tanks."(6) In the end, these final preparations were not employed. One 6 August 1945 the American B-29 bomber, named Enola Gay by the pilot Paul W. Tibbets, dropped the "little boy" uranium atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Three days later a second bomb, made of plutonium and nicknamed "fat boy," was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. On 14 August the Japanese surrendered unconditionally and the war in Asia ended. Truman's monumental decision to drop these bombs was born out of the complex background discussed above. Pressure to drop the bomb stemmed from three major categories: military, domestic and diplomatic. The military pressures stemmed from discussion and meetings Truman had with Secretary of War Stimson, Army Chief of Staff General Marshal, Chief of Staff Admiral William Leahy, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal and others. On 18 June 1945 General Marshall and Secretary of War Stimson convinced Truman to set an invasion of the island of Kyushu for November 1945.(7) Truman knew of the ferocious fighting currently taking place in the Pacific, and naturally had a desire to minimize what he felt would inevitably be a long, bloody struggle.(8) In an article written to Harper's magazine two years after the dropping of the bombs, Stimson wrote that the, "Allies would be faced with the enormous task of destroying an armed force of five million and five thousand suicide aircraft, belonging to a race that had already amply demonstrated its ability to fight literally to the death."(9) Stimson, Truman and others believed the invasion of the Japanese mainland would be extremely costly, and therefore embraced the bomb as a military weapon whose use fully condoned and never questioned. Truman's feelings that the bomb was a necessary military weapon can be seen in his diary on 25 July 1945, in which he recorded that he had told "Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use [the atomic bomb] so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are th...
