An Analysis Of Richard Winters 'Operation Downfall'

By the midsummer of 1945 the American military was drained, and the sheer number of troops needed for Operation Downfall meant that not only would the troops in the Pacific must make one more landing, but even many of those troops whose valor and sacrifice had brought an end to the Nazi Third Reich were to be sent Pacific. In his 2006 memoir, former 101st Airborne battalion commander Richard Winters reflected on the state of his men as they played baseball in the summer of 1945 in occupied Austria (Winters became something of a celebrity after his portrayal in the extremely popular 2001 HBO series Band of Brothers): During the baseball games when the men were stripped to their waists, or wearing only shorts, the sight of all those battle scars

Supporters of the bomb wonder if it was reasonable to ask even more sacrifice of these men. Since these veterans are the men whose lives (or wholeness) were, by this argument, saved by the bomb, it is relevant to survey their thoughts on the matter, as written in various war memoirs going back to the 1950s. The record is mixed. For example, despite Winters’ observation above, he seemed to have reservations about the bomb: “Three days later, on August 14, Japan surrendered. Apparently the atomic bomb carried as much punch as a regiment of paratroopers. It seemed inhumane for our national leaders to employ either weapon on the human race.” His opinion is not shared by other members of Easy Company, some of whom published their own memoirs after the interest generated by Band of Brothers. William “Wild Bill” Guarnere expressed a very blunt opinion about the bomb in 2007: We were on garrison duty in France for about a month, and in August, we got great news: we weren't going to the Pacific. The U.S. dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, the Japanese surrendered, and the war was over. We were so relieved. It was the greatest thing that could have

The Japanese should have stayed out of it if they didn't want bombs dropped. The end of the war was good news to us. We knew we were going home soon. Those soldiers with extensive combat experience in the Pacific theater and with first-hand knowledge of Japanese resistance also express conflicting thoughts about the bomb. All of them write of the relief and joy they felt upon first hearing the news. William Manchester, in Goodbye, Darkness: a Memoir of the Pacific War, wrote, “You think of the lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan's home islands—a staggering number of American lives but millions more of Japanese—and you thank God for the atomic bomb.” But in preparation for writing his 1980 memoir, when Manchester visited Tinian, the small Pacific island from which the Hiroshima mission was launched, he reflected on the "global angst" that Tinian represents. He writes that while the battle to take Tinian itself was relatively easy, "the aftermath was ominous." It was also from Tinian that napalm was dropped on Japanese cities, which Manchester describes as "one of the cruelest instruments of war." Manchester continues: This is where the nuclear shadow first