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Not to dispute your main point, but in Japan more than 1 million people died of starvation after the US blockades in WWII. It's the reason it is illegal to imp

Not to dispute your main point, but in Japan more than 1 million people died of starvation after the US blockades in WWII. It's the reason it is illegal to import staple foods into Japan to this day. The question of whether or not Japan would have surrendered without nuclear attacks is still very much an open one. It's really hard to say what the Japanese government was thinking at the time, but I can say that my mother in law told me that the only reason she survived is because her uncle had a garden and had a few sweet potatoes. Most people that were alive during the war suffers still from ill health as a result of malnutrition at the time. It has given me considerable cause to re-evaluate things I thought I knew.

tialaramex 8y ago
I'm not sure, but in re-reading what I posted it occurs to me that it's possible to read it as suggesting nowhere else starved (or not as badly as Britain) whereas what I was intending was that Britain's big threat turned out not to be aerial bombardment, rocket attack, or straight-up beach invasion but simply starvation. Invading Britain proved completely impractical, bombing it into submission was too costly to be continued, but starving it was close to working. Culture varies, and it seems unlikely that the British "stiff upper lip" would have carried on through starvation rations as the Japanese did. Certainly the government of the day is recorded as having expected to be overthrown once the reality of starvation was felt by the common people, unless the next shipments of food arrived (which they did).