Save at least 1 American life at the expense of 140000 enemy lives. I know which one i choose.
Ask any mom or dad that had a son in the service and I bet they choose to save 1 American too.
The Navy Plan was a blockade. How many MILLION Japanese civilians would have died had that option been adopted. Heck there were already reports that some Japanese were subsisting on grass and tree bark.
Or ask his son. My dad, a Marine, barely survived the fighting on Okinawa. I didn't know how close he came to death until his funeral when my uncle, also a Marine, told me the story. After Okinawa was over Dad and his unit were training for the invasion of Japan. He was to be in the first wave. He told me he and his friends knew they would die. Not worried, not feared, knew. He had fought the Japanese and knew what to expect. MacArthur estimated 100% casualties in the first wave.
In late 1937, over a period of six weeks, Imperial Japanese Army forces brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of people–including both soldiers and civilians–in the Chinese city of Nanking (or Nanjing). The horrific events are known as the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanking, as between 20,000 and 80,000 women were sexually assaulted. Nanking, then the capital of Nationalist China, was left in ruins, and it would take decades for the city and its citizens to recover from the savage attacks.
On December 13, the first troops of Japan’s Central China Front Army, commanded by General Matsui Iwane, entered the city. Even before their arrival, word had begun spreading of the numerous atrocities they had committed on their way through China, including killing contests and pillaging. Chinese soldiers were hunted down and killed by the thousands, and left in mass graves. Entire families were massacred, and even the elderly and infants were targeted for execution, while tens of thousands of women were raped. Bodies littered the streets for months after the attack. Determined to destroy the city, the Japanese looted and burned at least one-third of Nanking’s buildings.
Though the Japanese initially agreed to respect the Nanking Safety Zone, ultimately not even these refugees were safe from the vicious attacks. In January 1938, the Japanese declared that order had been restored in the city, and dismantled the safety zone; killings continued until the first week of February. A puppet government was installed, which would rule Nanking until the end of World War II.
There are no official numbers for the death toll in the Nanking Massacre, though estimates range from 200,000 to 300,000 people. Soon after the end of the war, Matsui and his lieutenant Tani Hisao, were tried and convicted for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and were executed. Anger over the events at Nanking continues to color Sino-Japanese relations to this day. The true nature of the massacre has been disputed and exploited for propaganda purposes by historical revisionists, apologists and Japanese nationalists. Some claim the numbers of deaths have been inflated, while others have denied that any massacre occurred.
Don't talk to me about Monday-morning quarterbacking this war 75 years later. Call it Karma or whatever, but dropping the bombs put a quick end to a war full of atrocities...
Damn right.