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A far smaller moral crime than a land invasion of the home islands would've been. There's a reason five hundred thousand Purple Hearts were manufactured in anti
by Causality1 7y ago
A far smaller moral crime than a land invasion of the home islands would've been. There's a reason five hundred thousand Purple Hearts were manufactured in anticipation of it.
- gshubert17 7y agoD. M. Giangreco agrees with this assessment. His book "Hell to Pay" examines many complex issues involved in the strategic and tactical planning of both the U.S. and Japan using documents from both sides, including postwar reports that the Japanese wrote for General MacArthur. The U.S. planned to use as many as nine A-bombs as tactical weapons in the invasion of Kyushu. He feels such an invasion would have been worse for both Americans and Japanese.
- mrguyorama 7y agoThere was no plan to deal with japan that wouldn't have involved hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides of the conflict losing their lives. The trade instead was 250k Japanese civilians.
- Causality1 7y agoThe planning for Operation Downfall expected a minimum of 5 million Japanese civilian deaths. The Japanese plan for defending the home islands, ketsugō sakusen, involved conscripting the entire population into a militia. The propaganda term was literally "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million." If you don't think that would've killed more than 250 thousand civilians you're a fool. The target choices, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are a good topic for debate. There's ample argument to be made that there were better, more militarized targets that would have shaved significant fractions off the ultimate civilian death toll. There is no sane argument, however, that the bombings themselves didn't kill an order of magnitude fewer people than any other method of defeating the Japanese Empire.