Скачать или смотреть The Purple Heart Stockpile: A Silent Warning from WWII

Nearly all Purple Heart medals awarded by the United States today come from a vast stockpile produced in 1945, in preparation for a planned invasion of mainland Japan.

The operation, known as Operation Downfall, was expected to be the bloodiest battle in history. U.S. military planners anticipated hundreds of thousands of American casualties, and potentially millions of Japanese deaths, including civilians. To prepare, the U.S. manufactured an enormous number of Purple Hearts — far more than had ever been needed before.

The invasion never happened. Japan surrendered after the atomic bombings and the Soviet declaration of war.
But the medals remained.

Decades later, the U.S. military is still awarding Purple Hearts from that original 1945 stockpile — a sobering reminder of how catastrophic the final battle of WWII was expected to be, and how close the world came to an even greater loss of life.