I disagree with assertions that dropping two atomic bombs on civilian populations was necessary to end WWII...the war was over, for all practical purposes...regardless of what you have learned. I believe it was meant to send a message to The Soviet Union, and was incomprehensibly fiendish. I also believe the war in Iraq is wrong. Men, women and children who had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein have died excruciatingly painful deaths...thousands upon thousands more have been maimed. The sanctions also killed thousands upon thousands of innocents, and achieved little to nothing else. Clinton was as much a bastard as the Bushes. The same with the unconscienable bombings in Kosovo. The history of the US involvement in VietNam is creepy, to say the least. Stanley Karnow wrote a great book on the history of that conflict...and PBS later did a series of episodes based on the book...with actual footage from the war. Another vulgar, anti-civilian adventure...that has yet to be explained in terms that anyone could comprehensibly understand and believe. (this is a very personal observation, having spent nearly two years in a combat role there). The reason that November 11th is set aside now as Veterans' Day (formerly Armistice Day) is that there was an agreement between all parties fighting in WWI that there would be an armistice signed on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918...whilst waiting for this 'significant' moment to come, many people died in sensless combat: "November 11, 1918. The final hours pulsate with tension as every man in the trenches hopes to escape the melancholy distinction of being the last to die in World War I. The Allied generals knew the fighting would end precisely at 11:00 A.M, yet in the final hours they flung men against an already beaten Germany. The result? Eleven thousand casualties suffered–more than during the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Why? Allied commanders wanted to punish the enemy to the very last moment and career officers saw a fast-fading chance for glory and promotion. Joseph E. Persico puts the reader in the trenches with the forgotten and the famous–among the latter, Corporal Adolf Hitler, Captain Harry Truman, and Colonels Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. Mainly, he follows ordinary soldiers’ lives, illuminating their fate as the end approaches. Persico sets the last day of the war in historic context with a gripping reprise of all that led up to it, from the 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, which ignited the war, to the raw racism black doughboys endured except when ordered to advance and die in the war’s last hour. Persico recounts the war’s bloody climax in a cinematic style that evokes All Quiet on the Western Front, Grand Illusion, and Paths of Glory.The pointless fighting on the last day of the war is the perfect metaphor for the four years that preceded it, years of senseless slaughter for hollow purposes. This book is sure to become the definitive history of the end of a conflict Winston Churchill called “the hardest, cruelest, and least-rewarded of all the wars that have been fought.” This is a quote from the Publisher's release for Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: The War to End All Wars and Its Violent End by Joseph E. Persico. Immoral...or even amoral...each and every one of these dastardly events. What would Jesus, or your favorite demigod, say?