Heart Of Learning Child Development Center Registration Form: Fill & Download for Free

How about the people who were there at the time and knew the whole story. Back then, when a country was attacked by surprise during peace talks with thousands of Americans killed, the reaction was to kick their damned ass clear back to the stone age.Today, we would sit around and feel their anger and try to understand their position. Then try to see things from their side. Possibly many would agree that the US deserved being attacked.Apparently, people who take this position don't understand that we were attacked by Japan. We didn't attack them. They attacked us! We didn't start it, they did. And the only way to stop them from killing us was to drop bombs.Truman had two options open to him: drop the atomic bombs or invade. The blockade imposed by our submarines had cut off most supplies from the Japanese Empire but obviously it was not stopping the war. In June, 1945, after Germany had surrendered, the Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production Albert_Speer, was debriefed and it was found that the massive bombing campaign against Germany hadn’t done nearly the damage thought and that production had increased up until Germany was being occupied. It was supposed that the same situation applied to Japan and that it was not as seriously damaged as the recon photos indicated. If the bombing campaign had not worked as well as it had appeared, then an invasion was unavoidable.It had also been proposed to drop a bomb on an uninhabited island as a demonstration. This was considered and rejected for several reasons. First, the Japanese had demonstrated that regardless of the odds, the Japanese military didn’t surrender. This had been proved in hundreds of battles. Then again, dropping a big noisy, flashbulb wasn’t going to impress an army like that. In addition, this was one of the most expensive weapons ever developed, second only to the B-29, and not using it that would cost even one American life was totally unacceptable. Finally, the US had only made 3 nuclear devices, and expended one of them as proof they would work. That meant that only two deliverable weapons were available.By August, 1945, the supposedly defeated Japanese Empire was costing the United States 900 casualties a day. We had firebombed over 60 cities and destroyed most of their factories, yet they were still fighting back vigorously. They now had a few radar guided anti-aircraft guns that were taking a toll of our B-29s and their fighters were still destroying them, even if it meant ramming them. Records indicate that the 20th Army Air Force lost 111 Super Fortresses by ramming, and only 38 were known as shot down. The war was apparently over by our accounts, but not from the Japanese point of view. General Mattis more recently expressed the proper attitude towards the enemy that modern revisionists do not understand: “No war is over until the enemy says it’s over. We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote.” And the Japanese wouldn’t say it was over.An example of the Japanese military mind was evident as early as the morning of December 7, 1941! Ensign Kazuo_Sakamaki, who was captured unconscious when his submarine ran aground after the attack on Pearl Harbor requested to be shot or allowed to commit suicide. He became Prisoner of War #1. On the other side of Oahu, A Japanese D3A1 Carrier Bomber was shot down by a P-40 and the two members of the crew bailed out off shore. One died, but Petty Officer Goto made it to shore and was spotted. A team from the 55thCoast Artillery approached him and demanded his surrender to which he replied with his pistols. Goto had recovered another pistol from the body of his other crew member and now, 2000 miles from Japan all alone, with no possible help, he fought to the death rather than surrender.The spring and summer of 1945 saw the Japanese planning and preparing for the Ketsu-Go, or the Decisive Battle for the Homeland (see http://fas.org/irp/eprint/arens/... for a more complete discussion). All school classes were cancelled which freed up more than 13,000,000 young people for the coming battle. By the summer of 1945, these people were divided into three types: Special guard Forces composed of older men who were assigned to build fortifications and transport supplies. The Independent Companies who were mobilized reservists who were building camouflaged landing strips for kamikaze’s and were trained for combat. And then there were the Civilian Volunteer Corps formed in June 1945, who were everyone else above the age of 15 and who were set to make munitions, food, and making last ditch weapons. The West was fighting against an enemy where even the women and children were being trained and armed with sharpened bamboo poles to kill the Americans. They were instructed to, “Always thrust tall Yankees in their belly.” In short, everyone above the age of 15, male or female, was going to be a soldier to defend the Homeland. Around 2 million civilians were part of the Patriotic Citizens Fighting Corps that were trained for combat even if it was only with sharpened bamboo spears. By August, 1945, the Japanese had accumulated 5,350 airplanes, over 1,000,000 gallons of gasoline and 6,200 fast suicide boats in preparation for the forthcoming American invasion.These are the people who simply didn’t surrender. They literally jump off of cliffs to their death before surrender. Look at the statistics that faced the Americans. In 1943, at Buna, New Guinea, out of 14,000 Japanese troops, not one surrendered. In 1943, on Attu, Alaska, out of 2,500 troops, there were 28 prisoners, some wounded. On Tarawa, out of 3,600 troops, 17 surrendered. On Saipan, there were 32,000 troops, and there were 921 prisoners. On Peleliu, out of 10,900 Japanese soldiers, 19 were captured, along with 183 laborers. On Iwo Jima, there were 21,000 troops, and 216 surrendered and American losses were 7,000 killed and eighteen thousand wounded. In the Philippines, 56,263 Japanese soldiers were killed, but only 389 surrendered. Just in the battle for Manila, 1,000 US soldiers died, but the entire garrison of 17,000 Japanese soldiers fought and died to the very last man-and over 100,000 civilians were massacred. On Okinawa, graves registration buried 110,701 dead and 7,401 were captured. Simply put, these are not an enemy you can scare. They didn’t scare. They looked Death in the face up close and personal, face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball, and didn’t blink. With very, very few exceptions, they simply didn’t surrender.The loss ratio between American and Japanese losses had become alarming. Six out of ten US casualties in the Pacific took place in the last 11 months of the war. In Luzon, in the Philippines, the Americans had lost 31,000 casualties and the Japanese 156,000 or a ratio of about 1 American to 5 Japanese. On Iwo Jima, the loss ratio had fallen to 1 American to 1.25 Japanese. As the battle on Okinawa raged, the ratio was 1 American casualty for 1.6 Japanese losses. In addition to the casualties of soldiers, the Americans had also lost 12 destroyers, 15 amphibious ships and 9 others with 386 damaged in addition to over 760 aircraft and 225 tanks. It was clear that any battle on Japanese soil would result in even more fanatical resistance than the Americans had met so far.The decision to use the atomic bombs is more clearly shown by this excerpt from Major General Charles Sweeny’s book The War’s End:“The only facts and numbers that are relevant to a discussion of Truman’s decision, therefore, are those facts and numbers the president had in front of him in July 1945. The staggering casualties at Iwo Jima and Okinawa were not projections, they were memorialized by rows of white crosses and hospital wards filled with broken bodies. In each case, Japanese military forces fought to the death, as they had done everywhere else. The casualty ratio as the United States drew closer to Japan was one to two.Based upon the realities, Truman’s military advisers, in a White House meeting on June 18, 1945, predicted that 30 to 35 percent of the 770,000-man invasion force could reasonably be expected to be killed or wounded during just the first thirty days of the invasion of Kyushu. Translation 231,000 to 269,000 dead or wounded Americans in the first thirty days of combat. It was estimated that it would take a hundred and twenty days to secure and occupy the entire island. By the end of that four-month period, Americans casualties would realistically reach around 395,000. And over one million of our troops still awaited the second prong of the invasion. In March, 1946, they would wade ashore near Tokyo to take Honshu.These estimates assumed, of course, that all would go according to plan. Yet Okinawa had expected to fall in two weeks; instead the battle had dragged into eighty-two days, and even then, it took several more weeks after that to secure the island.”On July 28, 1945, the Japanese government had publicly addressed the Potsdam Declaration with “Mokusatsu” which the Japanese press mistranslated into English as “rejected” when it actually had a much more subtle meaning of “to kill with silence” or simply, “ignore.” The first and second kanji characters forming the expression meant “silence” and “kill” respectively, and their juxtaposition implies “to kill with silent contempt”, and not simply “reject.” With the apparent Japanese rejection of the Potsdam Declaration, the decision was made to use whatever force was needed to end American bloodshed.The Japanese had, in fact, put out “peace” feelers through the Russians, but the Japanese concept of “surrender” was altogether different than what was required by the Potsdam Declaration. They had approached the Russians to be mediators as shown in the Togo-sato correspondence. The Japanese in Japan thought that the Russians would be mediators, while the Japanese foreign minister in Russia was telling them the exact opposite! The Japanese in Japan were living in a dreamland. The Japanese government was imagining giving back the Pacific islands, and essentially keeping everything else. They were not imagining returning Taiwan, Korea, Manchkuo (Manchuria), occupation of Japan, or punishment of war criminals. Japan would surrender if certain conditions were met: (1) preservation of the emperor; (2) that Japan was not to be occupied; (3) that the Japanese armed forces be disbanded voluntarily; (4) that war criminals would be prosecuted by Japanese courts in Japan.Consider the effect such a decision NOT to use the atomic bombs would have had in the United States. How could anyone tell an American mother that the United States let her son be killed because bombing was too cruel? Ask any mother if she felt that it was OK for her child to die because we were reluctant to kill the enemy. Tell any mother that we let her son be killed because we didn’t want to be too cruel to the Japanese. The spirit of the time was much more than determined to eliminate the Japanese Empire. The Japanese had made a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor while in the middle of peace talks. They were duplicitous, brutal animals that were as cruel as Vlad the Impaler. They had shown no mercy whatsoever in their conquests and so deserved none. They had killed thousands at Pearl Harbor, killed thousands more in the Bataan Death march, and on Okinawa, the Japanese did not take a single American prisoner. They killed every single American they captured. Every last one. The attitude of the American people at that time was that the only good Jap was a dead Jap.At the start of the bombing campaign against Japan, a list of targets was prepared that included over 60 Japanese cities. 67 cities had been fire bombed with napalm by the time the atom bombs were ready for use. The last five unbombed targets were: Kokura, the site of many of Japan's largest munitions plants; Hiroshima, an embarkation port and industrial center that was the headquarters of the Second Area Army; Yokohama, an urban center for aircraft manufacture, machine tools, docks, electrical equipment and oil refineries; Niigata, a port with industrial facilities including steel and aluminum plants and an oil refinery; Kyoto, a major industrial center and Nagasaki, which had many heavy industrial factories including ship building an arms factory, and an engine works. We had destroyed over 60 cities, but the Japanese still would not surrender. The final decision was to make Hiroshima as a primary target, then Kokura as the next with Nagasaki as an alternate.Hiroshima was a city of both industrial and military significance. Hiroshima was the headquarters of the 2nd General Army 第2総軍(日本軍)with responsibility for most of western Japan including Kyushu as well as a depot and port of embarkation in the middle of an urban industrial area. It was a good radar target and it was such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills that were likely to produce a focusing effect that would considerably increase the blast damage. Due to rivers, it was not a good incendiary target. It was classified as an AA(Prime)Target. It had a military garrison of about 40,000 men. Hiroshima was the primary target for the August 6 attack, with Kokura and Nagasaki as alternatives. Far from being an innocent city full of civilians, the garrison of 40,000 soldiers were doing calisthenics when the bomb exploded and were in fact the largest single group of casualties in the city.Nagasaki was a major industrial city making torpedoes and ammunition. Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works, on the south side, Mitsubishi-Urakami Torpedo Works on the north, and a large engine works dominated the production in the city in addition to a large military garrison. There was also a major dockyard used for the transport of men and materials to the north. It, too, was a high priority target but was a secondary target that was only hit if the primary target was too cloud covered for a visual drop on the primary.The popular position today that the civilians were not part of the war effort is beyond ridiculous. Every person in every country of the world was contributing to the war effort of their country. Regardless of the country-Germany, Japan, England, the United States, Russia… Everything that every person could do was to help their country win. In the United States, almost every family had a "Victory garden" so that they would use less food that could be sent to soldiers. Kids were sent out to pick up metal, extra pots and pans were donated to be melted down for aluminum and steel. In essence, every person in every country was fighting for the success of their country. They may not have been carrying a gun, but they were an essential part of the war effort. Saying that a civilian was not important ignores that fact that the soldier would have no gun, ammunition, food, or transportation without those civilians.After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, President Truman had announced that the bomb was an atomic bomb. Even with the certain identification of an atomic device both with the announcement by President Truman and the confirmation by Japanese nuclear scientists on site, the Japanese government still wouldn’t surrender. We had destroyed over 60 cities, and one with an atomic bomb, and the Japanese still would not surrender.The modern-day revisionists and apologists completely ignore several important considerations about the bombing campaign. Up to the moment of Pearl Harbor, the population of the United States was very isolationist. The general opinion was “Let those Europeans stew in their own juices.” We didn’t want to get involved in another Great War. The attack on Pearl Harbor changed that in a single day. By 1945, we had lost hundreds of thousands in dead and wounded fighting a war we did not start or want. We had spent treasure to supply the world with the weapons of war – again - a war we didn’t start or want. The American people were united in their hatred of the Japanese. The Japanese had made an unprovoked attack without a declaration of war. A sneak attack killing thousands of Americans while we were still at peace. The US military knew that Japan was militarily defeated by 1943, and by1944 had no chance for winning the war. Now, even when obviously defeated, they would not surrender. They would commit suicide before surrendering. Their concept of surrender was such that it would dishonor themselves, their families and far worse, their ancestors. When they said,”Death before dishonor,” they really meant it in a very literal sense. The Japanese mindset was so fundamentally different that we in the West simply could not understand why they wouldn't surrender when they were defeated. Until the Japanese realized it was time to surrender, the war would continue.It might be noted that General “Stormin’ Norman” Schwartzkopf wrote a paper when he was a cadet that in 1945 the Quartermaster Corps of the Army ordered 750,000 Purple Hearts prior to the invasion because, based on the casualties so far in the Pacific Theater, that is how many US casualties they expected during the invasions. Modern day revisionists should consider what the people on scene, at that time and place expected.There were also other reasons to end the war as quickly as possible. The Japanese were running out of food and we knew that orders had gone out to kill all prisoners of war. The Japanese held 168,000 prisoners of war! In fact, in preparation for that event, the Japanese had forced the POWs to dig trenches for their own graves. It was certain that when we started to invade the home islands, all the prisoners in Japanese hands would be massacred. Besides the prisoners of war, there were also tens of thousands of civilian internees who would undoubtedly be slaughtered. In addition, there were hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops scattered throughout Asia as garrison troops. They had to be ordered to surrender or they could have created a hundred Nanking's when the invasion took place. So, there was more than simply defeating the Japanese Army, there had to be a direction of surrender, or at least to stop fighting.To wrap it up, the invasion of Japan would have cost at least 750,000 Americans killed and wounded. It is estimated that there would have been 10,000,000 Japanese killed in combat, and another 10,000,000 who would commit suicide. In China, all of the POWs would have been killed-168,000 men, along with all of the civilian internees. The Japanese garrisons would have killed millions of Chinese thru-out S.E. Asia. The total fatalities would be a minimum of 21,000,000 not counting the millions of Chinese that would have been killed by the Japanese garrisons there.The alternative, the use of the atomic bombs, is the loss of less than 200,000 Japanese lives with no further American lives lost.Not using the atomic bombs would have resulted in a far greater bloodbath than using them. It is a shame on the American educational system that the reader here will learn what was NOT taught in school.

This keeps coming up all the time on the forum, so I'll really try to give an answer. Actually, two- A short one and the book length version.The short answer is that the Japanese had demonstrated a determination to fight unparalleled in warfare. They simply didn't surrender. Faced with overwhelming forces and absolutely no chance of winning a battle, they still fought to the death or committed suicide. It was recognized that simply showing an overwhelming force would not affect their position. We had lost tens of thousands of men fighting the Germans and the Japanese and were war weary. Dropping and atomic bomb seemed like the best, quickest method for ending the war.It was the only way to get the Japanese to stop fighting. A question like this is insulting by assuming that the United States did something wrong when we defended ourselves and bombed their cities. The people who argue against the use of bombs seem to have no idea of the circumstances of their use and no idea of what the alternatives were. It demonstrates a complete ignorance of how the war started, and insensitive to the terrible price the US paid in having to destroy the Japanese Empire. Apparently, people who take this position don't understand that we were attacked by Japan. We didn't attack them. They attacked us! We didn't start it, they did. And the only way to stop them from killing was to drop bombs.Truman had two options open to him: Drop the atomic bombs, or invade. There was a third option considered and that was just blockade. But in June, 1945, after Germany had surrendered, the Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production Albert_Speer , was debriefed and it was found that the massive bombing campaign against Germany hadn’t done nearly the damage thought and that production had increased up until Germany was being occupied. It was reasoned that if Germany could do it, so could Japan, so the blockade option was dropped. It had also been proposed to drop a bomb on an uninhabited island as a demonstration. This was considered and rejected for several reasons. First, the Japanese had demonstrated that regardless of the odds, the Japanese military didn’t surrender. This had been proved in hundreds of battles. Then again, dropping a big flashbulb wasn’t going to impress an army like that. In addition, this was one of the most expensive weapons ever developed, second only to the B-29, and not using it that would cost even one American life was totally unacceptable.By August, 1945, the supposedly defeated Japanese Empire was costing the United States 900 casualties a day. We had firebombed over 60 cities and destroyed most of their factories, yet they were still fighting back vigorously. They now had a few radar guided anti-aircraft guns that were taking a toll of our B-29s and their fighters were still destroying them, even if it meant ramming them. The war was apparently over by our accounts, but not from the Japanese point of view. General Mattis more recently expressed the proper attitude towards the enemy that modern revisionists do not understand: “No war is over until the enemy says it’s over. We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote.” And the Japanese wouldn’t say it was over.An example of the Japanese military mind was evident as early as the morning of December 7, 1941! Ensign Kazuo_Sakamaki, who was captured unconscious when his submarine ran aground after the attack on Pearl Harbor requested to be shot or allowed to commit suicide. He became Prisoner of War #1. On the other side of Oahu, A Japanese D3A1 Carrier Bomber was shot down by a P-40 and the two members of the crew bailed out off shore. One died, but Petty Officer Goto made it to shore and was spotted. A team from the 55thCoast Artillery approached him and demanded his surrender to which he replied with his pistols. Goto had recovered another pistol from the body of his other crew member and now, 2000 miles from Japan all alone, with no possible help, he fought to the death rather than surrender.Let us digress for a moment to better understand the Japanese government’s position and attitude and how this affected the course of the war and the attitude of the Japanese soldier.The Japanese government had adopted the principle of the Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosperity_Sphere in 1940. This guided the expansion of the Japanese Empire to encompass the cultural and economic unity of eastern Asia under the control of Japan. It would be a bloc of self-sufficient countries free of Western powers. A 1943 document, An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus reinforced this position showing that the exploitation of other countries was a policy separate from the war. It states that the Japanese, the Yamato Race, were superior to all other races and that the intention of the Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere was domination over Asia and the Pacific region.Another principle was the Southern Expansion Doctrine (南進論 Nanshin-ron) which postulated that Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands were Japan’s sphere of influence. This was greatly formalized in the 1920’s and 1930’s with the Japanese takeover of the German Pacific Empire which included the Caroline, Mariana, and Marshall Islands and Palau. These were felt necessary for Japan’s security and controlled by the Imperial Japanese Navy.Another principle of Japanese doctrine was Hakkō_ichiu which was that the Japanese people, being superior to all others, were destined to rule. Hakkō ichiu (八紘一宇?, "eight crown cords, one roof" i.e. "all the world under one roof") meant that the Emperor of Japan was to rule an empire, not of just the islands, but also many conquered lands. Consequently, not just the people, but the military had the concept that whomever they conquered deserved it. They should be happy to have become a part of the enlightened ones even though the Japanese felt that all other peoples were lower than dogs.Gyokusai was a Japanese philosophy has been expressed as, “Better to be a shattered jewel than a roofing tile.” The Gyokusai ideology reached its peak during WWII and was expressed in action, as honorable death in combat was far preferable to living as a prisoner. This philosophy is outside Bushido or any religion and was part of the Japanese psyche applying to soldiers and civilians alike. What is Gyokusai? 玉砕とは何でしょう? The Japanese Army regularly chanted the mantra, “Whether I float as a corpse in the waters or sink beneath the grasses of the mountainside I willingly die for the emperor,” and concluded “The life of a warrior is like a cherry blossom which lasts but three days.” There were many slogans but towards the end of the war one of them was, “One plane for one battleship. One boat for one ship. One man for one tank or ten men.” Another slogan to indoctrinate the warrior spirit was, “Duty is weightier than a mountain, but death is lighter than a feather.” An example of this is Kazuo_Sakamaki, an ensign in the Japanese Navy who was captured when his submarine ran aground after Pearl Harbor and he requested to be shot or allowed to commit suicide.The Allies had won the war in Europe and were now turning their power on the Japanese Empire. The determination of the Japanese to literally fight to the last man had been demonstrated on Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and a hundred other battles. It was anticipated that the invasion of Japan, Operation_Downfall, would involve up to a million US casualties and incidentally wipe out the Japanese population. Operation Downfall was the combination of Olympic , the invasion of Kyushu scheduled for November 1, 1945, and Coronet , the invasion of Honshu scheduled for March 1, 1946. The Japanese estimates were that 20 million Japanese would die. Diplomatic and military decrypts had shown that the garrison of Kyushu had increased from 150,000 men to 545,000 while all of Japan now had a garrison of over 2,000,000.The spring and summer of 1945 saw the Japanese planning and preparing for the Ketsu-Go, or the Decisive Battle for the Homeland (see http://fas.org/irp/eprint/arens/chap4.htm for a more complete discussion). All school classes were cancelled which freed up more than 13,000,000 young people for the coming battle. By the summer of 1945, these people were divided into three types: Special guard Forces composed of older men who were assigned to build fortifications and transport supplies. The Independent Companies who were mobilized reservists who were building camouflaged landing strips for kamikaze’s and were trained for combat. And then there were the Civilian Volunteer Corps formed in June 1945, who were everyone else above the age of 15 and who were set to make munitions, food, and making last ditch weapons. The West was fighting against an enemy where even the women and children were being trained and armed with sharpened bamboo poles to kill the Americans. They were instructed to, “always thrust tall Yankees in their belly.” In short, everyone above the age of 15, male or female, was going to be a soldier to defend the Homeland. Around 2 million civilians were part of the Patriotic Citizens Fighting Corps that were trained for combat even if it was only with sharpened bamboo spears. By August, 1945, the Japanese had accumulated 5,350 airplanes, over 1,000,000 gallons of gasoline and 6,200 fast suicide boats in preparation for the forthcoming American invasion.This indoctrination and philosophy led to the approval and creation of Operation_Kikusui which was the organization of the kamakazi attacks during the American attack on Okinawa. The attacks were called “kikusui” or “floating chrysanthemums.” These are the well known and (in)famous kamakazi attacks where a pilot would dive his aircraft into an American ship. This philosophy also inspired the soldiers to make Banzai charges into machine guns.These are the people who simply didn’t surrender. They literally jump off of cliffs to their death before surrender. Look at the statistics that faced the Americans. In 1943, at Buna, New Guinea, out of 14,000 Japanese troops, not one surrendered. In 1943, on Kiska, Alaska, out of 2,500 troops, there were 28 prisoners, some wounded. On Tarawa, out of 3,600 troops, 17 surrendered. On Saipan, there were 32,000 troops, and there were 921 prisoners. On Peleliu, out of 10,900 Japanese soldiers, 19 were captured, along with 183 laborers. On Iwo Jima, there were 21,000 troops, and 216 surrendered. In the Philippines, 56,263 Japanese soldiers were killed, but only 389 surrendered. Just in the battle for Manila, 1,000 US soldiers died, but the entire garrison of 17,000 Japanese soldiers fought and died to the very last man-and over 100,000 civilians were massacred. On Okinawa, graves registration buried 110,701 dead and 7,401 were captured. Simply put, these are not an enemy you can scare. They didn’t scare. They looked Death in the face up close and personal, face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball, and didn’t blink. With very, very few exceptions, they simply wouldn’t surrender.The loss ratio between American and Japanese losses had become alarming. Six out of ten US casualties in the Pacific took place in the last 11 months of the war. In Luzon, in the Philippines, the Americans had lost 31,000 casualties and the Japanese 156,000 or a ratio of about 1 American to 5 Japanese. On Iwo Jima, the loss ratio had fallen to 1 American to 1.25 Japanese. As the battle on Okinawa raged, the ratio was 1 American casualty for 1.6 Japanese losses. In addition to the casualties of soldiers, the Americans had also lost 12 destroyers, 15 amphibious ships and 9 others with 386 damaged in addition to over 760 aircraft and 225 tanks. It was clear that any battle on Japanese soil would result in even more fanatical resistance than the Americans had met so far.The decision to use the atomic bombs is more clearly shown by this excerpt from Major General Charles Sweeny’s book The War’s End:“The only facts and numbers that are relevant to a discussion of Truman’s decision, therefore, are those facts and numbers the president had in front of him in July 1945. The staggering casualties at Iwo Jima and Okinawa were not projections, they were memorialized by rows of white crosses and hospital wards filled with broken bodies. In each case, Japanese military forces fought to the death, as they had done everywhere else. The casualty ratio as the United States drew closer to Japan was one to two.Based upon the realities, Truman’s military advisers, in a White House meeting on June 18, 1945, predicted that 30 to 35 percent of the 770,000-man invasion force could reasonably be expected to be killed or wounded during just the first thirty days of the invasion of Kyushu. Translation 231,000 to 269,000 dead or wounded Americans in the first thirty days of combat. It was estimated that it would take a hundred and twenty days to secure and occupy the entire island. By the end of that four-month period, Americans casualties would realistically reach around 395,000. And over one million of our troops still awaited the second prong of the invasion. In March 1946 they would wade ashore near Tokyo to take Honshu. These estimates assumed, of course, that all would go according to plan. Yet Okinawa had expected to fall in two weeks; instead the battle had dragged into eighty-two days, and even then it took several more weeks after that to secure the island.”The American fire bombing campaign had leveled over 60 cities killing hundreds of thousands of people, but the Japanese government still believed it could at least stalemate the war. The Japanese had over a half a million men under arms in China and felt that they could stop American invasion forces. Neither side had the slightest doubt that such an invasion, successful or not, would be immensely costly in lives. The Samurai spirit of the Japanese military ruled the government. By any reasonable criteria, the Japanese Empire had ceased to exist and it was defeated. But they would not surrender and they would not stop attacking. President Truman had signed the Potsdam Declaration with our allies on July 26, 1945 that mandated unconditional surrender for Japan, but the concepts outlined in the Japanese peace feelers would have left them with their empire virtually intact and not unconditional surrenderOn July 28, 1945, the Japanese government had publically addressed the Potsdam Declaration with “Mokusatsu” which the Japanese press mistranslated into English as “rejected” when it actually had a much more subtle meaning of “to kill with silence” or simply, “ignore.” The first and second kanji characters forming the expression meant “silence” and “kill” respectively, and their juxtaposition implies “to kill with silent contempt”, and not simply “reject.” With the apparent Japanese rejection of the Potsdam Declaration, the decision was made to use whatever force was needed to end American bloodshed.The Japanese had, in fact, put out “peace” feelers through the Russians, but the Japanese concept of “surrender” was altogether different than what was required by the Potsdam Declaration. They had approached the Russians to be mediators as shown in the Togo-sato correspondence. The Japanese in Japan thought that the Russians would be mediators, while the Japanese foreign minister in Russia was telling them the exact opposite! The Japanese in Japan were living in a dreamland. The Japanese government was imagining giving back the Pacific islands, and essentially keeping everything else. They were not imagining returning Burma, the Dutch colonies, the French colonies, occupation of Japan, or punishment of war criminals. Japan would surrender if certain conditions were met: (1) preservation of the emperor; (2) that Japan was not to be occupied; (3) that the Japanese armed forces be disbanded voluntarily; (4) that war criminals would be prosecuted by Japanese courts in Japan.Consider the effect such a decision NOT to use the atomic bombs would have had in the United States. How could anyone tell an American mother that the United States let her son be killed because bombing was too cruel? Ask any mother if she felt that it was OK for her child to die because we were reluctant to kill the enemy. Tell any mother that we let her son be killed because we didn’t want to be too cruel to the Japanese. The spirit of the time was much more than determined to eliminate the Japanese Empire. The Japanese had made a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor while in the middle of peace talks. They were duplicitous, brutal animals that were as cruel as Vlad the Impaler. They had shown no mercy whatsoever in their conquests and so deserved none. They had killed thousands at Pearl Harbor, killed thousands more in the Bataan Death march, and on Okinawa, the Japanese did not take a single American prisoner. They killed every single American they captured. Every last one. The attitude of the American people at that time was that the only good Jap was a dead Jap.It is important to note that the bombs weren’t dropped on civilian targets, but on military targets. President Truman’s diary has the following comment:“This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo]. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one.”All cities subject to bombing of any kind had leaflets dropped on them beforehand warning the citizens to evacuate. There were the-leaflets-dropped-before-the-Hiroshima-atomic-bomb, and there were the Truman-leaflets/ dropped around August 6 warning about the atomic bomb. In other leaflets, America-warned-Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki-citizens/ to leave their cities before they were destroyed. As a result of the March9/10, 1945 Operation Meetinghouse Bombing of Tokyo, the Japanese government ordered the evacuation of most schoolchildren from major cities and by April, 87% were evacuated to the countryside. Newspapers and leaflets in the Japanese language were printed on Saipan. From there, Air Force B-29s flying at 20,000 feet dropped 500-pound M-16 fire bomb containers converted into leaflet casings. These opened at 4,000 feet to deploy millions of leaflets, effectively covering a whole Japanese city with information. In just the last three months of formal psychological warfare, OWI produced and deployed over 63 million leaflets informing the Japanese people of the true status of the war and providing advance warning to 35 cities targeted for destruction. Postwar surveys showed that the Japanese people trusted the accuracy of the leaflets and many residents of the targeted cities prepared immediately to leave their homes. The Japanese government regarded the leaflets with such concern that it ordered the arrest of those who kept or even read the leaflets and did not turn them in to their local police stations. Outside Japan, leaflets promoting the surrender of individual Japanese soldiers and civilians were dropped near cave and tunnel hideouts on islands that had been captured by the Allies.At the start of the bombing campaign against Japan, a list of targets was prepared that included over 60 Japanese cities. 67 cities had been fire bombed with napalm by the time the atom bombs were ready for use. The last five unbombed targets were: Kokura, the site of many of Japan's largest munitions plants; Hiroshima, an embarkation port and industrial center that was the headquarters of the Second Area Army; Yokohama, an urban center for aircraft manufacture, machine tools, docks, electrical equipment and oil refineries; Niigata, a port with industrial facilities including steel and aluminum plants and an oil refinery; Kyoto, a major industrial center and Nagasaki , which had many heavy industrial factories including ship building an arms factory, and an engine works. We had destroyed over 60 cities, but the Japanese still would not surrender.Hiroshima was a city of both industrial and military significance. Hiroshima was the headquarters of the 2nd General Army 第2総軍 (日本軍) with responsibility for most of western Japan including Kyushu as well as a depot and port of embarkation in the middle of an urban industrial area. It was a good radar target and it was such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills that were likely to produce a focusing effect that would considerably increase the blast damage. Due to rivers, it was not a good incendiary target. It was classified as an AA(Prime)Target. It had a military garrison of about 40,000 men. Hiroshima was the primary target for the August 6 attack, with Kokura and Nagasaki as alternatives. Far from being an innocent city full of civilians, the garrison of 40,000 soldiers were doing calisthenics when the bomb exploded and were in fact the largest single group of casualties in the city.Nagasaki was a major industrial city making torpedoes and ammunition. Mitsubishi Steel, Orikami Ordinance Works and a large engine works dominated the production in the city in addition of a large garrison. There were also a major dockyard used for the transport of men and materials to the north. It, too, was a high priority target but was a secondary target that was only hit if the primary target was too cloud covered for a visual drop on the primary.The popular position today that the civilians were not part of the war effort is beyond ridiculous. Every person in every country of the world was contributing to the war effort of their country. Regardless of the country-Germany, Japan, England, the United States, Russia… Everything that every person could do was to help their country win. In the United States almost every family had a "Victory garden" so that they would use less food that could be sent to soldiers. Kids were sent out to pick up metal, extra pots and pans were donated to be melted down for aluminum and steel. In essence, every person in every country was fighting for the success of their country. They may not have been carrying a gun, but they were an essential part of the war effort. Saying that a civilian was not important ignores that fact that the soldier would have no gun, ammunition, food, or transportation without those civilians.In Japan, a large factory was essentially an assembly facility for all the pieces/parts that were being made in the town around the factory. Major large parts were made in the factory where large machine tools were used, but all the small parts were being made in people’s houses. It has to be understood that Japanese industry had a LOT more light industry or cottage industry than there was in the US. If a factory needed 100 special screws per day, they would have some man in his house with a lathe making screws. If they needed a thousand, they had 10 men making screws.In some respects, this was more efficient than the Western approach because there were many advantages. A worker did not commute. His factory workplace was in a room in his house. He could get up have a bite to eat, and take a few steps to his workshop. There was no need for a large lunchroom or big cafeteria at the assembly factory since the workers were mostly at home eating at their own tables. The machine tools were well taken care of since each one was the personal responsibility of one man. Transportation and the need for fuel were significantly lowered since the worker didn’t have to go anywhere. You don’t need a car or bus if someone comes around once or twice a day to pick up your production.I have a Japanese torpedo gyro in its box and the screws in it are hand finished. That would be unthinkable in the US. It also meant that some of those civilians were a lot more useful to the factory than might otherwise be apparent.General Curtiss LeMay was reviewing the results of the “precision” bombing by his B-29s when he noticed that the residential area around the aiming point, a factory, had been burned out, but each house had something sticking up from the burned out ruins. Some analysis determined that all of those houses had machine tools, like a drill press or milling machine in it. He realized that he could stop production much more effectively by destroying the houses than trying to do pinpoint bombing. He then went from high-level “precision” bombing, which usually missed, to low-level carpet bombing which destroyed the workers houses and their machine tools. Burning down their houses slowed production a lot more in Japan than it would in the US because it not only hurt or killed the man and his family, it also destroyed some of the manufacturing equipment, too. In an analysis of the Bombing of Tokyo, the following observation was made:“Damage to Tokyo's heavy industry was slight until firebombing destroyed much of the light industry that was used as an integral source for small machine parts and time-intensive processes. Firebombing also killed or made homeless many workers who had been taking part in war industry. Over 50% of Tokyo's industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city's output in half. The destruction and damage was especially severe in the eastern areas of the city.”In addition, the US was dropping warning leaflets on all the cities they planned to bomb. The Kempeitai (the Japanese secret police similar to the Gestapo, only much more brutal) would beat you or kill you if they caught you with one.In addition to the American plans for an invasion, the British were also planning an invasion of their own with Operation_Zipper to capture part of Malaya, and Operation_Mailfist, for the reoccupation of Singapore. These were to take place shortly after the invasion by the American Operation Downfall but were aborted by the surrender of Japan. The British were very concerned about the possibility of continued Japanese resistance that would have resulted in the deaths of all of the prisoners of war held in the prison camps, along with the many civilians interned since the outbreak of the war.Even with the certain identification of an atomic device both with the announcement by President Truman and the confirmation by Japanese nuclear scientists on site, the Japanese government still wouldn’t surrender. So we had destroyed over 60 cities, and one with an atomic bomb, and the Japanese still would not surrender.With the Japanese continuing the war effort, a second city, Kokura, was designated as the target for the second atomic bomb. Nagasaki was designated as the secondary target if Kokura was not available. Three attempts were made to bomb Kokura, but the requirement for a visual bombing point could not be met and the plane was diverted to Nagasaki.The Japanese Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, also known as the "Big Six" was split 3-3 between the peace and war factions. Later, the full cabinet met but was still unable to reach a decision. That night, an imperial conference was held in Tokyo with the Emperor who indicated that he wished for the fighting to stop. Even so, when a message was sent to the US, it stipulated that the Emperor would retain his rights and prerogatives. But on August 11, in conformance to the Potsdam Declaration, the US specified that the Emperor would be subject to the authority of the Supreme Allied Commander. On August 12, the cabinet was still deadlocked over whether to accept the terms or not. The next day, both the Supreme Council and the cabinet were still deadlocked. On the morning of August 14, 1945, the Emperor called a meeting of the cabinet and declared that he accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and asked (ordered) them to accept the terms. That evening, the Emperor signed the Imperial Rescript accepting the terms and that night the message is sent to the Allies through Swiss diplomatic channels. At 4:00 pm, Truman learned of the decision. At 0800 August 15, 1945, American troops are told of the surrender. It should be clear that even with the bombs being dropped and the Russians declaring war, there was still a very great deal of reluctance by the military to surrender. It was only the personal intervention of the Emperor-an unheard of event in itself-that the Japanese finally did surrender.When one reads the transcript of the Imperial Rescript-the Gyokuon-hōsō, or “Jewel Voice Broadcast” one is struck by the singular absence of the word “surrender!” The Emperor said that he has ordered the government to accept the terms of the Joint Declaration-the Potsdam Declaration and for the fighting to stop. Nothing about surrendering. Even at this ultimate moment of capitulation, there was still no mention of the word “surrender.” He even justified the attack on the US and Britain to ensure Japan’s “self preservation and stabilization.” He expressed sorrow for the Japanese people who have suffered from the war, but none for the barbaric treatment of those under the control of Japanese forces.The modern day revisionists and apologists completely ignore several important considerations about the bombing campaign. Up to the moment of Pearl Harbor, the population of the United States was very isolationist. The general opinion was “Let those Europeans stew in their own juices.” We didn’t want to get involved in another Great War. The attack on Pearl Harbor changed that in a single day. By 1945, we had lost hundreds of thousands in dead and wounded fighting a war we did not start or want. We had spent treasure to supply the world with the weapons of war – again - a war we didn’t start or want. The American people were united in their hatred of the Japanese. The Japanese had made an unprovoked attack without a declaration of war. A sneak attack killing thousands of Americans while we were still at peace. The US military knew that Japan was militarily defeated by 1943, and by1944 had no chance for winning the war. Now, even when obviously defeated, they would not surrender. They would commit suicide before surrendering. Their concept of surrender was such that it would dishonor themselves, their families and far worse, their ancestors. When they said, ”Death before dishonor,” they really meant it in a very literal sense. The Japanese mindset was so fundamentally different that we in the West simply could not understand why they wouldn't surrender when they were defeated. Until the Japanese realized it was time to surrender, the war would continue.It might be noted that General “Stormin’ Norman” Schwartzkopf wrote a paper when he was a cadet that in 1945 the Quartermaster Corps of the Army ordered 750,000 Purple Hearts prior to the invasion because, based on the casualties so far in the Pacific Theater, that is how many US casualties they expected during the invasions. Modern day revisionists should consider what the people on scene, at that time and place expected.The Americans long knew about the insanely brutal Japanese Army. The Nanking Massacre with 300,000 dead. They said you could smell the city from many miles away from all the dead. Tens of millions more throughout China. The infamous Bataan Death March on which 7,000–10,000 US soldiers died or were murdered. The Americans felt that these people were far worse than animals since animals kill for food or self-defense. This was done out of brutal savagery unknown since the Mongols swept across Asia 600 years before. They had tortured and killed many of the men that they had captured. There were POW’s scattered throughout Asia that were brutalized, tortured and killed daily. There were thousands more civilian internees captured at the beginning of the war who would also be massacred at the start of an invasion. In the Philippines, in Manila, the Americans lost 1,000 dead, and the Japanese lost 17,000-but there were none who surrendered. And the Japanese had massacred over 100,000 Philippine civilians in Manila alone.The Japanese had correctly identified the beaches where the Americans would have to invade their islands. The Japanese had planned a final stand with the Ketsugo Operation that was being prepared by a stream of reinforcements from the other islands. Over 5000 aircraft and a million gallons of fuel had been accumulated in secret caves ready to be launched against the expected invasion fleet. Our photoreconnaissance clearly showed that they were not planning to surrender, but to fight to the bitter end. They had thousands of cannon and machine guns aimed at those beaches. The fire bombings of the cities had killed far more people than the atomic bombs did, but the atomic bombs had become a change in quantity that was a change in quality. Even at the very end, it was only the direct intervention of the Emperor who only just barely prevailed over the military who wanted to fight on.There were also other reasons to end the war as quickly as possible. The Japanese were running out of food and we knew that orders had gone out to kill all prisoners of war. The Japanese held 168,000 prisoners of war! In fact, in preparation for that event, the Japanese had forced the POWs to dig trenches for their own graves. It was certain that when we started to invade the home islands, all the prisoners in Japanese hands would be massacred. Besides the prisoners of war, there were also tens of thousands of civilian internees who would undoubtedly be slaughtered. In addition, there were hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops scattered throughout Asia as garrison troops. They had to be ordered to surrender or they could have created a hundred Nanking's when the invasion took place. So there was more than simply defeating the Japanese Army, there had to be a direction of surrender, or at least to stop fighting.The terrible possibility of an American” Lost Generation” like that of England and France must have been one of the reasons why President Truman sanctioned the use of the atomic bombs. He was a combat proven officer in WWI and would rather drop the bombs than lose the lives of his troops.Those objections to surrender were so strong that even though the Emperor of Japan had made it known the war was to end; a coup against their own god, called the Kyūjō_incident was planned. This was almost beyond belief because it was a rebellion against their own Arahitogami (living god). A coup was started, but by a series of fortuitous events, failed. The Imperial Rescript was read and the Japanese surrendered.You can also find a discussion on Quora at Who decided to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Was it Harry Truman?Mitsuo Fuchida, the pilot who guided the first wave of Japanese planes in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, met Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, who had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. He told Paul, “You did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude of that time, how fanatic they were. They’d die for the Emperor. Every man woman and child would resist the invasion with sticks and stones if necessary.”The Japanese have a saying that sometimes the greatest mercy is to show no mercy. We showed no mercy and saved millions of lives!We had bombed Japanese cities till there were almost none left, but they would not surrender. We dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, destroying the city, but they would not surrender. Finally, the second atomic bomb and the declaration of war by Russia made them come to their senses: They had lost the war and it was time to surrender.For further enlightenment you might visit:The Ketsu-Go plan for the opposing the final invasion:http://fas.org/irp/eprint/arens/chap4.htmBombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - World War II - HISTORY.comThe Decision to Drop the Bomb [ushistory.org]Harry S. TrumanThe Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and NagasakiPacific WarOperation BarbarossaThe National WW II MuseumCurtis LeMayThe LeMay Bombing LeafletThe Information War in the Pacific, 1945WW2 US Warning Leaflet/LeMay Bombing LeafletCurtis LeMay and bombing strategyHague Conventions of 1899 and 1907Airborne leaflet propagandaAir raids on JapanBombing of TokyoConcept of Eight Crown Cords Under one Roofhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakkō_ichiuThe Southern Expansion Doctrinehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanshin-ronConcept of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity SphereGreater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere - WikipediaThe Potsdam Declaration (explanation)Potsdam_DeclarationPotsdam Declaration-Texthttp://www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/c06.html Text of Potsdam DeclarationSurrender of Japanese Forces in the Far East at the end of WWII:http://www.taiwandocuments.org/japansurrender.htmJapanese war crimes and atrocities:http://histclo.com/essay/war/ww2...10 Japanese Atrocities From World War II - ListverseJapanese biological weapon attacks:Operation Cherry Blossoms at NightMore atom bombs to be ready in days/weeks/months:http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/1945-Hull-and-Seaman-Third-Shot.pdfJapanese germ warfare:Unit 731Ketsugo plan:http://fas.org/irp/eprint/arens/chap4.htmSurrender considerations:http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu...Gyokusiahttps://shatteredjewels.wordpress.com/about/Targeting rational:http://www.dannen.com/decision/t...Japanese caused casualties:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wo...Bombing of Tokyo:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo...Hirohito’s rescript ordering the end to fighting NOT surrender (17 August, 1945):http://www.taiwandocuments.org/s...The Franck Report advocated the use on an uninhabited island, but was eventually rejectedhttp://www.dannen.com/decision/f... of Hiroshima and NagasakiAtomic bombings of Hiroshima and NagasakiHow the Atomic Bombs saved 4,000,000 lives:http://www.freerepublic.com/focu...Hiroshima Saved Lives:Hiroshima-saved-livesThe bombs were dropped to save American lives:Why Drop an Atomic Bomb? To Save Lives!CIA information war in the Pacific:The Information War in the Pacific, 1945Much good information:The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War IINSA Intelligence information:http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/...Japanese fire balloon attacks:Fire balloons5th Imperial Conference, 2 July 1941. Japan’s decision to go south with the creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.www.jacar.go.jp/english/n...6th Imperial Conference of 6 September 1941. The decision to make war against the United States, Great Britain and The Netherlands in October 1941, if the United States didn’t stop the embargo.The US-Japan War Talks as seen in official documents7th Imperial Conference of 5 November 1941. Various positions for negotiations with the United States to avoid war.http://www.jacar.go.jp/english/nichibei/popup/pop_22.html8th Imperial Conference of 1 December 1941. Japan decides to go to war to go to war with the United States, Great Britain and The Netherlands.The US-Japan War Talks as seen in official documentsMajor General Charles W. Sweeny, commander of the Nagasaki bombing, testifies as to the reasons for the necessity of the atomic bombs May 11, 1995.https://eahnc.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/senate-testimony-of-major-general-charles-w-sweeney-may-11-1995/The War’s End by Major General Charles Sweeny (excerpted)http://www.socnet.com/showthread.php?t=107143The Japanese Secret Police (Kempeitai)http://military.wikia.com/wiki/KempeitaiTarget committee, Los Alamos, May 10-11, 1945http://www.dannen.com/decision/targets.html#fOperation Zipper:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_ZipperOperation Mailfist:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_MailfistOperation Kikisui:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_KikusuiThe Kyujo Incident:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incidentForeign Commerce and shipping of the Japanese Empire:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_commerce_and_shipping_of_Empire_of_JapanThe Japanese declaration of war signed 2 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor:http://www.emersonkent.com/historic_documents/wwii_japan_war_declaration.htmFor those who think we were worse than the Japanese, here’s a little educational reading:The Chichijima Incident where the Japanese captured, tortured, killed and ate 8 American airmen. George Bush escaped.Chichijima_incidenthttp://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres_pacific.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimeshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Chinahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_MassacreUnit 731: OverviewUNIT 731 - ExperimentsUnit 731 - WikipediaNanking Massacre - WikipediaThe Nanjing Massacre: Scenes from a Hideous Slaughter 75 Years Ago | TIME | Current & Breaking News | National & World UpdatesThe massacre at Andamans-A slice of historyhttp://www.tribuneindia.com/1998/98dec12/saturday/head4.htmThis is a VERY long read – over 1300 pages- but is the trial results of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/PTO/IMTFE/index.htmlSeveral references about “Comfort Women”:Dutch Comfort Women also want apology from Japan over WWII war crimesAllies in adversity, Australia and the Dutch in the Pacific War: Comfort womenThe Comfort Women in the Netherland East Indies (Indonesia)http://www.awf.or.jp/e1/netherlands.htmlDocuments detail how Imperial military forced Dutch females to be 'comfort women' | The Japan TimesVer: 081217

It was the only way to get the Japanese to stop fighting. The people who argue against the use of bombs seem to have no idea of the circumstances of their use and no idea of what the alternatives were. Apparently, people who take this position don't understand that we were attacked by Japan. We didn't attack them. They attacked us! We didn't start it, they did. And the only way to stop them from killing was to drop bombs.Japan had begun a war of aggression in 1931 with the invasion of China. Imperial Japan waged the Great East Asia War (Daitoa Senso) to supposedly “liberate” the Asian peoples from the yoke of Western Imperialism. This “selfless goal” was to bring the enlightened modernization of Meiji Japan to the hopelessly backward Asians who were under the heel of the West. The United States was appalled at the brutal invasion of a huge but largely helpless country and began to apply diplomatic pressure to end the invasion, but without success.The (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Alls_Policy) Three-Alls-Policy (三光作戦 Sankō Sakusen) was abhorrent beyond belief. It started in 1938 and meant a scorched earth policy in China in which the policy was implemented as, “Kill all. Burn All. Loot all.” General Yasuji Okamura of the North China Area saw to it that this was done with the utmost brutality in Hepei Province. A policy that was personally approved of by Hirohito. Post war evaluation estimated that this policy resulted in 2.7 million Chinese deaths.Finally, in 1941, the United States embargoed oil and steel and effected an economic blockade in order to compel Japan to stop. Japan had two options, withdraw, or roll the dice and go to war with the West. On December 7, 1941, she chose war. Now, four years later, Japan stood on the edge of defeat, but her fanatical military regime would not surrender even though the end was obviously near.Truman had three options open to him: drop the atomic bombs, invade and blockade. In June, 1945, after Germany had surrendered, the Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production Albert_Speer, was debriefed and it was found that the massive bombing campaign against Germany hadn’t done nearly the damage thought and that production had increased up until Germany was being occupied. It was supposed that the same situation applied to Japan and that it was not as seriously damaged as the recon photos indicated. If the bombing campaign had not worked as well as it had appeared, then an invasion was unavoidable. It had also been proposed to drop a bomb on an uninhabited island as a demonstration. This was considered and rejected for several reasons. First, the Japanese had demonstrated that regardless of the odds, the Japanese military didn’t surrender. This had been proved in hundreds of battles. Then again, dropping a big noisy, flashbulb wasn’t going to impress an army like that. In addition, this was one of the most expensive weapons ever developed, second only to the B-29, and not using it that would cost even one American life was totally unacceptable. Finally, the US had only made 3 nuclear devices, and expended one of them as proof they would work. That meant that only two deliverable weapons were available.By August, 1945, the supposedly defeated Japanese Empire was costing the United States 900 casualties a day. We had firebombed over 60 cities and destroyed most of their factories, yet they were still fighting back vigorously. They now had a few radar guided anti-aircraft guns that were taking a toll of our B-29s and their fighters were still destroying them, even if it meant ramming them. Records indicate that the 20th Army Air Force lost 111 Super Fortresses by ramming, and only 38 were known as shot down. The war was apparently over by our accounts, but not from the Japanese point of view. General Mattis more recently expressed the proper attitude towards the enemy that modern revisionists do not understand: “No war is over until the enemy says it’s over. We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote.” And the Japanese wouldn’t say it was over.Let us digress for a moment to better understand the Japanese government’s position and attitude and how this affected the course of the war and the attitude of the Japanese soldier.The Japanese government had adopted the principle of the Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosperity_Sphere in 1940. This guided the expansion of the Japanese Empire to encompass the cultural and economic unity of eastern Asia under the control of Japan. It would be a bloc of self-sufficient countries free of Western powers. A 1943 document, An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus reinforced this position showing that the exploitation of other countries was a policy separate from the war. It states that the Japanese, the Yamato Race, were superior to all other races and that the intention of the Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere was domination over Asia and the Pacific region.Another principle was the Southern Expansion Doctrine (南進論 Nanshin-ron) which postulated that Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands were Japan’s sphere of influence. This was greatly formalized in the 1920’s and 1930’s with the Japanese takeover of the German Pacific Empire which included the Caroline, Mariana, and Marshall Islands and Palau. These were felt necessary for Japan’s security and controlled by the Imperial Japanese Navy.Another principle of Japanese doctrine was Hakkō_ichiu (八紘一宇) which was that the Japanese people, being superior to all others, were destined to rule. Hakkō ichiu, literally "eight crown cords, one roof" (i.e. "all the world under one roof") meant that the Emperor of Japan was to rule an empire, not of just the islands, but also many conquered lands. Consequently, not just the people, but the military had the concept that whomever they conquered deserved it. They should be happy to have become a part of the enlightened ones even though the Japanese felt that all other peoples were lower than dogs.Gyokusai was a Japanese philosophy has been expressed as, “Better to be a shattered jewel than a roofing tile.” The Gyokusai ideology reached its peak during WWII and was expressed in action, as honorable death (ichioku gyokusai, ie, shattering jewels into a million pieces) in combat was far preferable to living as a prisoner. This philosophy is outside Bushido or any religion and was part of the Japanese psyche applying to soldiers and civilians alike. What is Gyokusai? 玉砕とは何でしょう? The Japanese Army regularly chanted the mantra, “Whether I float as a corpse in the waters or sink beneath the grasses of the mountainside I willingly die for the emperor,” and concluded “The life of a warrior is like a cherry blossom which lasts but three days.” There were many slogans but towards the end of the war one of them was, “One plane for one battleship. One boat for one ship. One man for one tank or ten men.” Another slogan to indoctrinate the warrior spirit was, “Duty is weightier than a mountain, but death is lighter than a feather.” An example of this is Kazuo_Sakamaki, an ensign in the Japanese Navy who was captured when his submarine ran aground after Pearl Harbor and he requested to be shot or allowed to commit suicide.The Allies had won the war in Europe and were now turning their power on the Japanese Empire. The determination of the Japanese to literally fight to the last man had been demonstrated on Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and a hundred other battles. It was anticipated that the invasion of Japan, Operation_Downfall, would involve up to a million US casualties and incidentally wipe out the Japanese population. Operation Downfall was the combination of Olympic , the invasion of Kyushu scheduled for November 1, 1945, and Coronet , the invasion of Honshu scheduled for March 1, 1946. The Japanese estimates were that 20 million Japanese would die. Diplomatic and military decrypts had shown that the garrison of Kyushu had increased from 150,000 men to 545,000 while all of Japan now had a garrison of over 2,000,000.The spring and summer of 1945 saw the Japanese planning and preparing for the Ketsu-Go, or the Decisive Battle for the Homeland (see http://fas.org/irp/eprint/arens/chap4.htm for a more complete discussion). All school classes were cancelled which freed up more than 13,000,000 young people for the coming battle. By the summer of 1945, these people were divided into three types: Special guard Forces composed of older men who were assigned to build fortifications and transport supplies. The Independent Companies who were mobilized reservists who were building camouflaged landing strips for kamikaze’s and were trained for combat. And then there were the Civilian Volunteer Corps formed in June 1945, who were everyone else above the age of 15 and who were set to make munitions, food, and making last ditch weapons. The West was fighting against an enemy where even the women and children were being trained and armed with sharpened bamboo poles to kill the Americans. They were instructed to, “always thrust tall Yankees in their belly.” In short, everyone above the age of 15, male or female, was going to be a soldier to defend the Homeland. Around 2 million civilians were part of the Patriotic Citizens Fighting Corps that were trained for combat even if it was only with sharpened bamboo spears. By August, 1945, the Japanese had accumulated 5,350 airplanes, over 1,000,000 gallons of gasoline and 6,200 fast suicide boats in preparation for the forthcoming American invasion.This indoctrination and philosophy led to the approval and creation of Operation_Kikusui which was the organization of the kamakazi attacks during the American attack on Okinawa. The attacks were called “kikusui” or “floating chrysanthemums.” These are the well known and (in)famous kamakazi attacks where a pilot would dive his aircraft into an American ship. This philosophy also inspired the soldiers to make Banzai charges into machine guns.These are the people who simply didn’t surrender. They literally jump off of cliffs to their death before surrender. Look at the statistics that faced the Americans. In 1943, at Buna, New Guinea, out of 14,000 Japanese troops, not one surrendered. In 1943, on Attu, Alaska, out of 2,500 troops, there were 28 prisoners, some wounded. On Tarawa, out of 3,600 troops, 17 surrendered. On Saipan, there were 32,000 troops, and there were 921 prisoners. On Peleliu, out of 10,900 Japanese soldiers, 19 were captured, along with 183 laborers. On Iwo Jima, there were 21,000 troops, and 216 surrendered and American losses were 7,000 killed and eighteen thousand wounded. In the Philippines, 56,263 Japanese soldiers were killed, but only 389 surrendered. Just in the battle for Manila, 1,000 US soldiers died, but the entire garrison of 17,000 Japanese soldiers fought and died to the very last man-and over 100,000 civilians were massacred. On Okinawa, graves registration buried 110,701 dead and 7,401 were captured. Simply put, these are not an enemy you can scare. They didn’t scare. They looked Death in the face up close and personal, face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball, and didn’t blink. With very, very few exceptions, they simply wouldn’t surrender.The loss ratio between American and Japanese losses had become alarming. Six out of ten US casualties in the Pacific took place in the last 11 months of the war. In Luzon, in the Philippines, the Americans had lost 31,000 casualties and the Japanese 156,000 or a ratio of about 1 American to 5 Japanese. On Iwo Jima, the loss ratio had fallen to 1 American to 1.25 Japanese. As the battle on Okinawa raged, the ratio was 1 American casualty for 1.6 Japanese losses. In addition to the casualties of soldiers, the Americans had also lost 12 destroyers, 15 amphibious ships and 9 others with 386 damaged in addition to over 760 aircraft and 225 tanks. It was clear that any battle on Japanese soil would result in even more fanatical resistance than the Americans had met so far.The decision to use the atomic bombs is more clearly shown by this excerpt from Major General Charles Sweeny’s book The War’s End:“The only facts and numbers that are relevant to a discussion of Truman’s decision, therefore, are those facts and numbers the president had in front of him in July 1945. The staggering casualties at Iwo Jima and Okinawa were not projections, they were memorialized by rows of white crosses and hospital wards filled with broken bodies. In each case, Japanese military forces fought to the death, as they had done everywhere else. The casualty ratio as the United States drew closer to Japan was one to two.Based upon the realities, Truman’s military advisers, in a White House meeting on June 18, 1945, predicted that 30 to 35 percent of the 770,000-man invasion force could reasonably be expected to be killed or wounded during just the first thirty days of the invasion of Kyushu. Translation 231,000 to 269,000 dead or wounded Americans in the first thirty days of combat. It was estimated that it would take a hundred and twenty days to secure and occupy the entire island. By the end of that four-month period, Americans casualties would realistically reach around 395,000. And over one million of our troops still awaited the second prong of the invasion. In March, 1946, they would wade ashore near Tokyo to take Honshu.These estimates assumed, of course, that all would go according to plan. Yet Okinawa had expected to fall in two weeks; instead the battle had dragged into eighty-two days, and even then, it took several more weeks after that to secure the island.”The Japanese had over a half a million men under arms in China and felt that they could stop American invasion forces. Neither side had the slightest doubt that such an invasion, successful or not, would be immensely costly in lives. The Samurai spirit of the Japanese military ruled the government. By any reasonable criteria, the Japanese Empire had ceased to exist and it was defeated. But they would not surrender and they would not stop attacking. President Truman had signed the Potsdam Declaration with our allies on July 26, 1945 that mandated unconditional surrender for Japan, but the concepts outlined in the Japanese peace feelers would have left them with their empire virtually intact and not unconditional surrenderOn July 28, 1945, the Japanese government had publically addressed the Potsdam Declaration with “Mokusatsu” which the Japanese press mistranslated into English as “rejected” when it actually had a much more subtle meaning of “to kill with silence” or simply, “ignore.” The first and second kanji characters forming the expression meant “silence” and “kill” respectively, and their juxtaposition implies “to kill with silent contempt”, and not simply “reject.” With the apparent Japanese rejection of the Potsdam Declaration, the decision was made to use whatever force was needed to end American bloodshed.The Japanese had, in fact, put out “peace” feelers through the Russians, but the Japanese concept of “surrender” was altogether different than what was required by the Potsdam Declaration. They had approached the Russians to be mediators as shown in the Togo-sato correspondence. The Japanese in Japan thought that the Russians would be mediators, while the Japanese foreign minister in Russia was telling them the exact opposite! The Japanese in Japan were living in a dreamland. The Japanese government was imagining giving back the Pacific islands, and essentially keeping everything else. They were not imagining returning Burma, the Dutch colonies, the French colonies, occupation of Japan, or punishment of war criminals. Japan would surrender if certain conditions were met: (1) preservation of the emperor; (2) that Japan was not to be occupied; (3) that the Japanese armed forces be disbanded voluntarily; (4) that war criminals would be prosecuted by Japanese courts in Japan.Consider the effect such a decision NOT to use the atomic bombs would have had in the United States. How could anyone tell an American mother that the United States let her son be killed because bombing was too cruel? Ask any mother if she felt that it was OK for her child to die because we were reluctant to kill the enemy. Tell any mother that we let her son be killed because we didn’t want to be too cruel to the Japanese. The spirit of the time was much more than determined to eliminate the Japanese Empire. The Japanese had made a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor while in the middle of peace talks. They were duplicitous, brutal animals that were as cruel as Vlad the Impaler. They had shown no mercy whatsoever in their conquests and so deserved none. They had killed thousands at Pearl Harbor, killed thousands more in the Bataan Death march, and on Okinawa, the Japanese did not take a single American prisoner. They killed every single American they captured. Every last one. The attitude of the American people at that time was that the only good Jap was a dead Jap.It is important to note that the bombs weren’t dropped on civilian targets, but on military targets. President Truman’s diary has the following comment:“This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo]. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one.”All cities subject to bombing of any kind had leaflets dropped on them beforehand warning the citizens to evacuate. There were the-leaflets-dropped-before-the-Hiroshima-atomic-bomb, and there were the Truman-leaflets/ dropped around August 6 warning about the atomic bomb. In other leaflets, America-warned-Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki-citizens/ to leave their cities before they were destroyed. As a result of the March9/10, 1945 Operation Meetinghouse Bombing of Tokyo, the Japanese government ordered the evacuation of most schoolchildren from major cities and by April, 87% were evacuated to the countryside. Newspapers and leaflets in the Japanese language were printed on Saipan. From there, Air Force B-29s flying at 20,000 feet dropped 500-pound M-16 fire bomb containers converted into leaflet casings. These opened at 4,000 feet to deploy millions of leaflets, effectively covering a whole Japanese city with information. In just the last three months of formal psychological warfare, OWI produced and deployed over 63 million leaflets informing the Japanese people of the true status of the war and providing advance warning to 35 cities targeted for destruction. Postwar surveys showed that the Japanese people trusted the accuracy of the leaflets and many residents of the targeted cities prepared immediately to leave their homes. The Japanese government regarded the leaflets with such concern that it ordered the arrest of those who kept or even read the leaflets and did not turn them in to their local police stations. Outside Japan, leaflets promoting the surrender of individual Japanese soldiers and civilians were dropped near cave and tunnel hideouts on islands that had been captured by the Allies.At the start of the bombing campaign against Japan, a list of targets was prepared that included over 60 Japanese cities. 67 cities had been fire bombed with napalm by the time the atom bombs were ready for use. The last five unbombed targets were: Kokura, the site of many of Japan's largest munitions plants; Hiroshima, an embarkation port and industrial center that was the headquarters of the Second Area Army; Yokohama, an urban center for aircraft manufacture, machine tools, docks, electrical equipment and oil refineries; Niigata, a port with industrial facilities including steel and aluminum plants and an oil refinery; Kyoto, a major industrial center and Nagasaki , which had many heavy industrial factories including ship building an arms factory, and an engine works. We had destroyed over 60 cities, but the Japanese still would not surrender. The final decision was to make Hiroshima as a primary target, then Kokura as the next with Nagasaki as an alternate.Hiroshima was a city of both industrial and military significance. Hiroshima was the headquarters of the 2nd General Army 第2総軍 (日本軍) with responsibility for most of western Japan including Kyushu as well as a depot and port of embarkation in the middle of an urban industrial area. It was a good radar target and it was such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills that were likely to produce a focusing effect that would considerably increase the blast damage. Due to rivers, it was not a good incendiary target. It was classified as an AA(Prime)Target. It had a military garrison of about 40,000 men. Hiroshima was the primary target for the August 6 attack, with Kokura and Nagasaki as alternatives. Far from being an innocent city full of civilians, the garrison of 40,000 soldiers were doing calisthenics when the bomb exploded and were in fact the largest single group of casualties in the city.Nagasaki was a major industrial city making torpedoes and ammunition. Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works, on the south side, Mitsubishi-Urakami Torpedo Works on the north, and a large engine works dominated the production in the city in addition to a large military garrison. There was also a major dockyard used for the transport of men and materials to the north. It, too, was a high priority target but was a secondary target that was only hit if the primary target was too cloud covered for a visual drop on the primary.The popular position today that the civilians were not part of the war effort is beyond ridiculous. Every person in every country of the world was contributing to the war effort of their country. Regardless of the country-Germany, Japan, England, the United States, Russia… Everything that every person could do was to help their country win. In the United States, almost every family had a "Victory garden" so that they would use less food that could be sent to soldiers. Kids were sent out to pick up metal, extra pots and pans were donated to be melted down for aluminum and steel. In essence, every person in every country was fighting for the success of their country. They may not have been carrying a gun, but they were an essential part of the war effort. Saying that a civilian was not important ignores that fact that the soldier would have no gun, ammunition, food, or transportation without those civilians.In Japan, a large factory was essentially an assembly facility for all the pieces/parts that were being made in the town around the factory. Major large parts were made in the factory where large machine tools were used, but all the small parts were being made in people’s houses. It has to be understood that Japanese industry had a LOT more light industry or cottage industry than there was in the US. If a factory needed 100 special screws per day, they would have some man in his house with a lathe making screws. If they needed a thousand, they had 10 men making screws.In some respects, this was more efficient than the Western approach because there were many advantages. Fewer workers commuted. His factory workplace was in a room in his house. He could get up have a bite to eat, and take a few steps to his workshop. There was no need for a large lunchroom or big cafeteria at the assembly factory since the workers were mostly at home eating at their own tables. The machine tools were well taken care of since each one was the personal responsibility of one man. Transportation and the need for fuel were significantly lowered since the worker didn’t have to go anywhere. You don’t need a car or bus if someone comes around once or twice a day to pick up your production.I have a Japanese torpedo gyro in its box and the screws in it are hand finished. That would be unthinkable in the US. It also meant that some of those civilians were a lot more useful to the factory than might otherwise be apparent.General Curtiss LeMay was reviewing the results of the “precision” bombing by his B-29s when he noticed that the residential area around the aiming point, a factory, had been burned out, but each house had something sticking up from the burned-out ruins. Some analysis determined that all of those houses had machine tools, like a drill press or milling machine in it. He realized that he could stop production much more effectively by destroying the houses than trying to do pinpoint bombing. He then went from high-level “precision” bombing, which usually missed, to low-level carpet bombing which destroyed the workers houses and their machine tools. Burning down their houses slowed production a lot more in Japan than it would in the US because it not only hurt or killed the man and his family, it also destroyed some of the manufacturing equipment, too. In an analysis of the Bombing of Tokyo, the following observation was made:“Damage to Tokyo's heavy industry was slight until firebombing destroyed much of the light industry that was used as an integral source for small machine parts and time-intensive processes. Firebombing also killed or made homeless many workers who had been taking part in war industry. Over 50% of Tokyo's industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city's output in half. The destruction and damage was especially severe in the eastern areas of the city.”In addition, the US was dropping warning leaflets on all the cities they planned to bomb. The Kempeitai (the Japanese secret police similar to the Gestapo, only much more brutal) would beat you or kill you if they caught you with one.In addition to the American plans for an invasion, the British were also planning an invasion of their own with Operation_Zipper to capture part of Malaya, and Operation_Mailfist, for the reoccupation of Singapore. These were to take place shortly after the invasion by the American Operation Downfall but were aborted by the surrender of Japan. The British were very concerned about the possibility of continued Japanese resistance that would have resulted in the deaths of all of the prisoners of war held in the prison camps, along with the many civilians interned since the outbreak of the war.Even with the certain identification of an atomic device both with the announcement by President Truman and the confirmation by Japanese nuclear scientists on site, the Japanese government still wouldn’t surrender. So, we had destroyed over 60 cities, and one with an atomic bomb, and the Japanese still would not surrender.With the Japanese continuing the war effort, a second city, Kokura, was designated as the target for the second atomic bomb. Nagasaki was designated as the secondary target if Kokura was not available. Three attempts were made to bomb Kokura, but the requirement for a visual bombing point could not be met and the plane was diverted to Nagasaki.The Japanese Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, also known as the "Big Six" was split 3-3 between the peace and war factions. Later, the full cabinet met but was still unable to reach a decision. That night, an imperial conference was held in Tokyo with the Emperor who indicated that he wished for the fighting to stop. Even so, when a message was sent to the US, it stipulated that the Emperor would retain his rights and prerogatives. But on August 11, in conformance to the Potsdam Declaration, the US specified that the Emperor would be subject to the authority of the Supreme Allied Commander. On August 12, the cabinet was still deadlocked over whether to accept the terms or not. The next day, both the Supreme Council and the cabinet were still deadlocked. On the morning of August 14, 1945, the Emperor called a meeting of the cabinet and declared that he accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and asked (ordered) them to accept the terms. That evening, the Emperor signed the Imperial Rescript accepting the terms and that night the message is sent to the Allies through Swiss diplomatic channels. At 4:00 pm, Truman learned of the decision. At 0800 August 15, 1945, American troops are told of the surrender. It should be clear that even with the bombs being dropped and the Russians declaring war, there was still a very great deal of reluctance by the military to surrender. It was only the personal intervention of the Emperor-an unheard of event in itself-that the Japanese finally did surrender.When one reads the transcript of the Imperial Rescript-the Gyokuon-hōsō, or “Jewel Voice Broadcast” one is struck by the singular absence of the word “surrender!” The Emperor said that he has ordered the government to accept the terms of the Joint Declaration-the Potsdam Declaration and for the fighting to stop. Nothing about surrendering. Even at this ultimate moment of capitulation, there was still no mention of the word “surrender.” He even justified the attack on the US and Britain to ensure Japan’s “self-preservation and stabilization.” He expressed sorrow for the Japanese people who have suffered from the war, but none for the barbaric treatment of those under the control of Japanese forces.The modern-day revisionists and apologists completely ignore several important considerations about the bombing campaign. Up to the moment of Pearl Harbor, the population of the United States was very isolationist. The general opinion was “Let those Europeans stew in their own juices.” We didn’t want to get involved in another Great War. The attack on Pearl Harbor changed that in a single day. By 1945, we had lost hundreds of thousands in dead and wounded fighting a war we did not start or want. We had spent treasure to supply the world with the weapons of war – again - a war we didn’t start or want. The American people were united in their hatred of the Japanese. The Japanese had made an unprovoked attack without a declaration of war. A sneak attack killing thousands of Americans while we were still at peace. The US military knew that Japan was militarily defeated by 1943, and by1944 had no chance for winning the war. Now, even when obviously defeated, they would not surrender. They would commit suicide before surrendering. Their concept of surrender was such that it would dishonor themselves, their families and far worse, their ancestors. When they said,”Death before dishonor,” they really meant it in a very literal sense. The Japanese mindset was so fundamentally different that we in the West simply could not understand why they wouldn't surrender when they were defeated. Until the Japanese realized it was time to surrender, the war would continue.It might be noted that General “Stormin’ Norman” Schwartzkopf wrote a paper when he was a cadet that in 1945 the Quartermaster Corps of the Army ordered 750,000 Purple Hearts prior to the invasion because, based on the casualties so far in the Pacific Theater, that is how many US casualties they expected during the invasions. Modern day revisionists should consider what the people on scene, at that time and place expected.The Americans long knew about the insanely brutal Japanese Army. The Nanking Massacre with 300,000 dead. They said you could smell the city from many miles away from all the dead. Tens of millions more throughout China. The infamous Bataan Death March on which 7,000–10,000 US soldiers died or were murdered. The Americans felt that these people were far worse than animals since animals kill for food or self-defense. This was done out of brutal savagery unknown since the Mongols swept across Asia 600 years before. They had tortured and killed many of the men that they had captured. There were POW’s scattered throughout Asia that were brutalized, tortured and killed daily. There were thousands more civilian internees captured at the beginning of the war who would also be massacred at the start of an invasion. In the Philippines, in Manila, the Americans lost 1,000 dead, and the Japanese lost 17,000-but there were none who surrendered. And the Japanese had massacred over 100,000 Philippine civilians in Manila alone.The Japanese had correctly identified the beaches where the Americans would have to invade their islands. The Japanese had planned a final stand with the Ketsugo Operation that was being prepared by a stream of reinforcements from the other islands. Over 5000 aircraft and a million gallons of fuel had been accumulated in secret caves ready to be launched against the expected invasion fleet. Our photoreconnaissance clearly showed that they were not planning to surrender, but to fight to the bitter end. They had thousands of cannon and machine guns aimed at those beaches. The fire bombings of the cities had killed far more people than the atomic bombs did, but the atomic bombs had become a change in quantity that was a change in quality. Even at the very end, it was only the direct intervention of the Emperor who only just barely prevailed over the military who wanted to fight on.There were also other reasons to end the war as quickly as possible. The Japanese were running out of food and we knew that orders had gone out to kill all prisoners of war. The Japanese held 168,000 prisoners of war! In fact, in preparation for that event, the Japanese had forced the POWs to dig trenches for their own graves. It was certain that when we started to invade the home islands, all the prisoners in Japanese hands would be massacred. Besides the prisoners of war, there were also tens of thousands of civilian internees who would undoubtedly be slaughtered. In addition, there were hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops scattered throughout Asia as garrison troops. They had to be ordered to surrender or they could have created a hundred Nanking's when the invasion took place. So, there was more than simply defeating the Japanese Army, there had to be a direction of surrender, or at least to stop fighting.The terrible possibility of an American” Lost Generation” like that of England and France must have been one of the reasons why President Truman sanctioned the use of the atomic bombs. He was a combat proven officer in WWI and would rather drop the bombs than lose the lives of his troops.Those objections to surrender were so strong that even though the Emperor of Japan had made it known the war was to end; a coup against their own god, called the Kyūjō_incident was planned. This was almost beyond belief because it was a rebellion against their own Arahitogami (living god). A coup was started, but by a series of fortuitous events, failed. The Imperial Rescript was read and the Japanese surrendered.You can also find a discussion on Quora at Who decided to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Was it Harry Truman?To wrap it up, the invasion of Japan would have cost 750,000 Americans killed and wounded. It is estimated that there would have been 10,000,000 Japanese killed in combat, and another 10,000,000 who would commit suicide. In China, all of the POWs would have been killed-168,000 men, along with all of the civilian internees. The Japanese garrisons would have killed millions of Chinese thru-out S.E. Asia. The total fatalities would be a minimum of 21,000,000 not counting the millions of Chinese that would have been killed by the Japanese garrisons there.The alternative, the use of the atomic bombs, is the loss of less than 200,000 Japanese lives with no further American lives lost.Mitsuo Fuchida, the pilot who guided the first wave of Japanese planes in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, met Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, who had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. He told Paul, “You did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude of that time, how fanatic they were. They’d die for the Emperor. Every man woman and child would resist the invasion with sticks and stones if necessary.”The Japanese have a saying that sometimes the greatest mercy is to show no mercy. We showed no mercy and saved millions of lives!We had bombed Japanese cities till there were almost none left, but they would not surrender. We dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, destroying the city, but they would not surrender. Finally, the second atomic bomb and the declaration of war by Russia made them come to their senses: They had lost the war and it was time to surrender.For further enlightenment, you might visit:The Ketsu-Go plan for the opposing the final invasion:http://fas.org/irp/eprint/arens/chap4.htmBombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - World War II - HISTORY.comThe Decision to Drop the Bomb [ushistory.org]Debate over How to Use the Bomb, Late Spring, 1945:https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945/debate.htmHarry S. TrumanThe Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and NagasakiPacific WarOperation BarbarossaThe National WW II MuseumCurtis LeMayThe LeMay Bombing LeafletThe Information War in the Pacific, 1945WW2 US Warning Leaflet/LeMay Bombing LeafletCurtis LeMay and bombing strategyHague Conventions of 1899 and 1907Airborne leaflet propagandaAir raids on JapanUnited States Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report (Pacific War)http://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htmBombing of TokyoConcept of Eight Crown Cords Under One Roofhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakkō_ichiuThe Southern Expansion Doctrinehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanshin-ronConcept of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity SphereGreater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere - WikipediaThe Potsdam Declaration (explanation)Potsdam_DeclarationPotsdam Declaration-Texthttp://www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/c06.html Text of Potsdam DeclarationSurrender of Japanese Forces in the Far East at the end of WWII:http://www.taiwandocuments.org/japansurrender.htmJapanese war crimes and atrocities:http://histclo.com/essay/war/ww2...10 Japanese Atrocities from World War II - ListverseJapanese biological weapon attacks:Operation Cherry Blossoms at NightMore atom bombs to be ready in days/weeks/months:http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/1945-Hull-and-Seaman-Third-Shot.pdfJapanese germ warfare:Unit 731Ketsugo plan:http://fas.org/irp/eprint/arens/chap4.htmSurrender considerations:http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu...Gyokusiahttps://shatteredjewels.wordpress.com/about/Targeting rational:http://www.dannen.com/decision/t...Japanese caused casualties:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wo...Bombing of Tokyo:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo...Hirohito’s rescript ordering the end to fighting NOT surrender (17 August, 1945):http://www.taiwandocuments.org/s...The Franck Report advocated the use on an uninhabited island, but was eventually rejectedhttp://www.dannen.com/decision/f... of Hiroshima and NagasakiAtomic bombings of Hiroshima and NagasakiHow the Atomic Bombs saved 4,000,000 lives:http://www.freerepublic.com/focu...Hiroshima Saved Lives:Hiroshima-saved-livesThe bombs were dropped to save American lives:Why Drop an Atomic Bomb? To Save Lives!CIA information war in the Pacific:The Information War in the Pacific, 1945Much good information:The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War IINSA Intelligence information:http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/...Japanese fire balloon attacks:Fire balloons5th Imperial Conference, 2 July 1941. Japan’s decision to go south with the creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.www.jacar.go.jp/english/n...6th Imperial Conference of 6 September 1941. The decision to make war against the United States, Great Britain and The Netherlands in October 1941, if the United States didn’t stop the embargo.The US-Japan War Talks as seen in official documents7th Imperial Conference of 5 November 1941. Various positions for negotiations with the United States to avoid war.http://www.jacar.go.jp/english/nichibei/popup/pop_22.html8th Imperial Conference of 1 December 1941. Japan decides to go to war to go to war with the United States, Great Britain and The Netherlands.The US-Japan War Talks as seen in official documentsMajor General Charles W. Sweeny, commander of the Nagasaki bombing, testifies as to the reasons for the necessity of the atomic bombs May 11, 1995.https://eahnc.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/senate-testimony-of-major-general-charles-w-sweeney-may-11-1995/The War’s End by Major General Charles Sweeny (excerpted)http://www.socnet.com/showthread.php?t=107143The Japanese Secret Police (Kempeitai)http://military.wikia.com/wiki/KempeitaiTarget committee, Los Alamos, May 10-11, 1945http://www.dannen.com/decision/targets.html#fOperation Zipper:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_ZipperOperation Mailfist:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_MailfistOperation Kikisui:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_KikusuiThe Kyujo Incident:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incidentForeign Commerce and shipping of the Japanese Empire:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_commerce_and_shipping_of_Empire_of_JapanThe Japanese declaration of war signed 2 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor:http://www.emersonkent.com/historic_documents/wwii_japan_war_declaration.htmFor those who think we were worse than the Japanese, here’s a little educational reading:The Chichijima Incident where the Japanese captured, tortured, killed and ate 8 American airmen. George Bush escaped.Chichijima_incidenthttp://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres_pacific.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimeshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Chinahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_MassacreUnit 731: OverviewUNIT 731 - ExperimentsUnit 731 - WikipediaNanking Massacre - WikipediaThe Nanjing Massacre: Scenes from a Hideous Slaughter 75 Years Ago | TIME.comThe massacre at Andamans-A slice of historyhttp://www.tribuneindia.com/1998/98dec12/saturday/head4.htmThis is a VERY long read – over 1300 pages- but is the trial results of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/PTO/IMTFE/index.htmlSeveral references about “Comfort Women”:Dutch Comfort Women also want apology from Japan over WWII war crimesAllies in adversity, Australia and the Dutch in the Pacific War: Comfort womenThe Comfort Women in the Netherland East Indies (Indonesia)http://www.awf.or.jp/e1/netherlands.htmlDocuments detail how Imperial military forced Dutch females to be 'comfort women' | The Japan TimesAnnouncement of the use of an atomic bomb by Truman:http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=12169Agreement with the British to use the Atomic Bomb on Japan 7/4/45https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945Berlinv01/d619Demography of Imperial Japan - WikipediaBombing of Tokyo - WikipediaAtomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - WikipediaAir raids on Japan - WikipediaHistory of TokyoSex slavery by Japan:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_slavery#Japan_during_World_War_IIVer: 022318