re: #32 Decatur Deb
The thinking of the time was that 6 months would have cost 2 million US, Japanese, and occupied nation lives.
(A co-worker was on a tiny Yard Minesweeper which had acted as a buoy for lines of landing craft at Okinawa. They were tagged to try their luck again on Operation Olympic. He learned to love the bomb early.)
My Dad was sent back to Hawaii after V-E day to get ready for the invasion—so I’ll always be grateful for the bomb—as horrible as that may sound.
Of course, he was a week late for everything—arrived in Oahu a week after Pearl Harbor, Normandy a week after D-day, the Ardennes a week after the Battle of the Bulge….maybe he would have landed on Kyushu a week after Olympic.