They would’ve thought otherwise if Japan ended up being a massive Vietnam before Vietnam with kamikazes on every street corner.
These guys were not going to surrender without a massive shock - US casualties would’ve been beyond massive. Easy to forget that this was the reason we nuked: To prevent even more loss of life.
In 1960, I was stationed about 40 kilometers south of Hiroshima at MCAF Iwakuni and became good friends with many Japanese whose memory of the war was still very clear. They told me that just before Hiroshima was bombed, the Japanese government had issued every Japanese woman an child an artillery shell and a hammer with instructions to hide and wait until invading Americans approached to within 25 meters before they struck the artillery shell's fuse with the hammer.
These surviving Japanese felt sorry for the people in Hiroshima, but they were thankful that they along with millions of other Japanese were never called on to commit suicide with their artillery shells.
...and sometimes I wonder whatever became of Masako, the girl I left behind.
“These guys were not going to surrender without a massive shock”
That’s very true, much more than modern Americans realize.
The Japanese people were resigned to losing 1,000,000 dead in the coming invasion of Japan. They knew that they would lose, but surrendering without this sacrifice would make them ‘lose face’ as a nation, and this was of an importance that we cannot conceive of in the West.
The atomic bombs hit like a force of nature. A typhoon, an earthquake, a volcano. It gave the people of Japan a chance to surrender without losing face- you do not lose face by acquiescing to nature- and surrender is what they did. This saved them a million dead, and saved us a similarly huge number. Many of us wouldn’t be here if our fathers had had to invade Japan.
As terrible as the bombs were they brought the war to an immediate end.