I most likely wouldn’t be alive if not for the Bomb - they were fixin’ to pull my dad from the victorious European campaign to invade Japan. Any idea how difficult that invasion would be? Remember Iwo Jima? Or virtually every other Pacific Island in WW2? Multiply it times 10 because it’s the homeland.
My father had already survived Guadalcanal and Peleliu. Guess where he was going next. I despise these stories.
Ditto. My father was a 19-year-old naval fighter pilot just out of flight school. His carrier was on its way to the Sea of Japan.
If Truman had refused to use the nukes and had instead sent thousands of American soldiers to die invading Japan he would have been impeached and likely imprisoned for treason.
Japan refused to surrender after we nuked Hiroshima, just like they refused to surrender after we had firebombed Tokyo to rubble. They only surrendered after we nuked Nagasaki and convinced them that we would continue to nuke Japanese cities every few days until they did (which we couldn't have actually done, since we had used up all of our nukes).
I was 13 when the bomb was dropped………the adults in my neighborhood were delighted because it ended the war.
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Same here. Who knows if they would have surrendered. My fathers PBY squadron had orders to deploy to Okinawa in preparation for the Invasion of Japan.
I, too, would likely never have been born were it not for the Nagasaki bombing. My dad’s POW camp, Fukuoka 17, was just across the bay from that explosion. As the prisoners looked up to see the plume, they imagined the biggest Japanese ammo dump that ever existed had just gotten hit.
It was in the first few days of 1946 that my dad appeared on his parents doorstep (unannounced). At first, they did not recognize the sickly, 44kg frame before them. That was even after a Thanksgiving and five months of having been restored to a reasonable diet, mostly on the Philippines.
If he had had to endure a few more months in the POW camp, he thought it likely he would not have come out alive.
To 7 My father-in-law was recovering from his third set of wounds on Iwo and preparing for the invasion of the Japanese mainland.
He told me that he knew he wouldn’t survive it.
My father was a standby ship out status to help supervise chemical weapons readiness in Australia if the Japanese used poison gas (which they had, especially in cyanide grenades, some of which were captured on the Pacific islands - I read the about them in military After Action Reports).
One of my older friends was on a medical ship heading towards Japan when the A Bombs were dropped. The ship turned around and headed back to Pearl Harbor.
A number of fathers of my friends survived Iwo. Some would not have survived the invasion of Japan, and would have deprived America of the next generation of patriotic Americans.
We are still here fighting against our leftist enemies on the Homeland, carrying on what our fathers, relatives and friends did in WW2. Otherwise we would be “Living in the United Soviet States of America”.
MM - S. Vietnam/Cambodia war journalist, on our side. Son-in-law, Kosovo and Desert Storm (combat wounded) and my son, Operation Iraqi Freedom and US Federal Police Officer.