America at War: The War Ends in the Pacific

Bombing Japan.

Shortly after the success of American troops in Normandy, U.S. long-range bombers began to pummel the Japanese mainland. In October MacArthur returned to the Philippines as he had promised, and in March U.S. Marines completed the capture of Iwo Jima in the bloodiest fighting in the Pacific up to that time. The raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi after the Iwo Jima campaign became the symbol of American triumph. Yet even worse fighting took place in June on Okinawa, the gateway to the Japanese home islands, where some 13,000 Americans and 100,000 Japanese lost their lives. So savage was the fighting in the last months of the Pacific War that troops in the field came to fear that a presumed invasion of Japan proper would cost the United States a million casualties, dwarfing the losses at Normandy the year before. The need to avoid such shocking losses became the overriding concern in the official rationale for what...

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