David and MoQers, I agree that the writing of history should be an intellectual academic activity. That is why I keep trying to get you off the propaganda and onto some serious history. You seem to have latched onto some crippled historians. I suggest that you take a broader look. There is plenty of material on the internet on both points of view. A close reading of all of the material should enable one to extract the meaning of what was actually happening. I was surprised to find it but if you read the longer article that I posted you will find the name of the fellow who actually inserted your idea into the history books. Remember that before Pirsig's MoQ will work reliably for us we have to have our facts straight. I am also surprised that you would say those things about yourself that were in your recent message. That is the only interpretation that I can put on it. World War II would eventually cost the United States more than a million casualties. It consumed the nation's energies and resources to an extent never experienced before or since. When Truman became President in April 1945, US casualties were averaging more than 900 a day. In the Pacific, the toll from each successive battle rose higher. The Japanese still had the means -- and the determination -- to make the invading Allied forces pay a terrible price for the final victory. Since the summer of 1944, the Japanese armed forces had been drawing units back to Japan in anticipation of a final stand there. The Japanese were prepared to absorb massive casualties. According to Gen. Korechika Anami, the War Minister, the military could commit 2.3 million troops. Commanders were authorized to call up four million civil servants to augment the troops. The Japanese Cabinet extended the draft to cover most civilians (men from ages fifteen to sixty and women from seventeen to forty-five). The defending force would have upwards of 10,000 aircraft, most of them kamikaze. Suicide boats and human torpedoes would defend the beaches. The Japanese Army planned to attack the Allied landing force with a three-to-one advantage in manpower. If that failed, the militia and the people of Japan were expected to carry on the fight. Civilians were being taught to strap explosives to their bodies and throw themselves under advancing tanks. The (US) plan called for an invasion in two stages. Operation Olympic, a land invasion of Kyushu, southernmost of the Japanese main islands, was to begin November 1, 1945. Operation Coronet, planned for March 1, 1946, would be an invasion of Honshu, the largest island. The Joint Chiefs expected the two-stage invasion to involve some five million troops, most of them American. The invasion was to be preceded by a massive aerial bombardment, reaching maximum intensity before troops went ashore on Honshu. Casualty estimates varied. Military planners figured the invasion of Kyushu alone would take between 31,000 and 50,000 US casualties in the first thirty days and that the combined US losses from Operations Coronet and Olympic would exceed 500,000. President Truman believed that, unless he used the atomic bomb, an invasion was necessary and that the casualties would be enormous. (Use of the bomb to end the war eventually saved Japanese casualties, too. The incendiary bombs from B-29s were taking a terrible toll. The attack on Tokyo in March killed more people than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs.) The Japanese refusal to surrender led to 48,000 American casualties in the battle for Okinawa between April and June. Kamikaze attacks in that battle sank twenty-eight US ships and did severe damage to hundreds more. The Japanese force on Okinawa was only a fraction the size of the one waiting in the home islands. See if any of this makes any sense to you. I think your problem is that you have no grasp of the scope of what was going on then. Russia did belatedly declare war on Japan like a hyena lurking about for whatever pickings it could get but it did not do any actual fighting. Russia was not a major concern at that time. I think that you revisionists just need to simplify things so that they are easy to grasp. Ken MOQ Online Homepage - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ Unsubscribe - http://www.moq.org/md/index.html MD Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
