“It was just hell, there’s nothing like it!” said a survivor of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. One cannot begin to imagine the horror of that time and that place. Oddly, I have heard almost the same thing spoken by survivors of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — without which it is doubtful that atomic bombs would have been used, doubtful that the United States would have been at war with Japan — “It was just plain hell, I’d never seen anything like it!”

By Aug. 6, 1945, how many American troops had already received secret orders to invade Japan, how many lives from each side would have been lost, how many bodies irreparably maimed, had the planned invasion taken place? Instead of the invasion, the atomic bombs were dropped.

Yes, the bombs were destructive beyond anything the world had known, but what country started the war? When we feel sorrow (as we should) for those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during a declared war, when we weep for the suffering survivors, we would do well to remember those victims who died at Pearl Harbor, and those who were tortured and killed in Japanese concentration camps. Lois M. Reed Carmel