I know the Germans gave the P47 the nickname "Jabo" (forget the rest of it and what it means) because they hate it.
Mitsuo Fuchida, IJN Pilot who led the Pearl Harbor attacks, told Paul Tibbets "You did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude at that time, how fanatic they were, they'd die for the Emperor...Every man, woman, and child would have resisted that invasion with sticks and stones if necessary...Can you imagine what a slaughter it would be to invade Japan? It would have been terrible. The Japanese people know more about that than the American public will ever know." Secretary of State James Byrnes (the atom bombs did not cause) "Nearly so many deaths as there would have been had our air force continued to drop incendiary bombs on Japan's cities" NOTE: In March 1945, Curtis had dropped 13,800 tons of incindairy bombs on Japan, he had planned for more than 115,000 by September "Evacuate Now!" Message on leaflets dropped on Hiroshima on August 4th Curtis LeMay "Hiroshima brought no instantaneous prostration of the Japanese military. We were still piling on the incendiearies. Our B-29's went to Yawata on August 8th, and burned up 21% of the town, and on the same day some other 29's went to Fukuyama and burned up 73.3%. Still there wasn't any gasp and collapse when the second nuclear bomb went down above Nagasaki on August 9th. We kept on flying." William Manchester, Marine veteran and historian "You think of the lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan's home islands - a staggering number of Americans but millions more of Japanese - and you thank God for the atomic bomb." U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey "The atomic bomb at Hiroshima was the equivalent of 220 fully loaded B-29's. Accordingly, a single atomic explosion represented no oder-of-magnitude increase in destructiveness over a conventional air raid." General Yoshijiro Umezu, on August 10th, after the Nagasaki raid "With luck, we will repulse the invaders before they land." General Anami, refering to the Potsdam Proclamation, on August 10th "Who can be 100% sure of defeat? We certainly can't swallow this proclamation." Paul Fussell, WW2 veteran "The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific War."
