Excellent article. (Nanking was mentioned extensively in the article)
Back in 1995, my dad, giving a Memorial Day speech in his hometown during the A-Bomb “anniversary year” said “We should have used it, and if we had them, should have used more of them, and sooner.” (Not his exact words, but much along those lines)
He was pilloried in the local press the next day for saying it. But it didn’t make him lose a moment’s sleep.
He knew right from wrong.
Indeed.
My Dad was in WW2 in the Navy. He was at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. After the surrender, his ship was instructed to liberate a Japanese POW Camp on some forsaken island. They assumed that the Americans would need immediate medical attention and prepared the ship for 250. When they got there, they found that the Japanese had fled, after beheading nearly 250 American Marines.
The crew of Dad’s ship, originally jubilant about the War’s end, had to match the heads to the bodies and identify them.
Dad shared a LOT of stories about those years, but never that one, until he was in his late 70’s, and only to my brother.
Oh...Dad was 17 at the time.
I met Gen Paul Tibbets in 2000, and told him the story. We both agreed that the Nuke was the right thing to do. He signed a book for my Dad whichI promptly mailed to him from Florida.
We had one more (sort of ... a little bit of assembly required); Pres. Truman decided against using it. I'm disinclined to second guess him.
Look up Paul Fussell’s piece “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb.” Amen.