[21twelve]

I was just watching the documentary about Iwo Jima. The Japs knew that they couldn’t win. but they wanted to defend it so hard and cause so many U.S. casualties in the hope that we would negotiate a peace so we wouldn’t have to go through all of that to overtake Japan.

We lost about 6,800 dead and 25,000 casualties. Almost the entire force of 25,000 Japs died. Yes - it would have been awful on both sides if we hadn’t dropped the bombs. I’m pretty sure that we wouldn’t have negotiated a peace.

Perhaps we would have used China or the Soviets to help with the invasion???? Then Japan (what was left of it) may have ended up being Communist instead of the good friend that they are now.

[Defiant]

One of the things that would have happened if there had been no atom bomb is that the Soviets would have swooped in from the north. They made a deal with Roosevelt that they would help out once Hitler was defeated, and had started to move that way. I think that's how they got Kamchatka and some islands. One of the reasons Truman used the nukes was to end the war quickly to keep the Soviets out of it. If there had been no nukes, we would have been glad to let the commies send their cannon fodder to Japan while we bombed it to smithereens, rather than send our war-weary people to fight through densely populated territory against warriors who thought surrender was disgraceful. The Russians would have taken a big chunk, if not the whole thing, as Stalin didn't care about his people's lives, and we wouldn't have had to fight them in Korea or Vietnam, it would have been in Japan.

[DuncanWaring]

Okinawa was just as bad, if not worse.

And there are fools out there who claim that after the absolute carnage of the Pacific island campaign, the Japanese would have just rolled-over and surrendered once the home-island invasion started.