I dunno, man. I recognize that it's the fashionable thing to say these days but my grandfather was a machine shop foreman at Pickatinny Arsenal during WWII and a machine shop foreman at Los Alamos National Labs after WWII. He loved regaling us with stories of the throttle detents on a B-29 made of copper wire that, if broken, allow you to throttle the things into "get me the fuck outta here and go ahead and shitcan the pistons in 15 minutes" mode. He enjoyed telling stories about the acetate discs they put in bomb timers that would be eroded by acetic acid slowly so that depending in the discs, the bombs would go off an hour, a day, a week or a month (or some combination thereof) after the bomb hit while meanwhile, a mercury switch kept you from moving the bomb. Unless you had Jews, of course. The Nazis just used Jews.

He enjoyed telling tales of "Little David", the 36-inch mortar they were working on where the shell was keyed into the lands of the gun barrel to reduce friction, an 80-ton siege engine with a six-mile range intended to take Japan one trench at a time.

American forces had spent ten months with kamikaze attacks by August 1945. Toland describes a lot of fatalism and misunderstanding in the runup to Pearl Harbor; the US mistranslated some secret cables so that they sounded a lot more aggressive than they actually were and the Japanese didn't understand how lenient we actually were about Manchuria. I had an interesting discussion once with a girl whose grandparents were wiped out in Hiroshima. We came around to the viewpoint that the first bomb could be justified but the second one couldn't. But then, I was a lot younger then and a lot more jaded.

We're still using Purple Hearts manufactured ahead of Operation Downfall.

The Battle of Okinawa was one of the bloodiest in the Pacific, with an estimated total of over 82,000 direct casualties on both sides: 14,009 Allied deaths and 77,417 Japanese soldiers. Allied grave registration forces counted 110,071 dead bodies of Japanese soldiers, but this included conscripted Okinawans wearing Japanese uniforms. 149,425 Okinawans were killed, committed suicide or went missing which was one-half of the estimated pre-war local population of 300,000. The Battle resulted in 72,000 US casualties in 82 days, of whom 12,510 were killed or missing (this figure excludes the several thousand US soldiers who died after the battle indirectly, from their wounds). The entire island of Okinawa is 464 sq mi (1,200 km2). If the US casualty rate during the invasion of Japan had been only 5% as high per unit area as it was at Okinawa, the US would still have lost 297,000 soldiers (killed or missing).

Was it Judt who argued that WWII was the direct consequence of the lack of unconditional surrender in WWI? Yeah, a warning shot to Stalin was probably part of it. But if I had a choice between doubling my war dead or nuking Japan until they rolled over forever, I'd fly the bomber myself.