Yeah... Very generous...:eyeroll:
Oh please... They started the war-- they sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind, as they should. Just how it is... Geez you bleeding hearts make me want to puke...
Besides, more people died in the Tokyo fire raids than in either of the nuclear attacks...
Either way, it saved at least hundreds of thousands of American men who would have been killed or maimed for life, and literally millions of Japanese whom they would have had to kill or be killed...
Guess some folks would have rather seen it that way than the nukes used... course if history had unfolded that way, they'd be lamenting all the little kids and women and old people blown away by the Allied invaders as they faced down Banzai charges from these people armed with sharpened bamboo sticks and anything else that could possibly inflict injury or death. They'd be arguing that the US had a moral obligation to prevent unnecessary death to our forces and their population by using the bomb to shock them into surrender...
Most people don't know, but that's EXACTLY what the Japanese had in mind... they had saved basically everything they had left in the form of aircraft and ships and anything else of use to be used for kamikaze suicide attacks and hopeless banzai charges, both by the military and civilians. Civilians were trained in how to take out soldiers with sharpened bamboo sticks and anything else available. Their military were trained to take out tanks and armored vehicles and convoys using satchel charges strapped to their bodies, as living landmines. The remains of their navy had been trained to crash boatloads of explosives into US ships to sink them. Men volunteered to be dropped in the water equipped with explosives on suicide missions as living mines. Virtually all their remaining war industry had been moved deep underground, out of the capabilities of US bombers, to keep essential warmaking supplies coming, to the extent possible, and would have been vigorously defended. Their remaining aircraft had been moved into underground caves and revetments and were being outfitted as kamikaze suicide planes, and manned cruise missiles like the "baka bomb" were being developed, rocket powered to allow them to outpace US pursuit fighters and interceptors to blow up US ships, facilities, and troop concentrations. Their few remaining naval aviation planes and crew and the remains of the Japanese air force had been totally surpassed in quality and capabilities of their aircraft since the war's beginning, and couldn't survive combat with US air assets, therefore they had been held back for suicide missions in a last ditch defense of the islands during invasion.
The US knew a lot of this (though just how thorough their preparations were and how murderous the suicidal defense of the home islands would have been wouldn't be discovered until during the occupation of Japan). The US plans before the bomb, for a conventional invasion of Japan, anticipated millions of Japanese deaths (in the range of 5-6 million) and up to a million US casualties. The Fifth Air Force was to continue the bombing campaign until they had practically burned everything above ground in Japan of any consequence. To "soften up" the defenders, both military and civilian, the US had stockpiled massive amounts of poison gas and chemical weapons to be dropped by the bombers once the fire bombing campaign was pretty much done. This alone would have killed and maimed millions of Japanese. The invasion would have dwarfed D-Day in Europe and would have similarly taken place across five invasion beaches named after American cars. The Kanto plain surrounding Tokyo was one of the main targets. Plans after the initial invasion were more hazy, left to the strategic situation of the battlefield to dictate movements after securing the initial beachheads and the initial advance.
Once it became apparent that the bomb would probably work and be available for use, the plan became to drop a pair of bombs to "demonstrate" the capability and hopefully induce the Japanese to surrender. More bombs were being constructed, as the Fat Man plutonium design was well suited to mass production, more so than the Little Boy design relying on highly enriched uranium (U-235), which was difficult to produce and more difficult to separate from regular Uranium 238. Design work was continuing to go forward on things like levitated cores for new pit designs for more explosive yield from a given amount of plutonium and greater bomb efficiency, plans that would be tested successfully in the Sandstone test series in 1948. Five atomic bombs were being held back and readied for use as tactical weapons to bomb Japanese troop concentrations or strong points preventing or holding up a US advance, or to bomb defenses or troop concentrations behind the invasion beaches themselves in anticipation of the invasion. More bombs were the pipeline and would have been available late in 1946, had the war continued.
So, while sad, the fact that 140,000 or so Japanese died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the atom bombings, it DID induce the Japanese to face the inevitable and surrender (though barely so-- the war cabinet was tied and the Emperor cast the tie-breaking vote-- for peace... and was very nearly overthrown in a coup by some young officers desiring a "final battle with honor" rather than surrender, but they failed and committed ritual suicide).
Yes it was an ugly chapter in world history, but it ended about as well as it possibly could have, considering the alternatives. Of course it would have been better if Japan and Germany had not started the war to begin with, but unfortunately it seems human nature made the discovery and acknowledgement of that fact untenable until those countries suffered the fates they did before they would admit that war wasn't the answer... And it could have been SO very much worse than it was...
We should remember that.
I personally find it disgusting how people sitting safely 70 years after those events sit and pass judgment and wag a finger at the hard decisions and harder consequences faced by their predecessors who had to live, fight, and die in the battles that would have occurred at that time, had the apologists living today had had their way... How many dozens of millions of people, both here and elsewhere, would never have been born due to their parents having been killed in the invasion and subsequent futile battles... we'll never know.
Later! OL JR