| Okinawa. That was more than were killed at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Newsweek’s pushover scenario, which would have had Japan defeated in 9o days, would be funny if it were not so sick. Winston Churchill’s estimate to the House of Commons would have had the war with Japan ending in 1946 and the Pentagon’s estimate was that Japan might even hold out until 1947. Not only was there a Japanese army which had proven its toughness and skill on many a battlefield, there were 5,000 kamikaze planes ready for suicide attacks on Americans invading their homeland. If these planes managed to take out just 5 Americans each, they alone would have killed more troops than those in Newsweek’s rosy scenario. Japan’s civilian population, including children, were also being mobilized and trained in suicide attacks on enemy troops and tanks. It would have been one of the great bloodbaths of all time. Of course Japan could have been defeated without the atomic bomb. But at what cost in lives of people killed in other ways and in larger numbers? The other tack taken by the revisionist historians is to say that Japan was “ready to surrender” before the atomic bombs were dropped. The most obvious question is: Why didn’t they do it, then? Indeed, why didn’t they do it after Hiroshima was bombed, and thereby spare Nagasaki? Whatever negotiations may have been going on behind the scenes, surrender was by no means a done deal. Even after both cities had been |
national cemetery where each grave was decorated with a small American flag, all blowing in the breeze, while larger flags flew in the background. The peaceful beauty of the sunny scene could not hide the grim reality of endless rows of gravestones of American soldiers and sailors. “There is the price of freedom,” I thought. And I turned into the cemetery. There were not very many people there, perhaps not nearly as many as there should have been. I had no one buried in this cemetery but I knew that I would not be alive today if it were not for those who were buried beneath the flags and the headstones. At the first place where I stopped to take a picture, there were two gravestones near each other with the same year of birth and the same year of death-a sergeant and a lieutenant, both born in 1921 and both dead in 1944. These young lives that had been snuffed out in the carnage of war were responsible for my still being aliveand free. Had Hitler won, I would long ago have been just a wisp of smoke coming out of a chimney in some concentration camp. As I was trying to decide what lenses and films to use, an elderly couple-Asian, as it happened-came by with much deeper things on their minds. They were carrying flowers to one of the graves. Here and there in the sea of gravestones, there were other people, usually in small groups, gathered |
