[Verginius Rufus]

The Japanese believed that you should never surrender so they treated prisoners of war very poorly (worse than the Germans). The professor I knew believed that all the POWs would have been killed if the US had invaded Japan.

My father would have been in the invasion force so he was always convinced that using the atomic bombs was the right thing to do. Even if he had survived that, his life over the next few years would have been different and he would never have met my mother so I would not be alive.

Yes, the story of Ira Hayes is very sad. The US government made heroes of the men captured in the photo and had them tour the US (to get people to buy war bonds), and they did not think they deserved any special recognition beyond what all the other military men were doing.

[MacNaughton]

I recall in With the Old Breed that Eugene Sledge was in a rest & recovery camp on Okinawa when the A-bombs were dropped. He wrote that the surrounding camps, which were not R&R, erupted in cheering and celebrating. The men in his camp showed little reaction because they were all so mentally spent from the Battle for Okinawa. Sledge agreed that dropping the A-bombs was the correct strategy. We have seen in recent years the casualty estimates for American forces ranged from 220,000 to several million, and estimates of Japanese military and civilian casualties ran from the millions to the tens of millions. Casualty estimates did not include potential losses from radiation poisoning resulting from the tactical use of nuclear weapons or from Allied POWs who would have been executed by the Japanese.