Yup. 45 cities were burned to the ground via conventional incidiary bombing.
No surrender.
Then Hiroshima.
Still no surrender.
Took a second a-bomb.
In addition, they didn’t have any complaint coming.
If there hadn’t been surrender at that point, more a-bombs were in the pipeline for a cadence reaching out to about December ‘45.
After the final defeat, the rest of Asia would have cheered, then visited long enough to piss on the ashes.
If anything, Japan got off light.
Only three were made. The process of making fissionable material in those days was slow.
Yes. To his dying day Dad hated the Japanese.
Most of my uncles were in the Pacific. One survived Iwo Jima, another was wounded at Guadalcanal.
If I could turn back the clock I would love to get an account from each of them of their experiences. Not sure they would all talk about them, however.
Near the end of the novel, “Unbroken,” about Louis Zamperini, he tells about the day (after Nagasaki) when the Japanese guards deserted his prison camp. Then the American bombers came and started dropping food and medicine by parachute on the prison camps.
Once they got the bulk of their fellow prisoners healthy enough to travel, they decided to “self-rescue” by boarding a public Japanese train to where they expected to find the nearest Allied encampment.
Zamperini mentions that on that trip there were no males anywhere except infants and sickly old men because all the rest had been conscripted. Even toddlers were being trained to pull little red wagons with ammunition from fighting point to fighting point. Adolescents were being taught to fight with sharpened bamboo sticks, or to lie hidden in “spider holes” with explosives strapped to them, waiting for an Allied armored vehicle to pass over them.
What struck me was that this was an independent, eye-witness account that even after the 2nd atomic bombing, the people of Japan were still determined to fight on.
The only reason they stopped fighting was their Emperor told them to.