Harry Truman and the Price of Victory.

The article focuses on the controversy associated with the U.S. war on Japan in 1940's led by the U.S. President Harry S. Truman. In the midst of the fighting on Okinawa, which began in April 1945, President Truman received a warning that the invasion could cost as many as 500,000 to 1,000,000 American lives. The document containing this estimate 'Memorandum on Ending the Japanese War,' was one of a series of papers written by former President Herbert Hoover at Truman's request in May 1945. The Hoover memorandum is well known to students of the era, but they have generally assumed that Truman solicited it purely as a courtesy to Hoover and Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, who had been Hoover's Secretary of State. According to Robert Ferrell, the editor of Truman's private papers, Truman had seized upon the memo and sent memoranda to his senior advisers asking for written judgments from each. This prooved that Truman knew about such a high casualty figure far in advance of the decision to use atom bombs.