Truman was the most revered President among WW II combat veterans. It was their overwhelming consensus that if he had not dropped the atomic bomb, they would not have survived the war. Also if the US had taken the casualties that were very realistically projected, many people who are on FR would have simply never came to exist.
I had an uncle who was a combat veteran of WWII in the European theater. Liberal schoolteacher, real bedwetter about most things. Not the Atomic bomb though, strangely enough. He was VERY happy about that. See, he was scheduled to redeploy for the invasion of Japan. This is one of the lesser talked about aspects of the war. They needed lots of personnel for that, and the only place they could have realistically got them was from the European theater. They were NOT happy about this, those guys felt it was someone else’s turn.
At my dad’s funeral, I learned that he had been in boot camp when Japan surrendered. I learned this from a man he had grown up with and had to boot camp with. I told the gentleman that they must have been relieved to hear about the surrender. “You just don’t know!” he said. “We knew where we were going to be sent!” Instead of going to Japan to fight, the two of them went to Germany after the war.
Daddy never mentioned it to me, but my brother told me not long ago that Daddy once told him that he was thankful for the nuclear bombs, because if they had not been dropped he would have had to go to Japan and would probably have died there.
And, as you say, lots of us would have never been born.