The Japanese had supplies, but experienced manpower they did not.
The rotation system their armed forces had, to put it frankly, SUCKED!
You were in the Jap Combined Fleet, you were in it for the long haul, you got sick, you went to their wardroom and got better, then went back to duty. Reference to that were two key command staffers before the Battle of Midway. One had his appendix removed, the other influenza. They were on their respective carriers when they were hit by US attack planes.
There was no rotation system in place, you lived, you fought, you died. You didn’t go back to the Island and trained others, you left that to your aging instructors.
No, and this was a political decision made by Truman.
Gen. Groves had some major influence in the decision making process, but Pres. Truman made the decision to use the devices on Japan.
I had some nuclear weapons training back in the 1980s. Drawing from the unclassified parts of that & open sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica I can say it would depend on if the bomb were detonated at low altitude or on the ground.
The tests in the US and Pacific were mostly surface or underground detonations. The bombs at Hiroshima & Nagasaki were detonated at medium altitude. In those two cases the ‘fireball’ or globe of superheated gases did not touch the ground. A shock wave of very hot and compressed air did strike the ground & that is what collapsed the buildings, killed people, started a firestorm much like that at Osaka or Hamburg & many other cities. Because of the altitude of the detonation the shockwave of compressed air hit the landscape downwards or at a angle, which crushed or rolled object across the ground.
In the case of the surface detonations two very different things happened. First the superheated gas or plasma made contact with the ground which turned the soil & other material into a fine dust that was carried upwards with the fireball & dispersed in the wind at high altitude. This is the most dangerous fallout as it is highly radioactive. The fine particals are easily asorbed by breathing, drinking contaminated water, or eating food that has it on the surface or has been asorbed by the living plant. This is the “Fallout” that causes the most damage as it spreads widely and is asorbed into the body where it causes continuing damage. The Second thing is the material that is in contact with the core of the detonation, but not vaporized is irradiated and then tossed about the landscape. This debris ranging from sand size to tons in weight is also impregnated with dangerous isotope particals. While it will not be asorbed into the body handling it or coming into close proximity will result in radiation poisoning. This material will be found tossed across the landscape several kilometers from the detonation.
At Hiroshima & Nagasaki the airbursts led to the ground directly under or adjacent to be contaminated, but as there was no soil or other material vaporized and carried aloft the fallout was insignificant. A few kilos of water & dust already in the air & caught by the fireball would be all.
The reason for the Hiroshima/Nagasaki detonations at altitude is that it provides the maximum ‘blast’ effect across the ground. Compression waves directed down towards the ground cause a more widespread destruction than those reflected upwards off the ground. This is one of several reasons why we often chose airbursts for our artillery attacks. In the case of the A bombs used on Japan the design was for airburst only. had they hit the ground the mechanism would have been wrecked and a low order detonation occured.
An A bomb attack on a target in Germany would for the same reasons have most likely been a airburst. The requirements for creating a high order detonation made a contact detonating Abomb difficult in 1945, and there would be the object of flattening as many kilometers of landscape as possible. So, there would have been very little Fallout drifting across the country side.
In the case of the “GIs” and the USN personnel contaminated in Operation Crossroads the the people who ordered them into the contaminated zones usually did not know themselves. Othen they were present alongside the men, as iggnorant as everyone else. The lack of knowledge of the effect of radiation on the human body is somewhat forgotton. Even the Physicists who worked directly with the radioactive material were fairly iggnorant about what was ‘safe’ and what was not. It took another fifteen years before the knowledge & experince came to a level where the danger was completely understood. Surface tests were still conducted through the 1950s. Those lifted hundreds of thousands of kilos of contaminated dust into the atmosphere, to be blown across the US and the Atlantic fisheries. Frequently a dangerous level of residue reached Western Europe.
If you search the bookstores or online there are a lot of good books on various aspects of nuclear weapons and contamination.
