3 ms·
Keep in mind that every day the war continued meant thousands of innocent lives being lost under the brutal Japanese occupation that still covered vast areas of
by wat10000 1y ago
Keep in mind that every day the war continued meant thousands of innocent lives being lost under the brutal Japanese occupation that still covered vast areas of east Asia. Blockading Japan and waiting for them to starve might have been the best thing to save American lives. I think it’s unlikely to have been the best thing to save innocent lives overall.
- bee_rider 1y agoBlockading Japan would have probably killed countless Japanese civilians via starvation, right? At least, I don’t think the island could sustain itself at that population level, particularly without fuel…
- wat10000 1y agoThe aerial mining operation was literally called Operation Starvation, so, yeah. The big question is how quickly it makes them surrender. If they decide they’re cooked and give up fast, it might not have been too bad. If they hold out a long time then it would have been terrible.
- wiseowise 1y agoGiven how ideological they were? It would take 5 mil dead at least.
- arkey 1y agoA blockade would mean a slow death for thousands or potentially millions of Japanese, as well at the cost and risk of tens of thousands of American troops, as well as a stupid amount of resources and infrastructure. The message in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "We can put eleven men on a fancy plane and make one of your main cities simply disappear, and you can do nothing about it." That made not surrendering simply and objectively not worth it.