners of war. Having made the decision, he is shrouded in, and protected by, history; it was done, the war ended, and almost no-one cried out; it was done, so it was rightly done. But, if you take a step back, and examine the events of 1945, you learn a few things:
The Japanese had already asked the Russians to intercede for them and had indicated they would surrender if allowed to keep their emperor. We proceeded to drop the bomb while calling for unconditional surrender; immediately afterwards, we made peace on terms allowing them to keep their emperor.
It is hard to know, of the many causes men allege, which are their real motives, which are subsidiary, which are trivial or meaningless. But there were people who said at the time that the bomb would send an assertive signal to the Russians.
The selection of Hiroshima was made because the city had not been bombed, and we would learn more about the effects of an atomic bomb upon a virgin city.
There was profound racism against the Japanese, and one wonders if we would ever, under equivalent circumstances, been able to bring ourselves to use the bomb against the Germans.
The idea of dropping a demonstration bomb, or of dropping the bomb upon a large uninhabited area, was considered but rejected. The fear was that a pre-announced bomb might lead the Japanese to move POW's to the site (which they might have done), while a dud under those circumstances would have been a huge embarassment. But no-one has definitively explained why the bomb had to be dropped on a place of little strategic significance, inhabited mostly by civilians.
The second device was dropped on Nagasaki only days afterward, before the Japanese even had assimilated what had happened at Hiroshima. They certainly would have surrendered without the necessity of a second bomb.
The estimate that the invasion of Japan would have cost us a million casualties is ludicrous and not based on anything. The studies done at the time and presented to the president showed that the soldiers killed would have been about 5% of that number. The fact that the Japanese were already trying to surrender when we dropped the bomb--and that we ultimately gave them the terms we first refused--makes the allegation that we would have had to invade Japan particularly ridiculous.
There were even those who believed, in a tortuous example of one extreme of bomb thinking, that we must drop the bomb to show the world how horrible it is, so that we may never drop the bomb again.
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Excerpted from "Harry S. Truman: Advancing the Revolution," in Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom, John Denson, ed. :
http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=1812snip
Thus, the rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency — that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that had been needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.<7> The ridiculously inflated figure of a half-million for the potential death toll — nearly twice the total of US dead in all theaters in the Second World War — is now routinely repeated in high-school and college textbooks and bandied about by ignorant commentators. Unsurprisingly the prize for sheer fatuousness on this score goes to President George H.W. Bush, who claimed in 1991 that dropping the bomb "spared millions of American lives."<8>
Still, Truman's multiple deceptions and self-deceptions are understandable, considering the horror he unleashed. It is equally understandable that the US occupation authorities censored reports from the shattered cities and did not permit films and photographs of the thousands of corpses and the frightfully mutilated survivors to reach the public.<9> Otherwise, Americans — and the rest of the world — might have drawn disturbing comparisons to scenes then coming to light from the Nazi concentration camps.
The bombings were condemned as barbaric and unnecessary by high American military officers, including Eisenhower and MacArthur.<10> The view of Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman's own chief of staff, was typical:
the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. … My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.<11>
snip
Leo Szilard was the world-renowned physicist who drafted the original letter to Roosevelt that Einstein signed, instigating the Manhattan Project. In 1960, shortly before his death, Szilard stated another obvious truth:
If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.<23>
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila. If Harry Truman was not a war criminal, then no one ever was.----------------------------------------------
Also see Barton J. Bernstein, "A Post-War Myth: 500,000 US Lives Saved," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
http://alsos.wlu.edu/information.aspx?id=1153
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