There have been a number of comments over the years by military people who suggested that an invasion of Japan was absolutely unnecessary for the U.S. to win the war. As an island nation with few natural resources, the country could not possibly have sustained a major military force for very long.
That may be true, but it would have resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of civilians; many more than were killed in the initial dropping of the atomic bombs and even the cancer in their aftermath. For some to say that it was immoral to drop the bombs, then say that it was better to have starved them to death instead strikes me as a disengenuous argument.
Those military people, who wouldn't have been hitting the beach, are in the distinct minority. The opinion of the majority, particularly those who fought on Okinawa, holds much more weight.
The other aspect was the entry of the Soviet Union -- and the countries that they were going to seize and not give up control of.
The Soviet Union was slated to enter the war on August 15 or maybe September 1. Now Russia probably could have occupied most of the Northern Islands of Japan as well as all of Korea.
We had to paratroop troops in to prevent the Soviet Union from occupying South Korea after they moved into the Northern portion.
Stalin had signed a non-agression pact with Hitler and divided Poland with Hitler. When the Soviet Union was in dire straits during the time of the siege of Stalingrad, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Japan, and moved all the Far-Eastern troops to the German front. This was part of the Russian winter blitz that crippled the German advance.
The Cold War might have been different if most of Korea/Japan was in the hands of the Soviet Union. We might have even lost Taiwan.
One of my uncles was in the Philippines, and he probably would have been killed in a few weeks because of the attrition in his squad. They were paratroopers, so they had to earn their combat pay.
And they may be right about that. But one of my key points is that we did very similar bombing of German and Japanese cities. In fact, it was reported by the official historian of the US Navy in World War II (Samuel E. Morrison) that the fast battleship bombardment one night wreaked more terror on the Japanese civilian population than the aircraft bombings.
Why?
They never heard any air raids sirens or anythings. Just explosions going off with no sense of where they were coming from. I forget where this occurred.
But imagine not having any warning in the middle of the night and having explosions everywhere. If I was a small child, I would be affected by something like that for years to come.
Too many people, IMO, focus on the atomic bombings because they were atomic, but the conventional bombings did very similar things -- if you lost both legs from those or suffered extreme burns and died slowly, it is the same as some of the long term effects of the nuclear bomb.
Well what did they expect the US to do then. Simply lay siege to Japan for a few years? That would have been cruel to orders of magnitude more people than the two Bombs were.
Really? Gee whiz! Tell that to the Chinese, Vietnamese, French, Dutch, & British citizens they managed to put under the Greater East Asia Co_prospertiy Sphere. They fielded a pretty vital & effective military for 8 years. In fact, didn't they manage to kick British & Commonwealth ass all over SE Asia well before they bombed Pearl Harbor? Does the conquest of Hong Kong, Singapore, the sinking of Repulse and Prince of Wales
ring a bell? Wasn't there a sizable Canadian contingent captured at Hong Kong? Pretty good for what the Brits dismissed as a "bunch of backward runts with poor eyesight."
The Japs had every intention of defending the home islands to the last man woman and child. They armed their civilians with bamboo spears in anticipation of launching mass banzai charges against American units. Fanatics don't care about tin, rubber, steel or petroleum reserves. They'll use rocks to kill their enemies if they have to.