A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

My dad. (Photo Credit: Author's personal collection) If you could bring back any 3 people from the dead, who would they be? Why? My answer depends on the following variables: In which state do I want to revive them? Am I allowed any flexibility as to how old they are and their state of health when I bring them back, or am I locked in the Stephen King-like Hobson’s Choice of “Yeah, you can bring them back to life if you want, but you’d have to settle for getting them at the same age they were at the time of their deaths.” Is there a certain time limit that I can have them with me? You know, like “You can have them back, but only for a week. Then they die again and you can’t revive them again.” To be honest, I’m not really sure if I  could  do this - if I had the power to bring back people from death. But let’s say that I  could  and that I retrieved three people from “the undiscovered country” at the prime of their lives, in good health, yet aware of who ...

If Japan had not surrendered after the double whammy of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki A-bomb attacks and the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific War, it is likely that: The 20th Air Force would have resumed its massive conventional bombing campaign against Japan’s cities (including Kyoto) until several atomic bombs became available in 1945 and 1946. (I believe a third A-bomb could have been dropped sometime after August 15, 1945 had the Japanese not agreed to surrender on that day.) The invasion of Kyushu, codenamed Olympic, would have been carried out on or around November 1, 1945. According to Alfred Coppel’s  The Burning Mountain: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan,  which was based on the actual American and Japanese war plans for the invasion, the Allied objective was to capture only enough of Kyushu to establish a series of naval and air bases there. These bases would then be used as part of the infrastructure for Operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu. (Richard...