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"But I think it was the wrong one."

Thanks, Timmy - glad you have an opinion, too... but you know what they say about a-holes and opinions.

I wonder if Tim remembers how, in Dec. 1944, Germany was bound to surrender by Christmas. Unfortunately, that was when that whole Battle-of-the-Bulge thing occurred and the war dragged on for several more months with thousands more American deaths and casualties.

I wonder why Tim is so concerned about the civilian deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but not apparently concerned about the 100,000 civilians killed during the firebombing attacks on Tokyo or Dresden. And if he's so concerned about the civilian deaths, I would point out the Japanese military started that tradition with their attacks on Manchuria, Burma, the Philippines, and China - see "Rape of Nanking."

I wonder if Tim is aware of the deaths of the Japanese civilians at Saipan, where entire families, after years of propaganda by the japanese military, hurled themselves from cliffs rather than suffer "abuse" at the hands of the "barbaric" Americans. An invasion of the Japanese home islands would have seen that reenacted over and over.

I would also ask why it took a second strike for Japan to finally figure out the war was over for them. Maybe they thought the first bombing was just a fluke.

The atomic strikes occurred less than two months after some of the bitterest fighting in the Pacific at Okinawa - nobody told the Japanese they were on the verge of surrender, I guess. I'm glad Tim's sanctimonious conscience could have been salved by letting the war drag on for another 3 or 4 months, but then his life was never in jeopardy during that time.

Absolutely spot on!

I get so tired of this BS about the atomic BOMBS, plural, as in two, every August by these hand-wring, dip$hit, chairwarmer, REMFs.

A computer crash wiped out my analysis of the Battle of Okinawa which I used to post in response to the know-nothing musings of these people.

In short, there were so many artillery shells used in that battle that there was not one thing on the island, man-made or natural that was over 24 inches in height. In addition to the people of Okinawa throwing themselves off the suicide cliffs, mothers cut the throats of their own children to silence their crying so their hiding places would not be given away.

In the Japanese Underground Naval Headquarters, there was one room where Japanese officers went in and pulled the pins from grenades to commit suicide in turns. The pock marks on the wall attested to how high the bodies were stacked in the room when it was over.

Additionally, the United States did not need to strike any Purple Heart medals for almost 50 years after the war, as they had made that many in anticipation of invading the Japanese homeland.

I have an opinion on this topic, But I think it might be somewhat biased as my father was a civilian laborer on Wake Island, who was captured by the Japanese after they took the Island on December 24th 1941, they shipped the majority of the over 1500 civilian prisoners to POW Camps in Japan and China and kept 98 civilians to work on building up the Wake Island Defenses, when the work was completed in 1943, the Commander had the 98 men marched to a common grave site and shot them all... My thought is the bomb was an appropriate training aid for the military complex, I was 9 years old at the time, my mother was left with 5 kids to raise by herself.. SFC Pratt Airborne Retired.