Hiroshima: Columbia's Anti-American Canards

Columbia journalism professor and ex-SDS president Todd Gitlin claims (NY Times 8/11/15) that the Soviet Union's entry into World War II made it unnecessary for the US to drop atomic bombs on Japan, also claiming without substantive evidence that an invasion of Japan would have cost "only" 100,000 American lives.  Japan's horrific war that took  20,000,000 Chinese lives has been overshadowed by the Hiroshima debate and is now long forgotten.  When the atomic bombs were dropped, Japan's largest armies were still a menace in China and Korea.   Virtually no one remembers today that when the atom bombs were dropped,  Japan's most brilliant general, Tomoyuki Yamashita, was still undefeated in the Philippines.  He did not surrender until September of 1945.  It would have taken months, if not years, of devastating fighting to subdue the Japanese armies in China, Korea, the Philippines and still scattered across the Pacific.  Moreover, the Soviet Union had no maritime capability to invade the Japanese home islands.  That would have been left to American forces.   The invasion of the small island of Okinawa cost the US nearly 100,000 casualties.  It's egregiously disingenuous to claim that the far bigger task of invading Japan's home islands would have cost "only" 100,000 American lives.   In 1945 it was the responsibility of the US government to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible to save untold Chinese, Korean, American and, indeed, Japanese lives.

Gitlin's thoughts are really just more anti-American propaganda from the New York Times, Columbia University and the longtime fans of the old Soviet Union, which, in fact, as Hitler's original ally in the dismantling of Poland, was responsible for making World War II and the Holocaust a reality.  All of the horror that followed Poland would have been avoided but for Stalin's original sin: his alliances with Hitler and Japan.  Former SDS leader Gitlin should have explained why Stalin waited until August,1945, to declare war on Japan, instead pretending the Soviet Union's WWII perfidy never happened.

On the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII,  no one wants to talk about the Soviet Union's perfidy helping to start it.

====================
"My generation of the New Left — a generation that grew as the [Vietnam] war went on — relinquished any title to patriotism without much sense of loss. All that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked political correctness of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost — we squandered the politics — but won the textbooks."
-- Varieties of Patriotic Experience, Todd Gitlin, Professor & Chair, Ph.D. Program, Columbia Journalism School,