My father flew B-29's out of Guam. A great story to read about the Japanese surrender and how it was almost thwarted is the book, The Last Mission, by James Smith. My father took part in that mission.
Lost an engine coming back from the bombing mission and had to land at Iwo. A tricky thing to do with those short runways.
Yeah, that’s a good point — even after 40+ cities had been incinerated by firebombing, and two cities obliterated by single nuclear bombs — and unable to know that the US had exhausted its arsenal of nukes — there were still those who wanted to continue to fight. The idea that they were entirely beaten and that the nukes weren’t “necessary” is so dopey it’s difficult to believe there are those who still purport to believe it. The rest of the victims of the Japanese were largely Asians, and if the US had built fifty nuclear weapons, hardly a tear would have been shed if we’d had to use them against a Japan that refused to surrender.