Swords Into Plowshares

There can be no doubt that the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki hastened the end of the war. Again volumes have been written on the subject and the chance of saying something new is remote.

The decision to drop the bomb was made by the man with a sign on his desk that read "The Buck Stops Here." The choice has been defended on the grounds that it saved many American lives. One could still ask, in the eyes of God are American lives more valuable than Japanese lives? I suppose not, but Truman was not engaged in abstract ethical philosophy, he was Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces and as such he was committed, as we all were, to winning the war.

So we will have to bear the onus of being the only country in the world to have used nuclear weapons in a war. If the Nazis had had the bomb first we would probably all be speaking German.

What if we had not used the bomb and had to invade the Japanese Islands the way we hit the beaches in Normandy? We would no doubt have softened up the islands with waves of heavy bombers for a long time before going ashore. Instead of two cities in Japan being destroyed they would have all been leveled at the cost, I suspect, of millions of Japanese lives.

A sad aspect of the aftermath, however, is that people died of radiation for years after the hostilities had ceased. We might not have known that this would happen when we dropped the bomb and if we had lost a son or a husband on Iwo Jima or Corregidor we might not have cared.

Hiroshima as revenge for Pearl Harbor hardly satisfies the Christian conscience but I told you I couldn't think of anything new.

Meanwhile back at Camp Bowie we kept on training as if our commanders were not listening to the radio (TV had been invented but was not available). We had a .50 caliber machine gun practice, antiaircraft fire, classes, rifle range, guard duty, and it was l05° on August 19th. It seemed like forever but actually the war's end probably caught everybody by surprise and the paper shuffling was done with better than average dispatch.

Not many of the enlisted men in the 275th had enough points to be discharged right away. One accumulated points for time in the service with double time if there was overseas service. So they shipped us to various posts around the country which were whatever is the opposite of a reception center. As I mentioned earlier I went to Fort Lewis, Washington along with Donald Hermann and John Borkowski from A Battery. There could have been some more. I have no idea where the rest went.

Records show that the 275th Armored Field Artillery Battalion was inactivated on 8 September 1945, and it might never have been heard of again if indefatigable Dave Cleary had not had a vision of bringing old comrades in arms back together again. That is another story and a long one too.

What happened to Jimmy Cricket? He was one heck of a fighter for a little guy. But the war was over so he discarded his armor and went back to California. The last we heard he was living happily ever after in Disneyland.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

DeLoyd Cooper is the Historian for the 275th Armored Field Artillery Battalion Association.
Copyright © 1999 DeLoyd Cooper. All rights reserved.
Revised: November 4, 2004