Promised Land; Saving GIs’ Lives
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Aside from deploring President Harry Truman’s innocuous anti-Semitism -- which, fortunately, was belied by his acts -- letter writer K.V. Bapa Rao has history completely backward (July 22). The Jews did not “colonize” Palestine; they were there eons before the Arabs. A national home for the Jewish people in Palestine was promised to them by the British foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, way back in 1917.
And after Japan’s execrable record of treachery and cruelty in World War II, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were eminently justified if they saved the life of even one American GI -- never mind “a few thousand.”
Marvin H. Leaf
Marina del Rey
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Rao writes that President Truman unleashed atomic weapons against Japan “for the ostensible purpose of preventing the deaths of a few thousand American GIs” in an invasion of that country.
Even the most jaded observers at the time estimated a minimum of 500,000 American casualties, with many placing the figure at 1 million or higher.
Jim Byrne
Long Beach
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