Although the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor caught us off guard, not all American military planners were surprised. As far back as the 1920s some officers warned that the Japanese were to be our next enemy and that an attack on our Navy at a place like Pearl Harbor was inevitable. In 1924, Army Bri...

FIVE PAST MIDNIGHT By James Thayer Towards the end of WWII, Theodore Roosevelt was having a meeting on how he could end the war. Director of the Office of Strategic Services (William Donovan) was summing up the war in 3 sentences. First, each and every day the war continued in Europe, 27,...

On August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb, "little boy" on Hiroshima, Japan. Hiroshima had been almost eradicated with an estimated 70-80,000 people killed. Three days later, a second, more powerful bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing over 100...

Catch-22: A Study in Post-War Attitudes by Chris Nicholson In 1961, Joseph Heller published Catch-22, his first novel. Based on his own war experiences, the novel wickedly satirized bureaucracy, patriotism, and all manner of traditional American ideals. This was reflective of the increas...

During the peak of WWII, if I were in President Truman's position, I would have deployed the atomic bombs against Japan. Considering the moral and strategic-political perspectives, as well as a great deal of pressure from government officials, there was not much of a choice except to use an unteste...