[wendy1946]

Hate to say it...

But WW-II was over before those two bombs were dropped. Japan's 75 largest cities were in ashes and the bomb which had done that was a ten or twelve pound thing with crepe paper streamers to guide it. There was an army without any means of supply sitting around in China, a maritime nation whose entire navy and merchant marine had been destroyed, and 20 million people walking around in forests because the cities they used to live in were gone.

I'd have saved the two A bombs for Mecca and Medina.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Japan still had thousands of serviceable aircraft and enough bombs and gasoline to do tremendous damage in August 1945. More than a million troops were still armed and ready to fight on the main islands, along with the civilian population which had booby traps, crude, single shot handguns and edged weapons to greet American troops. Even with daily firebombing, the armament industries had been moved into caves dug in the sandstone bluffs around Yokohama and was still operating.
As a little kid Army brat in the 1950s, my American and Nihon pals and I played in those caves.

[dfwgator]

Consider this, the Soviets had just declared war on Japan, had we not dropped the bombs, they would have taken their half of Japan, then inevitably there would have been a bloody civil war, just like in Korea with the ChiComs getting involved.

[US Navy Vet]

YOU ARE F*CKING CLUELESS!

[KeyLargo]

Unfinished Business

For 65 years, Japanese corporations have escaped responsibility for abusing American POWs during World War II.

Lester Tenney entered World War II as a strapping 21-year-old, weight 180 pounds. By the time he emerged from Japanese captivity in 1945, he was a shattered, emaciated cripple. His left arm and shoulder were partly paralyzed due to an accident in a coal mine where he'd been sent as a slave laborer. His overseers there -- civilian employees of the Mitsui Corp., not members of the Imperial Army -- had knocked out his teeth in repeated beatings with hammers and pickaxes. At war's end, he weighed in at 98 pounds. It took him a year in U.S. Army hospitals to regain something like a semblance of his old well-being.

Sixty-five years later, Tenney and his fellow ex-prisoners of war (POWs) -- the rapidly diminishing group of those who remain alive, that is -- are still awaiting the full fruits of victory. The Japanese companies that once abused Tenney and his fellow prisoners have never acknowledged responsibility for their crimes, let alone offered compensation or regrets of any kind. (The companies needed the POWs to compensate for a wartime labor shortage.) The Japanese government has only just begun to offer its regrets for what happened -- far too late for most of the veterans, but, still, something. Perhaps most depressingly of all, the U.S. government has spent years allowing the Japanese to get away with it -- a policy of complicity that has its roots in the two countries' complex postwar relationship. There are signs that this, too, may finally be changing. Hope never dies, as they say.

[tophat9000]

But WW-II was over before those two bombs were dropped.

Hardly....The Battle of Okinawa was from early April until mid-June, 1945.

Allies suffered more than 50,000 casualties,Japan lost over 100,000 troops,more than 100,000 civilians (12,000 in action) were killed, wounded, or committed suicide, approximately one-quarter of the civilian population died ....

So two month later you say the Japan was just going to give up before a foot was set on any of the home Islands?

Britain looked beat in 1940 and held out to win... Germany was totally destroyed from the air by early 1945 yet it still had to be taken foot by foot...

Consider that if the two a bombs prevented one just one "Okinawa" both side were ahead of the game..... The A bomb let Japan(that by tradition did not surrender but would fight to the death and/or committed suicide) to in effect surrender and save face at the same time...

If the war had stated conventional war is there any real drought that, just as in "beaten Germany", Berlin still had to be taken; we would of at the very least had to take the capital of the "beaten Japan", Tokyo?...

And it a fair bet taking just one of Japans five main islands would be far bloodier then taking Okinawa

[texmexis best]

You are quite wrong:

Japanese assets in place at the time of the ear invasion:

14 dug in divisions on the southernmost island of Kyushu (900,000) well armed. Many had been transported from China to defend the homeland.

10,875 aircraft that were to be used as kamizakes against the invading ships. Estimated casualties at sea were to be one third to one half of the invading forces.

US assets:
We were going to land 14 divisions on Kyushu and six months later 25 divisions in Honshu. The one to one ratio of combatants in Kyushu would have been in the Japanese favor and the carnage on the American side would have been horrific.

Estimates handed to Truman for the invasion:

1.75 to 4 million American casualties.
no less than 10 million Japanese casualties.

The difficulty of feeding the Japanese populace was going to be a real problem and the toll could have reached 30 million Japanese through combat, disease and starvation.

Many of the Freepers on this board today would not be around if we had invaded Japan. I am one of them. My dad was moved from Europe to Mississippi to train for mountain fighting. He was told that it would be far worse than Europe. His unit in Europe had 76% attrition rate.

The decision to drop the bomb was a great one. It saved many American and Japanese lives.