THIS AUGUST 6 AND 9 marks the 56th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The use of the atomic bombs was the only alternative left to President Truman and his officials.

By August 1945, the war with Japan showed signs of continuing indefinitely. As American forces advanced closer to the Japanese mainland, the Japanese refusal to surrender did not diminish but increased. In the summer of 1945, Japan had more than 2 million soldiers and 30 million citizens who were prepared to choose "death over dishonour." This point had already been established by the kamikaze pilots and Japanese soldiers who fought at and Iwo Jima<.

The Japanese view of war was quite different from that of the American view: death in war was not something to be avoided, but to be sought. The Shinto cult, for example, which preached a radical concept of self-sacrifice, taught that suicide was glorious, while surrender was an unthinkable disgrace. It was at Saipan that even Japanese civilians committed suicide by jumping off the cliffs on the northern tip of the island rather than surrender. At the battle of , thousands of Japanese had drawn themselves up in a line and killed themselves by hand-grenades, rather than surrender.

The Japanese leadership never disguised its revulsion to the idea of surrender. It repeatedly made clear its intention to fight to the last man, woman and child. The Japanese bitter-end slogan called for "the honorable death of a hundred million" -- the entire population. Allied intercepts of communications revealed that Japanese militarists were obsessed with vindicating their emperor’s, as well as their own, honor in a bloody till-the-death battle over the home islands.

This explains why at this very time the Japanese military was rapidly building up defense forces on the southern island of Kyushu, where by war's end there were 14 divisions and 735,000 troops ready to sacrifice themselves in battle.

Japan's stubborn and unsatisfactory response to the Allies' Potsdam Declaration left Truman with little choice. He knew, as General Marshall's reports confirmed, that at least 500,000 Americans would be lost in an invasion of Japan. That was a conservative estimate, as the possibility existed that up to one million Allied casualties would be suffered. Meanwhile, it was estimated that potential Japanese casualties stood at five million.

Truman and his advisers were well aware that they had just suffered 75,000 American casualties in seizing Okinawa , just a small island. The bombing of the two Japanese cities, therefore, was considered to be the quickest way to end the war with the least amount of casualties on both sides.

For nearly four years America had watched its soldiers being killed by militant and fanatical Japanese troops. And now, every day that the Japanese refused to surrender, the death toll on both sides rose, while Allied POWs and civilian internees in Japanese concentration camps were being tortured and executed.

Truman knew that if an American invasion was carried through, the 100,000 Allied prisoners of war would die. He was aware of Tokyo’s order that, at the moment that the Americans invaded Japan's home islands, the POW's were to be tortured, beheaded, and executed en masse. At many POW camps, many prisoners had already been instructed to dig their own graves. Fifty thousand POWs had already died from torture, starvation, and unimaginable abuse.

In his book The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, “revisionist” historian Gar Alperovitz denounces the American use of the bomb. His book is filled with impressive documentation and sophisticated phraseology. The problem is that the 780 pages of text and references fail to answer one question: would Alperovitz argue the same thesis if he, or one of his children, had been an Allied POW in a Japanese prison camp on the eve of Truman's decision?

Only an intellectual could create the arguments that Alperovitz does. Few academics represent better the ultimate heartlessness of ideas.

That the Japanese bore the brunt of the first weapons of mass destruction, that tens of thousands of innocent and helpless Japanese citizens died during those tragic and soul-searching days of early August 1945 is a given. They deserve our memory, as well as our grief. What is too often forgotten, however, is that the greatest crime awaiting mankind at that terrible time was not inherent in the use of the atomic bomb, but in the more horrifying reality that would have followed its non-use.