Sorry Jim but I thought you wrote that the Japanese had already decided to execute the prisoners, that the thing that saved them was the fact that they were protected from the blast of the bomb due to the fact that they were in the act of digging their own mass grave. I would therefore think it not only likely but highly probable that had the bomb not been dropped those POWs would have been executed as ordered - don't you? - or did you think that the Camp Commandant was only kidding when he ordered the prisoners to dig their own grave?