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To: tom h

My mother graduated high school in 1944, and yes, she's told me, they were tired of the war...more resigned to it, really. She didn't know my father at the time, but in 1945 he was in the Philippines, a sergeant in a motor pool on Leyte, and had already been told that he was probably going to be reassigned as an infantryman for Operation Olympic, the invasion of Japan.

The area where my mom grew up had already suffered fairly heavily--central Virginia, around Lynchburg (the city of Bedford in particular), had lost a lot of men when the 29th Infantry Division went ashore on D-Day. Chances are, had the war continued, despite the heavy losses the 29th had suffered (around 200% casualties for the entire European campaign), most of them were going to get to storm the beaches of Japan the same way they had in Normandy.

The will to win, she always told me, hadn't diminished. But they were most definitely tired of the sacrifices and saddened by the losses.

I've never read "Flags of Our Fathers," but I got "Flyboys" as a gift and have read it, and I'll concur with your opinion. We were hypocritical at times in our foreign policy toward Japan pre-war, but he definitely goes way too far in making us as much of a bad guy as Imperial Japan was. His description of the Tokyo firebomb raid on 8-9 March 1945, though, is chilling. Not many people know that we'd already killed more civilians in bomb raids on Tokyo than we had on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The only difference was that killing 120,000 people in Tokyo took 334 planes; killing 120,000 in Hiroshima took one.

}:-)4


11 posted on 10/11/2006 5:07:32 PM PDT by Moose4 (They caught me white and nerdy.)
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To: Moose4
The only difference was that killing 120,000 people in Tokyo took 334 planes; killing 120,000 in Hiroshima took one.

And it was the fact that we had already done it with 334 and now had the power to do it with one that let the Japanese KNOW we could and WOULD destroy them utterly. They simply had to surrender.
22 posted on 10/16/2006 11:31:20 AM PDT by TalonDJ
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