Like hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and Japanese military and civilians alike, I owe my life to the atomic bomb. No other major modern war has ever been ended so quickly, or so humanely.
At least a million “baby boomers” here in the U.S.A. would not have been born due to a shortage of potential fathers. Estimates at that time were that hundreds of thousands of Americans and Japanese would have died had the war not ended when it did.
Postwar intelligence proved that we had vastly underestimated the enemy’s last-stand capabilities, which included 5,651 army plus 7,074 naval aircraft available for suicide or other missions.
Those who are trying to convince the American public that we owed it to the world to sustain and cause more deaths and injuries in order “to win the war in a more acceptable manner” are just not with it.
I participated in one late-war action in which the Japanese tenacity (not a bad trait) was demonstrated. About 8,000 enemy forces were killed at Corregidor; only 52 chose to surrender to our forces in February 1945. Okinawa cost them 90,000 killed and we lost 26 ships sunk, 386 damaged and, in the Navy alone, 4,900 killed plus 4,800 wounded.
