We didn’t need to drop the bomb — and even our WW II military icons knew it

[Igel]

77. I've always been heartbroken over this and do think it was necessary.

This, sadly, is something that people wedded to extremes cannot easily fit into their thinking.

Now, we may disagree that it was necessary. There were undoubtedly hopes, projections, expectations that things would fold. People probably wanted those to be true. A blockade would cause surrender. At the last minute sanity would prevail. There's be an uprising. The Japanese were like us.

But there were plans for invasions of Kyushu and Honshu, and the loss of life was projected to be phenomenal in the typical case--not the best case, the most hoped for case. These were projections based on the assumption that the Japanese military would continue as they had in other cases when Japanese forces were surrounded with no hope of victory.

Because the Japanese were *not* like us. I look at teens in my classes, and they're often culturally distinct from me. Some kids are like me. It's when I assume they're all *like* me that things can go wrong.