“What had at first seemed a barbarous thought in the back of my mind now became less unsavory.” Remembering how Union soldiers had exploded a mine under the Confederate trenches around Petersburg, Virginia, he went to work on a plan for the cave at Quinauan Point. He had engineers drop dynamite from the cliff above the cave while boats fired into it. “There were no survivors,” he wrote. “It had at last dawned on me, as it was to dawn on so many commanders who followed me in the Pacific war, that the Jap usually prefers death to surrender.”
