Joe Saranella remembers it like it was yesterday. It was the summer of 1945 and he was aboard the USS Greeley steaming toward an American military base in China. The World War II campaign in Europe was won and the Allied Forces were turning their complete attention toward invading Japan, known as Operation Downfall. The Navy Department experts who predicted this sort of thing estimated that there would be up to 4 million American casualties. Japanese casualties could reach 10 million.

Saranella was a member of the U.S. Army Tank Corps, which suffered tremendous human losses during the war. He and hundreds of thousands of others were likely to be among them. But then the war ended. Saranella didn’t have to fight and didn’t have to die.