This has nothing to do with this site, but I found it interesting and thought you might too.

I was talking to a friend last night and we got onto military service. During WWII he was on Saipan involved with the writing of battle orders. One morning everyone was called in and told that something big was going to happen. Several hours later the pictures taken over Hiroshima arrived.

In case the bomb had not worked, the military was already implementing their contingency plan. There were no ships in the Pacific at the time. They were all on the east and west coasts of the US being loaded with the invasion forces targetting mainland Japan.

52,000 Americans died in the Pacific war and 300,000 Americans died in all of World War II. Expected casualties for the Japanese invasion were in the area of 1 million men, and that was just on the American side. I had heard this number before. I had also heard that this number was an invention of those justifying the atomic bombs and far fewer would have died. Well, that number was real and so were each and every man making up that number.

How many of us would not be alive today if the bombs had not worked and our father or grandfather had gotten on one of those ships?