find peaceful resolutions

Prophets have foreseen our day, when there would be wars and rumors of wars and when the whole earth would be in commotion. As followers of Jesus Christ, we plead with leaders of nations to find peaceful resolutions to their differences. We call upon people everywhere to pray for those in need, to do what they can to help the distressed, and to seek the Lord’s help in ending any major conflicts.

Russell M. Nelson

"Preaching the Gospel of Peace" General Conference April 2022

thank god for the atomic bomb

Few people now reflect that samurai swords killed more people in WWII that atomic bombs. WWII veteran Paul Fussell wrote, "The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific War.

Marine veteran and historian William Manchester wrote, "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."

Winston Churchill told Parliament that the people who preferred invasion to dropping the atomic bomb seemed to have "no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves.

James Bradley

Flyboys: A True Story of Courage. Little, Brown. 2003. 

a good second guesser

Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants. In my travels, I sense a smoldering resentment towards WWII Japanese behavior among some Americans. Ironically, these feelings are strongest among the younger American generation that did not fight in WWII. In my experience, the Pacific vets on both sides have made their peace. And in terms of judgments, I will leave it to those who were there. As Ray Gallagher, who flew on both atomic missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki argues, "When you're not at war you're a good second guesser. You had to live those years and walk that mile.

James Bradley

Flyboys: A True Story of Courage. Little, Brown. 2003. 

war is the tragedy of what might have been

The Flyboy who got away became president of the United States. What might have been for Warren Earl, Dick, Marve, Glenn, Floyd, Jimmy, the unidentified airman, and all the Others who had lost their lives?...And what might have been for those millions of doomed Japanese boys, abused and abandoned by their leaders? War is the tragedy of what might have been.

James Bradley

Flyboys: A True Story of Courage. Little, Brown. 2003. 

he saw heralds of his doom

Standing there, watching them, it occurred to me that when Hitler watched Joe and the boys fight their way back from the rear of the field to sweep ahead of Italy and Germany seventy-five years ago, he saw, but did not recognize, heralds of his doom. He could not have known that one day hundreds of thousands of boys just like them, boys who shared their essential natures—decent and unassuming, not privileged or favored by anything in particular, just loyal, committed, and perseverant—would return to Germany dressed in olive drab, hunting him down.

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown. Penguin Books. 2013

hate multiplies hate

Why should we love our enemies?... Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says "Love your enemies," he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. 

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr. Harper & Row. 1963. Fortress Press Gift Edition 2010. p. 47

death is the enemy

How can any of us be cruel to one another? How are wars possible, and hate, when we must all face such things? Death is the enemy, and life itself is inimical, for all its bounty. We must hold one another close against the cosmic perils.

Majorie Kinnan Rawlings

Cross Creek. 1942. Mockingbird Books Inc. p.259

simple people bear the weight of the world

It is not the multitude that serve and save the world but the righteous remnant that walk humbly before God. For the sake of ten the Lord was willing to spare Sodom, but they could not be found. (See Genesis 18:32.) Zarahemla narrowly escaped the fate of Sodom because of the few who were righteous. “Yea, wo unto this great city of Zarahemla; for behold, it is because of those who are righteous that it is saved…. Behold, if it were not for the righteous who are in this great city, behold, I would cause that fire should come down out of heaven and destroy it.” (Helaman 13:12-13.) 

Today as in the past God withholds his dreadful judgment for the sake of his Saints. The nations are not preserved by armaments and the threat of war, nor by economic power and technology. Before the God who made all things, these things are as reeds in the wind. The destroying angels are kept from their work by the lives of unknown people “who seek not for riches but for wisdom” (Doctrine and Covenants 6:7) and who try each day to serve the Lord….

Simple people bear the weight of the world.

The Lord’s Question: Thoughts on the Life of Response by Dennis Rasmussen. Brigham Young University Press. April 1985. Chapter Four, “Whom Shall I Send?” p.42, 43

Ambassador Satch

On a 1960 tour of the emergent African nations, jointly financed by the State Department and Pepsi-Cola, the All Stars arrived in the middle of the civil war in the former Belgian Congo, now Congo. [Arvell] Shaw said: “We landed at Leopoldville four days after Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. Both sides came together to the concert and enjoyed it and as soon as we left they started in again shooting at each other. The American ambassador said: “Louis, if we had you all the time there wouldn’t be no war.” That’s how he got the name Ambassador Satch.

Armstrong by David Bradbury. Haus Publishing. 2003. p.117

go off to fight a guy by the name of Adolf

When I was eighteen, Uncle Sam told me he'd like me to put on a uniform and go off to fight a guy by the name of Adolf. So I did.


Alan's War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope by Emmanuel Guibert, 2008.

not fought a war

The Swiss have not fought a war for nearly five hundred years, and are determined to know how so as not to.


La place de la concorde suisse by John McPhee. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984. p. 3

dulled by constant foulness

Mac, our mortar section leader, was nowhere to be seen. But Duke, who had been our section leader on Peleliu and who was by then leading the battalion’s 81mm mortar platoon, came up to take charge. He ordered an NCO to have us dig two-man foxholes five yards apart along the crest of the ridge. My buddy went off down the ridge to draw ammo and chow while I prepared to dig.

The ridge was about a hundred feet high, quite steep, and we were on a narrow crest. Several discarded Japanese packs, helmets, and other gear lay scattered along the crest. From the looks of the muddy soil, the place had been shelled heavily for a long time. The ridge was a putrid place. Our artillery must have killed Japanese there earlier, because the air was foul with the odor of rotting flesh. It was just like being back at Half Moon Hill. Off toward our front, to the south, I had only a dim view through the gathering gloom and curtain of rain of the muddy valley below.
The men digging in on both sides of me cursed the stench and the mud, I began moving the heavy, sticky clay mud with my entrenching shovel to shape out the extent of the foxhole before digging deeper. Each shovelful had to be knocked off the spade, because it stuck like glue. I was thoroughly exhausted and thought my strength wouldn’t last from one stick shovelful to the next.

Kneeling on the mud, I had dug the hole no more than six or eight inches deep when the odor of rotting flesh got worse. There was nothing to do but continue to dig, so I closed my mouth and inhaled with short shallow breaths. Another spadeful of soil out of the hole released a mass of wriggling maggots that came welling up as though those beneath were pushing them out. I cursed, and told the NCO as he came by what a mess I was digging into.

“You heard him, he said put the holes five yards apart.”

In disgust, I drove the spade into the soil, scooped out the insects, and threw them down the front of the ridge. The next stroke of the spade unearthed buttons and scraps of cloth from a Japanese army jacket buried in the mud – and another mass of maggots. I kept on doggedly. With the next thrust, metal hit the breastbone of a rotting Japanese corpse. I gazed down in horror and disbelief as the metal scraped a clean track through the mud along the dirty whitish bone and cartilage with ribs attached. The shovel skidded into the rotting abdomen with a squishing sound. The odor nearly overwhelmed me as I rocked back on my heels.

I began choking and gagging as I yelled in desperation, “I can’t dig in here! There’s a dead Nip here!”

The NCO came over, looked down at my problem and at me, and growled, “You heard him; he said put the holes five yards apart.”

“How the hell can I dig a foxhole through a dead Nip?” I protested.

Just then Duke came along the ridge and said, “What’s the matter, Sledgehammer?”

I pointed to the partially exhumed corpse. Duke immediately told the NCO to have me dig in a little to the side away from the rotting remains. I thanked Duke and glared at the NCO. How I managed not to vomit during that vile experience I don’t know. Perhaps my senses and nerves had been so dulled by constant foulness for so long that nothing could evoke any other response but to cry out and move back.



With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge. Presidio Press. 1981. p.276-278

the harvest of man's stupidity

Among the craters off the ridge to the west was a scattering of Marine corpses. Just beyond the right edge of the end foxhole, the ridge fell away steeply to the flat, muddy ground. Next to the base of the ridge, almost directly below me, was a partially flooded crater about three feet in diameter and probably three feet deep. In this crater was the body of a Marine whose grisly visage has remained disturbingly clear in my memory. If I close my eyes, he is as vivid as though I had seen him only yesterday.

The pathetic figure sat with his back toward the enemy and leaned against the south edge of the crater. His head was cocked, and his helmet rested against the side of the crater so that his face, or what remained of it, looked straight up at me. His knees were flexed and spread apart. Across his thighs, still clutched in his skeletal hands, was his rusting BAR. Canvas leggings were laced neatly along the sides of his calves and over his boondockers. His ankles were covered with muddy water, but the toes of his boondockers were visible above the surface. His dungarees, helmet, cover, and 782 gear appeared new. They were neither mud-spattered nor faded.

I was confident that he had been a new replacement. Every aspect of that big man looked much like a Marine “taking ten” on maneuvers before the order to move out again. He apparently had been killed early in the attacks against the Half Moon, before the rains began. Beneath his helmet brim I could see the visor of a green cotton fatigue cap. Under that cap were the most ghastly skeletal remains I had ever seen – and I had already seen too many.

Every time I looked over the edge of that foxhole down into that crater, that half-gone face leered up at me with a sardonic grin. It was as though he was mocking our pitiful efforts to hang on to life in the face of the constant violent death that had cut him down. Or maybe he was mocking the follow of the war itself: “I am the harvest of man’s stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust. I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can’t forget.”



With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge. Presidio Press. 1981. p.269,270

only the flies benefited

I had long since become used to the sight of blood, but the idea of sitting in that bloodstained gun pit was a bit too much for me. It seemed almost like leaving our dead unburied to sit on the blood of a fellow Marine spilled out on the coral. I noticed that my buddy looked approvingly at my efforts as he came back from getting orders for our gun. Although we never discussed the subject, he apparently felt as I did. As I looked at the stains on the coral, I recalled some of the eloquent phrases of politicians and newsmen about hoe “gallant” it is for a man to “shed his blood for his country,” and “to give his life’s blood as a sacrifice,” and so on. The words seemed so ridiculous. Only the flies benefited.


With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge. Presidio Press. 1981. p. 146

friendship was the only comfort a man had

A friend came over from one of the rifle platoons that was to be in the next day’s assault. We sat near the gun pit on our helmets in the mud and had a long talk. I lit my pipe and he a cigarette. Things were quiet in the area, so we were undisturbed for some time. He poured out his heart. He had come to me because of our friendship and because I was a veteran. He told me he was terribly afraid about the impending attack. I said everybody was. But I knew he would be in a more vulnerable position than some of us, because his platoon was in the assault. I did my best to cheer him up.

He was so appalled and depressed by the fighting of the previous day that he had concluded he couldn’t possibly survive the next day. He confided his innermost thoughts and secrets about his parents and a girl back home whom he was going to marry after the war. The poor guy wasn’t just afraid of death or injury – the idea that he might never return to those he loved so much had him in a state of near desperation.

I remembered how Lt. Hillbilly Jones had comforted and helped me through the first shock of Peleliu, and I tried to do the same for my friend. Finally he seemed somewhat relieved, or resigned to his fate, whatever it might be. We got up and shook hands. He thanked me for our friendship, then walked slowly back to his foxhole.

There was nothing unique in the conversation. Thousands like it occurred every day among infantrymen scheduled to enter the chaos and inferno of an attack. But it illustrates the value of camaraderie among men facing constant hardship and frequent danger. Friendship was the only comfort a man had.



With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge. Presidio Press. 1981. p.217, 218

but men were expected to keep going

My guess is that the 1st Tank Battalion was relieved not because the men were “badly depleted and debilitated” – the official reason given – but because the machines were. Machines wore out or needed overhauling and maintenance, but men were expected to keep going. Tanks, amtracs, trucks, aircraft, and ships were considered valuable and difficult to replace way out in the Pacific. They were maintained carefully and not exposed needlessly to wear or destruction. Men, infantrymen in particular, were simple expected to keep going beyond the limits of human endurance until they got killed or wounded or dropped from exhaustion.


With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge. Presidio Press. 1981. p. 137

I will fight your battles

D&C 105: 13, 14 Therefore it is expedient in me that mine elders should wait for a little season, for the redemption of Zion. For behold, I do not require at their hands to fight the battles of Zion; for, as I said in a former commandment, even so will I fulfill – I will fight your battles.

gospel of peace

The gospel is the “gospel of peace.” How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace” (Isa. 52:7). Where the gospel principles prevail, there can be no war, except for self-defense, and in the Book of Mormon we read of a people that, under the influence of the Spirit of God, refused to take up arms even in self-defense (Alma 24:17-24). The gospel enjoins upon the Church to “lift up an ensign of peace… to all people” (D&C 105:38), and to make a proclamation for peace “unto the ends of the earth.” The Prophet Joseph was a true messenger of peace. His sentiments on bloodshed may be gathered from the following incident. When Zion’s Camp was traveling from Kirtland, the brethren one day came to a thick wood of recent growth. The Prophet felt very much depressed. He said that a great deal of blood had been shed in that place, and added these memorable words: “Whenever a man of God is in a place where many have been killed, he will feel lonesome and unpleasant, and his spirits will sink” (History of the Church, Vol. II., p. 66).


Doctrine and Covenants Commentary by Hyrum M. Smith and Janne M. Sjodahl. Deseret Book. 1965. p.138

his memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty

Kiyoshi Tanimoto was over seventy now. The average age of all hibakusha was sixty-two. The surviving hibakusha had been polled by Chugoku Shimbun in 1984, and 54.3 per cent of them said they thought that nuclear weapons would be used again. Tanimoto read in the papers that the United States and the Soviet Union were steadily climbing the steep steps of deterrence. He and Chisa both drew health-maintenance allowances as hibakusha, and he had a modest pension from the United Church of Japan. He lived in a snug little house with a radio and two television sets, a washing machine, an electric oven, and a refrigerator, and he had a compact Mazda automobile, manufactured in Hiroshima. He ate too much. He got up at six every morning and took an hour’s walk with his small wooly dog, Chiko. He was slowing down a bit. His memory, like the world’s, was getting spotty.


Hiroshima by John Hersey. Vintage Books. 1989. p.152

causes v. instruments of total war

The White Chrysanthemum, with space for forty orphans, stood near an American Army base; on one side was an exercise field for the soldiers, and on the other were officers’ houses. After the Korean War began, the base and the orphanage were packed. From time to time, a woman would bring in an infant whose father was an American soldier, never saying that she was the mother – usually that a friend had asked her to entrust the baby to the orphanage. Often, at night, nervous young soldiers, some white, some black, having sneaked off the base without leave, would come begging to see their offspring. They wanted to stare at the babies’ faces. Some of them tracked down the mothers and married them, though they might never again see the children.

Sasaki-san felt compassion both for the mothers, some of whom were prostitutes, and for the fathers. She perceived the latter as confused boys of nineteen and twenty who as draftees were involved in a war they did not consider theirs, and who felt a rudimentary responsibility – or, at the very least, guilt – as fathers. These thoughts led her to an opinion that was unconventional for a hibakusha: that too much attention was paid to the power of the A-bomb, and not enough to the evil of war. Her rather bitter opinion was that it was the more lightly affected hibakusha and power-hungry politicians who focused on the A-bomb, and that not enough thought was given to the fact that warfare had indiscriminately made victims of Japanese who had suffered atomic and incendiary bombings, Chinese civilians who had been attacked by Japanese, reluctant young Japanese and American soldiers who were drafted to be killed and maimed, and, yes, Japanese prostitutes and their mixed-blood babies. She had firsthand knowledge of the cruelty of the atomic bomb, but she felt that more notice should be given to the causes than to the instruments of total war.


Hiroshima by John Hersey. Vintage Books. 1989. p.121, 122