By the time of the bombings, what we'd recently learned about the Bataan Death March due to our very expensive liberation of the Philippines was the big motivat

By the time of the bombings, what we'd recently learned about the Bataan Death March due to our very expensive liberation of the Philippines was the big motivator. I've been reading Now It Can Be Told by Leslie Groves, the Army general in charge of the Manhattan Project, and I just came to this bit in the chapter titled "Hiroshima", right after he delivered the first paper report of the bombing early in the following morning: [US Army Chief of Staff] General Marshall expressed his feeling that we should guard against too much gratification over our success, because it undoubtedly involved a large number of Japanese casualties. I replied that I was not thinking so much about those casualties as I was about the men who had made the Bataan death march. When we got into the hall, Arnold [Army Air Force Commanding General] slapped me on the back and said, "I am glad you said that---it's just the way I feel." I have always thought that this was the real feeling of every experienced officer, particularly those who occupied positions of great responsibility, including General Marshall himself. It was quite evident to all of us, as well as to the [War] Secretary up on Long Island [resting after the Potsdam Conference], that our hope of ending the war thought the development of atomic energy was close to realization. In general, they of course knew they were doing a terrible thing, but as discussed here, it was to stop a much more terrible outcome. E.g. an estimated 250,000 killed every month the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Or the mass use of nukes in the coming invasion; after Nagasaki a debate started about how to use the 3rd, to destroy another city or reserve it for the 5 or so needed for otherwise impractical Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu (the Japanese had reinforced it, and had constructed way too many kamikaze planes, even more than we estimated).