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It was a tragic but necesary event. Operation Olympic, which was the code name for the invasion of Japan, was scheduled for early 1946. It was estimated that the Allied casualties alone would number over a million. Thats 1 million guys on just our side, more than half of them would have been killed besides the maimed and wounded. My father spent three years in the Pacific theater of operations. Wounded on Peilelu and Saipan. Would he have come home? Probably not as the law of averages was already against him. He knew the way the Japanese would fight, death before dishonor. On the Japanese side how many would have died? Best guesses say millions both military and civilian. One must remember that more people died in the fire bombing raids on Tokyo then at either bomb site. The real tragedy of it all was that it was surely nescesary and the legacy it left of Nuclear proliferation that was to become it's bastard child. War is never good. Some may be just but most, as is our current involvement, our the schemings of old men with old ideoligies and political views not borne of the public sentement. Iraq was not nescesary, I beleive that. I do support the men fighting it as they are just doing what every good soldier does and pledges to do to hold up our countrys policies whenever asked without question and for that our Armed Forces our second to none, they have never failed to go when called upon even when the cause is subject to suspicion. The war on terror is the real enemy. OBL and Al-Qaida and religious extremism is where we should have focused our military and intelligence strengths. Now that we are there we have to finish the job as we have created a state where the line between democracy and an extremist society sympathetic to the cause of Jihad in the name of extremist Islam interpretation. Hiroshima and Nagasaki will always be debated but one must remeber in those debates to put oneself back into the time and place the decision was made. What were the options available. Though Japan was secretly making overtures of surrender they wanted to do it on thier terms. The Emperor was in favor of it but the military was not and the military not the emperor were the ones who were in the drivers seat. They needed to be persuaded. The world had already seen the deaths of over twenty million people in the period between 1939 and August 1945 and the world was weary of the death and destruction. Innocent people paid more heavily than all the military personal involved. Civilian deaths were near twenty to one over military casualties. It had to stop. The two bombs, and the threat of more, stopped it. It had to be and I, and a lot of you, would not be here if it did not stop then and there.
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