[jonascord]

My father was training with the 1st Marine Division for the landing, at the time, since he was out of the hospital after Okinawa. A discussion among the Marines was having to shoot a 10 year old, armed with a bamboo spear, known as an idiot stick. Recall, the Marines were averaged age 19.

A standing joke was that this was going to be a short fight. The 1st MarDiv wasn't on the list of available maneuver elements after L Day+10, having been functionally wiped out.

Since the country was bleeding million$ per day, and 2 million young men were gone on duty, you're saying "They should just wait." Months, years?

[21twelve]

I read that the terrible fighting to take Okinawa was factored into using the A-bombs. The Japanese would fight to the last, and civilians would also be in the fight to their death on their homeland using whatever tools or farm implements they had.

I know that lots of civilians on Okinawa committed suicide. They were told terrible stuff about the Americans, like we would rape their women and children, eat them, etc. I don’t know if I have heard of any of them actually joining the fighting against us, but I suppose they did.

I just looked it up. 90,000 Jap military dead and estimated 150,000 Japanese civilians dead.

12,520 American dead or missing - and 36,631 wounded. Total casualties was about 35% of our forces.

There are some youtubes where diaries of Germans and Japanese from WWII are read - pretty interesting stuff. One was of a Japanese person (civilian?) on Okinawa (or similar) saying how they wanted to kill themselves but just couldn’t. And then amazed at the good treatment he and others received from the Americans.