The numbers don't lie, but the author of the article fails to look at the facts, nor does he understand Japanese culture. The casualties in the Pacific Theater of WW2 can be found here.
https://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/C/a/Casualties.htm While the Japanese Military represent 30% of the military dead, they represent 68% of the prisoners of war and only 3% of the wounded, and their civilian population suffered only 1.5% of the civilian casualties of the war. The numbers show that the Japanese did not take prisoners and killed millions of civilians in the countries they invaded, but had relatively few civilian casualties in Japan until the 2 atomic bombings which accounted for the majority of the 400,000 Japanese civilian casualties in the war. The Japanese culture instills a sense of honor in death and an unquestioning respect for authority, and there should be no doubt that the civilian population, when ordered to defend their homeland, would have fought to the death attempting to kill the invading Allied forces. Millions of Japanese civilians and hundreds of thousands of Allied troops would have died if an invasion was necessary to end the war. The atomic bombings were a brutal but necessary action to force the surrender of Japan and saved millions of lives and the country and culture of Japan. Japan was the clear aggressor in the Pacific War. Japan invaded China, India, the East Indies and the Philippines. The Japanese military killed over 25,000,000 civilians in these countries in the process, while less than 200,000 civilians died in Japan until the atomic bombs were dropped. The civilian Japanese population, who supported the war effort, were little affected by the fighting until 1945, and without the atomic bombs, the war would have dragged on for at least a year resulting in a factor of 10 to 100 more deaths than the 2 bombs caused. IMO our political and military leaders during WW2 agreed with
General Fox Conner who had principles of war for a democracy. They were:
- Never fight unless you have to;
- Never fight alone; and
- Never fight for long.
