Those people don’t know any history. Take into account the Saipan suicides (sensationalised, but still real), and the long, bloody battles for Okinanwa and Iwo Jima, and one comes to the conclusion that the US was absultuely correct in estimating that the battle for the mainland was going to be long, bloody, and last until 1948. Stalin took Sakhalin with the little time he had, he would have entered the fray on the mainland for a land grab of Hokkaido and a lot of northern Honshu. Imagine a North and South Japan, today. How well would the Japanese ahve done as a battle ground on that front? I’m absulutely certian they would not be the economic powerhouse they are today.

Then take a look at some books such as the Time Life series and see the pictures of schoolchildren in Japan being trained to use bamboo pikes to incapcitate armored vehicle treads in mid 1945, and tell me more than 200,000 lives would have been lost in an invasion. Lets be generous and claim 500,000 for the after-effects plus the blasts of the bombs. An invasion would have killed ten times that many between the two sides. These idiots are unwilling or unable to do the caclulus of death.

The understatement of the century. A massive miscalculation.

The Okinawa resistance was a preview of what to expect on the mainland. With all this in mind, responsible Allied leaders couldn’t have been expected to risk more lives of their forces after years of sustained carnage, when it could all have been done with in a figurative instant. Japan got nuked, which is tough, but there was no other way when after four years, swift certain victory was imperative.

Making a sacrifice for the greater good, both big and little, used to be a common more that ran throughout society, but which has become pretty much alien in this ego-driven age. It’s no wonder then that the nuking of Japanese towns doesn’t resonate with those weaned in an affluent world with a UN, and a dubious concept of consequence-free peacemaking.

As though there was a moral obligation on the US to interpret “We’ll keep on fighting” as “We’ll surrender in a few minutes,” but none on Japan to actually say “We surrender.”

It’s almost an infantilization of Japan, as though they were incapable of actually making a pre-Hiroshima (or post-Hiroshima, pre-Nagasaki) statement of surrender, even if they really really meant it in their hearts, and the US should have been omniscient enough to figure out what Japan really meant.