Ronn Blankenship wrote:
> FWIW, more civilians had already died in the firebombing of Tokyo than were
> killed in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese leaders
> had shown no sign of surrendering.
>
A little surfing provided this summary of an article - something that confirms
a TV documentary I caught parts of a few weeks ago:
http://www.doug-long.com/summary.htm One of the suppositions is that had we
offered terms that did not depose the Emperor as a condition, that the
Japanese may have accepted. We ended up allowing the Emperor to remain in
place anyway, so offering it prior to the bombing would not have made any
difference.
>
> At least a million combatants on each side.
>
At this site, which is actually a high school kid's report (heavily footnoted
though) http://users.erols.com/goodmank/ it says that "In a meeting on 18 June
the Joint War Plans Committee gave Truman projected death rates ranging from a
low of 31,000 to a high of 50,000(42), and a projected causality rate (deaths,
injuries and missing) of 132,500.(43) During fighting in the Pacific, from 1
March 1944 to 1 May 1945, the Japanese were killed at a ratio of 22 to 1.(44)
Thus, if we use an estimate of 40,00 American deaths, we can extrapolate
880,000 Japanese deaths--for a combined total of 920,000 deaths."
The footnote (42) sites a biography of Truman by a David McCullough.
> >
> >It's easy to sit in your comfortable home and judge the men who had to make
> >decisions that would cost thousands of lives no matter what the eventual
> >decision was. I think the fact that we haven't used atomic weapons since we
> >*saw* what they can do is a damn good sign that we learned something from
> >using them.
>
I tend to agree with you here, but I do think our perception of why we dropped
the bombs have been skewed, and that some of our reasoning behind dropping
the bomb is seldom discussed at all. For instance, is there a possibility that
some members of the military wanted to demonstrate our new found power to the
Soviets?
Doug
