(June 19, 2018 at 10:04 pm)Minimalist Wrote:Quote:Gen. Anami declared "100,000,000 dead in defense of Japan!"
Yeah, we're big on slogans, too.
The submarine blockade had essentially ended Japan's capacity to conduct a war. By July, 1945 carrier-based aircraft attacked Kure on the Inland Sea. The handful of ships there were essentially immobile because of a lack of fuel caused by the previously mentioned sub campaign and an equally effective mining operation. The Japs were helpless. Had they not surrendered Anami might have gotten his wish.... through famine and frostbite in the coming winter.
So Hiroshima and Nagasaki were little more than state-sanctioned mass murders....... just like Dresden.
No, operation Olympic was scheduled before the on-set of winter. It would have landed 700,000 allied troops in Hokkaido, against 700,000 defending Japanese troops and 12,000 stockpiled kamikaze aircraft. At no other time in pacific war had the US attempted to launch amphibious assault against a defended Japanese position without a 3 to 1 numerical superiority.
Operation Olympic would likely, bluntly put, fail and incur 300,000+ casualties.
The Japanese defensive strategy was to inflict such a reverse on the first allied landing in the Japanese homeland that the allies would nagotiate rather than keep suffering that magnitude of casualty. The ratio of forces involved suggest they would pull off the first part - inflict a devasting reverse - on the first allied landing on the Japanese home islands.
In so far as attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was calculated to avert friendly casualties comparable to enemy casualties resulting from the effort at a time of declared war between two states, it is not the equivalent of most conception of terrorism.
War can not be waged if one would accept more military casualties for ones own side in order to avert fewer civilian casualty on the enemy side. By nature there would almost always be far more enemy civilians than friendly military personnel.
