It was the carnage at Iwo Jima that convinced Truman that America had to use the bomb. The Japanese were so fanatic that the toll in lives required to capture the Japanese mainland would have exceeded all American deaths in both the Europe and the Pacific theatres, combined.
God Bless Harry Truman.
Without his courage to use the bomb, myself,along with many other Americans and (never mentioned) Japanese would not exist.
Grandpa had orders to go to the Pacific from Europe to invade Japan.
I have to take books off the shelves and show them to my kids to “get this.” I lost an uncle in the PI, another uncle’s leg there, and another uncle worked graves registration and recovery from the first invasions through ‘45. I grew up steeped in disdain for the Japanese army and their brutality. Not one of them would suggest that we invade Japan. Nor would my father in law who was on a troop ship heading west from Europe—to head straight through the canal to the Pacific.
People today are jaded and startled by the losses we’ve encountered in our recent wars. Every life is valuable, but to consider we lost as many folks in a couple of days on Iwo than we have in the eight years of the WOT. imagine how our general public would react to those kinds of numbers.
Finally, I was watching the WWII in HD on the History Channel the other night and I was stunned at the writings of Time magazine before the invasion of Guadalcanal. They were talking about how soft and unprepared our marines were—that they probably did not have the heart for the fight because they were so soft. They could have taken the text from today’s papers.