Photo Credit: najla al7rewiel

More than 98% of my relatives were murdered during WWII. If the Allies had only bombed the concentration camps, more of them would have survived. As I noted in my article But Churchill Did Allow Torture: "There are times when doing the vile, wrong, immoral thing is the kind, right, moral action. For example, the Allies could have bombed Auschwitz. Sure, tens of thousands of innocent Jewish lives would have been lost; on the other hand it would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives."

Were I alive in early 1942, knowing what I know now, I would have demanded that America bomb all the camps holding Jews. I am not one of those idiots who would prefer that millions die as long as we hold the moral high ground.

There are Japanese who feel the same way about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japanese heroes, in fact. Mitsuo Fuchida is the pilot who led the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese hold him in such high esteem that he's called God's Samurai. After the war he told Paul Tibbetts, the pilot of the Enola Gay, 'You did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude of that time, how fanatic they were. They'd die for the Emperor.... Every man, woman, and child would have resisted the invasion with sticks and stones, if necessary...'

Why would he say this about more than 200,000 of his own countrymen who were killed? The truth is, Mitsuo Fuchida knew something that many Americans and almost all Muslims do not know.

It was in fact the ultimate act of kindness that we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Let me explain why.

During the last seven months of the war the US firebombed 67 Japanese cities, killing more than twice as many civilians as died in the atomic bomb attacks. And Japan did not surrender.

More Japanese died from a conventional air attack in one day than were killed in Nagasaki. The date was 9 March 1945. 334 B-29s dropped around 1,700 tons of bombs on the city of Tokyo destroying 16 square miles of the city and killing more than 100,000 Japanese. It was the most destructive and deadly conventional bombing raid of any kind in terms of lives lost, in all of military aviation history. And Japan did not surrender. The Japanese continued to lose a Nagasaki worth of people through conventional bombing attacks in April, May, June, July and early August of 1945 and still - Japan did not surrender.

For five months after Japan lost 100,00 people that day and 400,000 more people afterwards Japan did not surrender.

58% of Yokohama , 51% of Tokyo, 99% of Toyama, 55% of Kobe, 50% of Wakayama, 68% of Okayama, 63% of Kagoshima, 63% of Imabari, 64% of Matsuyama, 86% of Fukui, 85% of Tokushima, 65% of Hachioji, 56% of Isesaki, 67% of Takamatsu, 80% of Fukuyama, 63% of Gifu, 66% of Shizuoka, 55% of Kōchi, 56% of Ichinomiya, 69% of Nara and Tsu, 75% of Kuwana, 61% of Toyohashi, 78% of Kofu, 68% of Mito, 65% of Tsuruga, 64% of Nagaoka, 72% of Hitachi, 55% of Kumagaya, 60% of Hamamatsu, 64% of Maebashi were destroyed between March and August of 1945 along with a few dozen other cities I do not have the energy to include, and still - Japan did not surrender.

The US could have continued killing 100,000 Japanese a month for another year or two and they would not have surrendered. The only thing left was a land invasion which would have killed millions more on both sides.

Every man, woman, and child would have resisted the invasion with sticks and stones, if necessary.

Some of my Muslim readers, not knowing a damn thing about non-Islamic history, like to leave comments calling the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the greatest terrorist act in history. But if God's Sumurai, the hero who coordinated the entire aerial attack that started the war and who was present at the end of the war, if he believes we did the right thing, who are Muslims, who were not there, to argue with him?