I can't sspeak to the disaster of Singapore or the valiant efforts of the Australians on the Malay Peninsula or even the death march of Bataan. I wasn't there. But I was on Guadalcanal, involved in something that history has recorded as 'The Long Patrol': a thirty day patrol behind japanese lines from Aola Bay to Mt. Austen to the Marine perimeter defending Henderson Field. I saw the butchery of the Japanese at first hand: wounded Marines slaughtered, their corpses profaned and desecrated for no human reason. Later it was our turn and the closest we came to committing an atrocity (if war itself is not enough of an atrocity) was to kill the patients of a field hospital attached to a supply depot. Men on a battlefield who see their comrades die are not civilized men, free to invoke the high moral principles that are often the subject of philosophical debate. The only civilized men on a battlefield are those who are dead.

As to the atom bombs, had they not been dropped the ultimate loss of JAPANESE life during the inevitable invasion of japan would have mounted into the hundreds of thousands. (Many more than were killed at Hiroshimaa and Nagasaki) And an invasion would have cost uncountable Allied losses as well. War is hell, as the general said, and unless you have participated in it, don't moralize too much about it. The important thing to recognize is that our official language is still english and a lot of good men and more than a few women of different nationalities died to keep it that way.

Spud