Reply #4: Actually... [View All]

After Midway, the US Navy concentrated on commerce raiding, and many of the navy personnel didn't like it one bit. Commerce raiding is the practice of attacking mostly unarmed or lightly armed convoys that were manned by merchant marines. So essentially, they spent two years shooting fish in a barrel. Not exactly my definition of 'true heroes' but it wasn't their choice and the strategy worked.

There is no such thing as a good war, and heroes are not made of killers, even if they are doing what they must. The true heroes were those that saved innocent civilians, on either side. Escluding merchant seamen, US civilian deaths probably numbered in the hundreds during WWII, while Japanese civilians died in the hundreds of thousands and there were too many to count from England, Russia, Germany and France. We have such a distorted view of war in general, largely because of this.