Soundwave said:
Nuvendil said:
Have you even read about the force Japan had amassed to meet a mainland invasion? Operation Ketsugo? And the ferocity of the battles throughout the Pacific? Japan had repeatedly fought with intensity well beyond the point of hopelessness. They had demonstrated their willingness to go to extraordinary, even near suicidal tactics like bonsai charges against far superior numbers, to keep up the fighting. The US had no reason to believe that wouldn't be the case.
Seriously, read up on the projected outcomes of Operation Downfall and the measures of Japan in Operation Ketsugo. The Japanese even planned to pull from all males 15 to 60 and all females 17 to 40 to aid in the battle. Casualties were expected to be extraordinary. Also, they anticipated they would likely need nukes or near-equal destructive weapons to succeed without casualties climbing to outright ludicrous levels.
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Japan was pretty much on its knees by this point in the war though, the US had them effectively surrounded and cut off from resupply/oil/etc.
From here
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-real-reason-america-used-nuclear-weapons-against-japan-it-was-not-to-end-the-war-or-save-lives/5308192
According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was “looking for peace”. Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.
“Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan,” says Selden.
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And others will contradict that guy. I don't take sides much on this and really rarely comment. Cause frankly both sides always wind up shouting at each other in rage, usually with gobs of misinformation or just insults. My point was that Japan's helplessness on other islands hadn't stopped them before. And for a country on their kneesknees they sure were still gearing up to make a campaign of attrition. I have no doubt that impressing Russia was on their mind. But they could have done that within the parameters of Operation Downfall. Or they could have targeted a far larger city. This image usually painted by anti-hiroshima people is of a cold, unthinking, murderous government. Me? I don't *know* what went on in those meetings, I don't *know* what Truman was thinking. I just know that the War was hell, Japan did lenty if terrible things themselves, and the circumstances that lead to their surrender were sure as hell better than Operation Downfall which would have killed far more civilians and military due to the measures Japan took in Operation Ketsugo.
Also, the Japanese government wanted peace, we wanted surrender. Very different things. That was the point of Ketsugo.
