In 1944, my father in law was a 19 year old Marine radioman on Iwo Jima. In 1945, my father was on a small Navy ship just off Okinawa. Both would have been sent on an invasion of the Japanese home islands. And it’s doubtful that either of them would have made it home. Not to mention the millions of Japanese who would have died fighting from cave to cave, extrapolating from Okinawa.
Thank you, Harry Truman.
For sure that guy had it coming; the problem is the other 999,999 people in his town and what if anything they’d done to have it coming... Japan was defeated after the first two or three big firebomb raids and there was nothing resembling proportion in the picture. Some 3000 Americans had been killed at Pearl Harbor, while we may in fact have killed a million people in the fire raid over Tokyo March 9/10 of 45. It might have been possible to end the war months earlier, and without getting Russia involved on the Pacific rim or leaving Stalinist regimes on the Pacific rim.
My wife is from the Philippines...Her mother and father had many stories of the cruelty by the average Japanese soldier...Her father hid in the mountains and sometimes had to boil grass for food....He made a batch of it when she was a little girl and she said it was horrible...Her mother told him that the war is over and quit scaring the kids...kinda funny. ;)