What Is the U.S. Doing in Gaza?

Back in January 1945 the United States was entering the fourth year of fighting a world war on two fronts against Germany in Europe and Japan in the Pacific. We had 12 million troops under arms and total military casualties, killed and wounded were just short of the million mark.

The war in Europe dragged on for five months until May 7th, when Germany surrendered following Hitler’s suicide on April 30th in his bunker underneath the streets of Berlin.

Two months’ later, President Truman was told that there had been a successful test of an atomic bomb at Los Alamos, and the weapon might be ready for deployment within several months.

Truman was also told by his military advisors that an invasion of Japan might cost a million American casualties, and a naval blockade might need two years or even longer before Japan could no longer fight a war.

Truman’s decision to obliterate two Japanese cities — Hiroshima and Nagasaki — on August 6 and August 9 was based to some degree on what he had been told about the other military options, but ending the Pacific war immediately was also based on his political awareness that extending the fighting could mean a devastating loss for the Democrat(ic) Party at the mid-term election in 1946 and the Presidential election in 1948.