The polar cap of the "Fat Man" weapon being sprayed with plastic spray paint in front of Assembly Building Number 2. (Photo from U.S. National Archives, RG 77-BT)
Toyko was pretty much destroyed already by our firebombing, which killed more people than both atomic bombs. But the Japs kept fighting. The bombs were dropped on fairly undisturbed cities both for the shock effect on the Japs, and also to judge their power.
Imagine if we just had to continue the firebombing of all their cities, close their ports to starve them, and then invade them.
What amazes me is how good allies the Japanese and the Germans are now with us.
“the invasion of Japan would cost 1.7-4 million American casualties, including 400,000-800,000 fatalities”
“the half-million American death toll routinely bandied about is, to put it lightly, inflated. To put this ridiculous claim into perspective, consider the fact that for the estimate of a half-million American deaths to be accurate, the invasion of Japan would have had to cost more American lives than the total number of US combat fatalities in all theatres of World War II. The reality, as Stanford historian Barton Bernstein has documented, is that the actual worst-case government estimate for a full-scale US invasion of Japan was around forty-six thousand lives lost — more than ten times less than the figure often set forth in American schoolbooks. This fact aside, the bomb-or-boys myth is completely punctured by the conclusion of the US government-sanctioned 1946 Strategic Bombing Survey, which — after conducting interviews with US and Japanese military personnel — found that Japan would have surrendered by the end of 1945 “even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
from https://www.lewrockwell.com/2005/08/james-r-lawrence-iii/rethinking-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/
My Dad served in 5 major battles in the Pacific including the retaking of the ROCK. If not for the decision to drop the bombs I might not have had a dad.
The polar cap of the "Fat Man" weapon being sprayed with plastic spray paint in front of Assembly Building Number 2. (Photo from U.S. National Archives, RG 77-BT)
“The United States should be commended for picking the less-populous cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to drop the bombs on. And not more populous cities of Kokura and Tokyo”
Actually, Kokura was the primary target that day. From your other post
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3190761/posts
When a second mission was approved, Kokura was the primary target Nagasaki was the secondary target...Sweeney and his crew were under orders to only bomb visually. When they got to Kokura they found the haze and smoke obscuring the city as well as the large ammunition arsenal that was the reason for targeting the city.
Thank God for Fat Man and Little Boy.