On August 6 and 9, 1945, the cities and residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan experienced something no other people had ever experienced before , and no other person has experienced it since. Within three days in August 1945 and towards the end of World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, would become the testing ground and their population the test dummies for a new type of weapon of war; the atomic bomb. Was this act necessary to end World War II as has been claimed? No, it wasn't. For months, many cities in Japan had suffered a relentless gun attack by American military forces. In March 1945, the city of Tokyo was attacked and 16 square miles of the city were destroyed (Weber). As a result, over 100,000 people were killed and a million were left homeless, with nowhere to go, nothing to eat, and none of their belongings. Several months later “there was the largest air raid of the Pacific War” (Weber), when two more attacks were carried out on what remained of the capital Tokyo. In these attacks, a total of more than 9,500 tons of munitions and explosives, creating hurricane-force winds, completely obliterated 56 square miles of the capital (Weber). The commercial district, entertainment district, and rail system were essentially reduced to nothing. The damage created and the number of lives lost in those attacks was mind-blowing. In his 1949 war memoirs, "Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding general of the Army Air Forces, stated: "It always seemed to us, atom bomb or no atom bomb, that the Japanese were already on the verge of of collapse" (Weber). Japanese leaders did not disagree when the former Japanese prim...... middle of paper ......hima destroyed, they should have destroyed them with the barrage of bombs and weapons that had dropped in the previous six months. That was a terrible excuse to use Hiroshima and its people as a test bed to find out what their precious atomic bomb was capable of. Works Cited Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Wikipedia and May 29 2011.Chaffee, John. “Was the United States Justified in Dropping Atomic Bombs on Japan?” ". 1996. The wartime newspaper. 25 May 2011 .Weber, Marco. “Was Hiroshima necessary?” June 1997. Institute for Historical Review. June 5th 2011 .