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Nagasaki

In the spring of 1945, American bombing raids destroyed much of Tokyo and dozens of other Japanese cities, killing at least 200,000 people, without forcing a surrender.

Editor’s Note: David Dean Barrett is a military historian, specializing in World War II.
Kimberly Miller Hill has sent us a photo taken, she writes, “… on or shortly after V-J Day, showing a uniquely American depiction of confidence and might. The ‘quarterback’ holds aloft a symbol of destruction, which, in subsequent years, caused controversy riddled with complexity.

Stationed near Nagasaki at the close of the war, a young photographer ventured into the devastated city and stayed for months.

Truman was Commander in Chief of the American armed forces, and he had a duty to the men under his command that simply was not shared by those sitting in moral judgment decades later.

On the morning of August 6, 1945, the American B-29 Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later another B-29, Bock’s Car, released one over Nagasaki.
My wife and I visited Corregidor last December. Some 50 other tourists boarded the big, enclosed hydrofoil with us for the trip across Manila Bay. Perhaps half our fellow passengers were Filipinos, a quarter Americans and Europeans, and the rest Japanese.

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