Hiroshima

Tomorrow is the sixty-seventh anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and I will have a post examining the decision of Truman to use the atomic bomb.  This week I have been watching a three-hour DVD of a movie, Hiroshima, which originally appeared on Showtime in 1995.  I found it very well done.  The movie has a striking period feel.   The actor who played Truman, Kenneth Welsh,  gives an uncanny on target performance, looking, sounding and even moving like Truman.  The film flips back and forth between the United States and Japan, showing the US development of the bomb, and the decision to use the bomb on Japan, and the refusal of the Japanese Army and Navy chiefs to countenance surrender, even as the civilian leadership recognized that the situation of Japan was beyond hopeless.