Many years ago I was prompted to re-establish contact with one of my college professors after he published a letter to the editor of the local paper castigating the US for its use of the atomic bomb against Japan in WWII.

We had a pleasant correspondence for several years after that, during which I became firmly convinced that this professor a) meant well, and b) was completely clueless about the world.

He simply could not fathom that there could have been a more horrific outcome than what actually happened in history, when the A-bombs killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese.

Today I read an article by a professor not nearly as addled in the head as my friend was — Professor Paul Kengor of Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania.  It’s well worth your time to read it, too.

Anyone who has the faintest idea of what happened on Tarawa, New Guinea, Iwo Jima or Okinawa (to name but a few of the pinpricks of land in the south Pacific that the Japanese fought ferociously for, often to the last man) has no doubt that what Professor Kengor says is true.  (As he points out, even the Japanese at the time knew and admitted that it was so.)

My professor friend is gone now.  Thanks to many thousands of young men who lost their lives on those island in the south Pacific, he was able to spout his peacenik nonsense in complete freedom, right to his dying day.  (It’s one of the great, if sometimes trying, aspects of our American liberty.)  And thanks to Harry Truman, countless thousands of other young men — on both sides — were spared the horrific end suffered by so very many of their fellows in arms.