Herbert Feis served as the Special Consultant to three Secretaries of War. This book was his finale to a series on the governmental viewed history of World War II, one of these receiving the Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Feis gives personal accounts in a strictly factual description leaving out no information that the president and high officials discussed within the walls of the White House. The information that is presented is referenced countlessly throughout the book. His position in the government gave him the ability to have direct knowledge from personal individuals, in the government at that time, who had assessed the actions first hand. With these contacts his information is not presented as secondary information.
             In early August 1945, two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These two bombs quickly yielded the surrender of Japan and the end of the American involvement in World War II. By 1946, the two bombs caused the death of perhaps as many as 240,000 Japanese citizens. The popular view that dominated the 1950s and 60s, presented by President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, was that the at the dropping of the atomic bombs was a solely military action that avoided the loss of as many as a million lives in the upcoming American invasion of the island of Kyushu. In the 1960s a second idea developed, put forth by a collaboration of historians, that claimed the dropping of the bomb was a diplomatic maneuver aimed at gaining the upper hand in relations with Russia. Twenty years after the bombing, Feis, with the advantage of historical hindsight and the advantage of new evidence, developed a third view, free from obscuring bias. First, he stated that the dropping of the bomb was born out of a number of military, domestic, and diplomatic pressures and concerns. Secondly, many potentially alternatives to dropping the bombs were not explored by Truman and other men in power. Lastly, becaus...