Not a fact. If one is going to "indiscriminately kill civilians" one does not warn said civilians in advance, as the United States did, to vacate the target area.
That's a good point. A friend of mine who was in PsyOps made that point to me as well.
But I'd like to learn more about how that was intended to work, and how it did work. (Now think this through with me, I really am trying to get a realistic picture of this.)
Didn't the neighborhood security cadres pick up the leaflets before many people saw them?
I understand that a number of cities were leafletted a number of times with the bomb warnings. In the run-up to the bombing of Hiroshima, 30 or more cities were leafletted. But Hiroshima itself hadn't been conventionally bombed since May? So then, wouldn't the people be to the point where they didn't believe the leaflets anymore?
I understand that Japanese WWII-era law imposed fines and imprisonment for worker absenteeism. If that is the case, then if 10, 100, 100,000 people wanted to leave, could they? Wouldn't they be stopped by men with guns?
Like I said, I'm not assigning or assuming U.S. blame here. I'm trying to get a realistic picture. Maybe you can help me. To me, it looks like it has some features in common with a massive hostage situation