OK, there were casualties in the tens of thousands to take (almost) each of the islands from Guam inward. There was a real time factor involved to try and keep the Japanese from regaining their war footing. I get that. But at the point just before we dropped the bomb, we had firebombed Tokyo, and Japan’s major cities into ashes, and Russia invaded Japan’s Manchurian territories taking their resources and factories. Japan was a hollow shell of what it had been. A few more months of fire and conventional bombings, and without a place to secure resources or re supply weaponry, there was no need to rush a nation-wide invasion resulting in possibly a million casulties (so it goes…)

I don’t know I buy the rationale for using ‘the bomb’ as a humanitarian choice, and both of them for that matter, as America did. I can’t shake the motivation that the bombs were used primarily as a means to end the war as soon as possible to secure Japan solely for the Western Allies, and to intimidate the Soviet Union. After spending 20,000 men to take useless chunks of rock in the pacific, more than once, it seems strange to suddenly value human life… and specifically American human life… Because we say the Japanese deaths were ok, don’t we? But I can’t write off the 230,000 people killled in the Atomic bombing, and the 200,000 people that died of cancer by 1950. War makes no god damn sense to me.

But I wasn’t there. It was my grandparent’s generation. And everyone tells me, everyone, they were the greatest generation.