“Obviously, these morons had never heard of Operation DOWNFALL, in which the U.S. government secretly predicted hundreds of thousands of Allied casualties, and over a million Japanese. Many of us would not be here today if the atomic bombs had not been dropped since our grandfathers would have been killed taking the home islands.”
Grandfather, heck. My dad would probably have been there. He returned to the US in April of ‘45 having escaped a German POW camp in Jan ‘45 and evading to the Russian side. Took a while for them to ut him loose and return him here stateside, but as he was pretty much back in fighting condition by the time Coronet was slated to go, he’d probably have been there.
I’ve also seen the terrible toll of what the Japanese did to US POWs they held. Dad belonged to the Ex-POW organization, and several of his fellow chapter members were PTO vets. They still bear the mental and physical scars of what was done to them.