The invasion of Japan. Two versions.

With the surrender of Nazi Germany in May, 1945, the Allies turned their full attention to the Pacific theater. The U.S. began transferring troops from Europe.

The war in the Pacific, for the U.S., had been going on since the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor in late 1941, and longer than that for the British and French. Many great sea battles had been fought.  Many losses had been endured by the Allied forces. The struggle had been painstakingly slow, fighting from island to island.

In the spring of 1945, the home islands of Japan herself remained to be taken to end the war. The invasion of Japan was planned for the spring of 1946. The planning of "Operation Downfall" (the actual invasion of the home islands of Japan) had been going on for some time. The early casualty estimates for the invasion were set at 130,000 to 220,000, of which the American death total was expected to be 25,000 to 46,000. However, after the battle for Okinawa, the U.S. realized the Japanese intended to fight to the death for the home islands, and the casualty figures were revised drastically.

2.3 million Japanese Soldiers were being set in place to defend the Japanese homeland. There were another 4 million Army and Navy employees which would be militarized. Finally, there were 28 million Japanese civilian militia, both men and women, who were preparing to die for their country. No surrender was contemplated.

The new casualty estimates for the invasion jumped to a more realistic 1.4 million to 4 million for the Allied invaders, up to 800,000 dead. As many as 20,000,000 Japanese casualties were predicted by the Imperial Japanese General staff, due to the entire population intending to fight to the death for their emperor. The allies put Japanese casualties at 5 to 10 million. Nobody really knew, of course. It was scary. Preposterous unfathomable numbers.
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July 16, 1945, 0500.

Scientists and military men huddled in bunkers 10 miles distant from a metal tower with an odd-looking device, referred to only as "the gadget,"  hanging at the top of the tower.

0500:29: The New Mexico desert suddenly becomes as bright as noonday. Every rock and crevice of the nearby mountains is clearly visible. Even inside the distant bunkers, the heat is like an oven.

The military code name for the test of the device was "Trinity."

Dr. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the scientists in the bunker. As the odd mushroom cloud climbs higher and higher, a line from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture, runs through his mind.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
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And so it came to pass that millions and millions of Japanese lives were spared; there was to be no invasion of the Japanese homeland by a slow and horrendous ground war. The Allied estimate of their own invasion casualties was revised downward from 4 million to zero.

In the end, out of great horror and still unspeakable death, came, for millions and millions, mercy of a sort.

But the genie is still out of the bottle.

Adolf Hitler: Patriot? German Teabagger? Or simply your average monster?

If this gets too long, I will stop and do another post later.

I had intended to do a "time line" post on the space shuttle Columbia in this space, but that can wait until I get riled up again about it.

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There is a debate of sorts going on about Adolf Hitler, between a reader of this blog and myself, but I sincerely hope the debate is joined by other readers with an interest in history after this post; I need some fresh input.

The debate stems from two different interests. My own is mostly my deep interest in history, and her interest MAY stem from an interest in the character development of fictional villains. She can speak for herself. Either way, there is a debate regarding the motivations and circumstances of Adolf Hitler; we speculate on why he turned out like he did. If any of you would like to add to the debate, or mention things I have left out, I hope you will.

For my part, I am trying to put forward and support a theory that Adolf Hitler's rise to power, or his DESIRE to rise to power in Germany, was, originally, at least, more to restore or rescue Germany from its national humiliation from its defeat in World War One, than it was some sort of deranged megalomania or superman complex.

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This is one of those subjects that, when you try to find the root causes of this or that part of his personality, you find yourself having to go further and further back in his history. I wanted to find a starting point later than simply his birth. I would have liked to start at the beginning of WWII and simply say Hitler was a German nationalist who hated Jews, but how can you make statements like that without offering some background? After all, it was trying to come up with the backgrounds that makes a "villain" either merely a bad person or a truly evil person that started this debate in the first place.

I think there are 4 points that need to be considered if we are to understand what underlying forces and beliefs drove Hitler, and I don't think being a big man in the eyes of others had much to do with it. I don't think one can kill 6 million people - and many millions more when you count the people killed in the actual fighting - simply because one is on a power trip, or because he was beaten by his father as a child.

1. German nationalism.

2. Hatred of Jews.

3. His interest in war and things military.

4. How - no matter what his beliefs - could such an insignificant person rise to national power.

A few of the things I am going to assert in my assessment of his beliefs, motivations, and his rise to power come simply from Wikipedia articles, but mostly I relied on biographies and "expert" analyses of historians (there are dozens), both online and in my personal library. My historical facts regarding the earlier events leading up to WWI come from C. L. Sulzberger's magnificent account detailing the end of the imperial era, "The Fall of Eagles."

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I'm going to stop here at the end of my introduction.