Ten thousand feet. Oxygen on.

Someone today over coffee opined that had we not dropped the bomb and gotten the Japanese to surrender that we may very well have simply taken enough casualties invading the mainland that we might have opted for a negotiated peace.

Interesting point.

While the island hopping campaign was an inarguable victory, we never did tangle with the million plus man army the Japanese had in Manchuria, not to mention that the people of Japan were arming themselves with whatever was available.

EIther way, win, lose or draw for the United States it would have been a total bloodbath. WHen you think about it you thank God for the bomb.

I remember a now dead neighbor telling me how he joined the Navy near the end of the war and was being sent to Pharmacist Mate's school but the program closed after the bomb fell. He was sent to the Pacific as a young non-rate and worked as a basic deck hand on a boat that was hauling GIs back to the States and then Japanese back to Japan.

He told me he had always been disappointed that the Navy didn't train him to be a pharmacist mate. WHen he said that I floored him by pointing out that he was more than likely going to be sent in with the Marines for the invasion of Japan.

He replied that he was in the Navy and I asked him where the Marines got their medical people. He opened his eyes wide when I pointed out that Doc Bradley, the sailor that was thought for years to be an Iwo Jima flagraiser had been a Navy medico assigned to a rifle company.

Over sixty years after the fact he paled and when he got his ability to talk back spat out, "Thank God for the bomb!"



To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY