YOU make the call. YOU decide to send more kids to die…mostly kids 5-8 yrs younger than you are now. After the country had lost about 200,000 DEAD so far (more, actually). And hundreds of thousands wounded. Watch the last hour of Band of Brothers…talk with WW2 soldiers…there was abject fear of going to the South Pacific…it was our Siberia…you went there to die. Sure more **** died than Americans…but too many Americans died. Any invasion would’ve likely resulted in corpses on both sides throughout the home islands far in excess of those created on the 6th and 9th.

The Japanese were ready to fight…by the millions. Altho we’d been bombing the mainland nonstop for months, they were still manufacturing more planes than they were losing. While we were decimating their cities, they weren’t giving up. While their navy was virtually nonexistent, their subs were still sinking our ships (read about the Indianapolis, the cruiser than delivered one of the A bombs…it was torpedoed and nearly half its crew was lost to sharks for the 4 days that it took for anyone to notice they were missing).

It’s revisionist history to think that we had a choice. The Japanese had just waged one of the most vicious campaigns in history. Read about the Rape of Nanking. Read abut the 1,000,000 Filipinos lost in the last few months of the war AFTER MacArthur invaded/returned. A million!!! In a few months!

And you wanted soldiers like GN and his buddies to invade? And face a populace willing to die? To die for an Emperor who’d been given chance after chance to surrender and had refused? Whose troops fought to the last man on every island that we invaded? (and we leapfrogged over many merely because there was no need to invade and suffer losses).

Sure we would’ve won eventually…but consider how many MORE Japanese would’ve died in that invasion. Fewer Japanese died from the two A-bombs than from any invasion.

And before you say…well the Emperor and Imperial Army were ready to surrender…read a little about the coup that almost occurred when the Army found out the Emperor might budge and turn soft. Even if he lasted only another month, we probly would’ve killed another 100,000 or more in our ongoing bombings. After Iwo, our bombers had a much shorter flight time to all home islands of Japan. After Okinawa, our fighters were able to sortie to the home islands. Our air war was only ramping up. And how much credence could we lend what little intelligence was coming out from Japan about a potential, possible, undocumented surrender?

No less than 1,000,000 Americans were saved from death or wounds from a mainland invasion. The Imperial Army was far from capitulating in Aug ‘45. My reading, not minimal on the subject, tells me that Truman had little choice…and you must look at the decision in the perspective of 1945…NOT with your (im)perfect 20/20 or 20/2006 hindsight.

Look at what happened 6 mos earlier on Iwo Jima. More than 5,000 Americans DIED for 5 square miles. Nearly 25,000 were wounded. Consider those numbers.

Look at what happened at Okinawa, a few weeks earlier. This was one of the bloodiest and most hotly contested encounters of the war. Over 30 Navy ships were lost to kamikazes. Thousands more died. The fighting reverted to WWI trench warfare. Hundreds died to gain a few yards a day…day after day.

Japan had several thousand airplanes on the mainland that were capable of being used for kamikazes against an invasion. No shortage of pilots/soldiers willing to give up their lives for the Emperor. On Okinawa, hundreds of soldiers and civilians willingly died rather than to surrender to the Americans. In nearly every single battle for 4 yrs, only handsful of Japanese soldiers surrendered…

Atomic scientists protested to President Truman about the proposed bombings which considered the act against humanity.

Truman, the staunch communist foe, wanted to show USSR that his country was capable of producing the unimaginable military weapon. Truman was aware of the USSR’s ongoing development of hydrogen bomb.

The atomic bombings left the Japanese society socially, politically and culturally impacted above the normal human memories.

The nowaday Japan seems less opposed to the idea of nuclear energy unlike the pre-90s decades.

Robert L. Mason (RLM)

Now, remember, We had 3 working bombs and took a very, very long time to develop them. The first was a test. A successful detonation.

The 2nd one was dropped on Hiroshima first but only before they warned them to surrender first. They didn’t blink after that bomb.

So, they dropped the 3rd bomb on Nagasaki. Japan blinked only because Truman said we have more bombs only when they didn’t. It was a bluff but they had the technology to make more but then again it would take time.

Remember, Japan has it’s own nuclear lab and was working on a bomb. They know it takes time to make a bomb and they could end up theorizing, after American dropped a demo bomb near Japan on some isolated piece of the country, that U.S. had only limited number of atomic bombs and they could essentially would dare them to drop on their cities.

If you only had three bombs and use used 1 of them in a secret test. You had better make the best use of the two remaining bombs to provide the fullest deterent effect.

I can only surmise that the real reason for using the bombs on Japan was to show the Soviet Union that America was ready to use the bomb if necessary to prevent the Russians from gaining more territories in Far East and Europe.

If it was to be used solely to force a surrender, a demonstration of the bomb would have been sufficient. There was no real need to actually drop not just one but two bombs on cities with thousands of people.

Also, click on the links inside. Interesting stuff.

Had we not moved in earlier with the atomic bombing of Japan and favored ground troops, this would have allowed Japan extra time to finish their nuclear plan. And they would have no qualms to use it immediately on the United States.

Something to think about when time is really was of essence back then.

We haven’t used our nuclear arsenals on another country for more than 60 years. And we don’t want to unless it’s absolutely necessary and a last chance option. Plus, we don’t go around saying that a certain country should be wiped off the map. Or lob several test missiles at another country either.

Secondly, it was either an aerial and ground force assault on the whole country of Japan or a few nuclear bombs. Had we gone the route of ground troops with air and naval support invading Japan, there would be more deaths on both sides. More deaths on the Japanese sides since we’d have to some how take control of Japan by ground troops. It was hard enough to extract those Japanese mole rats out of their tunnels on those Pacific Islands. Imagine the whole island of Japan and Okinawa.

None of this would have happened had not Japan attacked the United States that embroilled the United States into WWII. Japan never bothered to think about the consequences of their own actions that would ultimately have their citizens be killed by the hundred of thousands.

This seems to be the classic peacenik complaints about the atomic bombing of Japan. Understandable that these deaths were horrible and that those innocent Japanese civilians never deserved such horrible deaths. Now, unless somebody here can think up of a better idea on how the United States could have ended the war on a better note with Japan surrending, I’m all ears.