But I ask this question… how many lingering deaths were caused by all the people burned, shot, blown up, crushed, etc… by all the massive bombings, invasions, mines, booby-traps, unexploded bombs, etc… from all the destruction wrought by war? And how many died from heart attacks and strokes brought on by the stress during and after the war?
Sure some died from radiation from the atom bomb, but an awful lot died, or would have died, later from other things if the war had continued.
Just got through with a book, ‘Dumb but Lucky’, and the author who, after 50 missions in Italy, France, and Germany, felt he would have had to fly against Japan if the war continued. He said every GI he met THANKED GOD the A-bomb had been dropped. He said they felt like they were the walking-dead if they and been sent to invade Japan.
My father enlisted in the US Navy prior to the war, was trained as a carrier pilot, served on three different carriers including the Ranger and Enterprise, and flew from Henderson Field for a time in the fall of 1942. He returned to the US and trained new pilots for a year, then returned to the Pacific and flew combat missions until the end of the war. He contracted malaria and some unidentified skin disease on Guadalcanal, both of which continued to afflict him long after the war, and suffered from exhaustion in the latter stages of the war. He was shot down twice and had to ditch twice when he ran out of fuel. He also survived two crashes on the carrier deck.
All of this apparently took it’s toll on his health for he died of a heart attack before his 40th. birthday. My father claimed that had the war gone on any longer, he felt his luck would have run out; he said the atomic bombs saved his life.
It is instructive to look at the US plans for what to do if the Hiroshima/Nagasaki attacks didn’t happen or weren’t successful in ending the war. In addition to the invasion plans (which in some versions involved the massive use of Mustard gas and the tactical use of nuclear weapons), the submarine blockade was to be continued and carrier strikes were to be used to destroy the rail network. This would have essentially made it impossible to move food around the country.
Fast forward now to 1946, and take a look at the food situation. It was very, very bad - and this was with a lot of help from the US occupying forces. Should Japan still be fighting, there would have been enormous casualties from starvation.
Not only did the Americans plan on using tactical nukes (I have not heard of plans for mustard gas) in any invasion of the Japanese Home Islands, the Japanese military authorities had made a policy decision that no civilians would be evacuated from potential combat zones. Civilians were to stay and assist the troops in any way they could, including attacks on enemy formations and providing manpower to move supplies; this would have exposed large numbers of civilians to the horrors of combat.
As for the movement of food supplies, American plans to attack the rail system would have been devastating. Richard Frank in his book “Downfall”, says that Tokyo received 95% of it’s rice by rail; other large cities were similarly dependent on rail for the delivery of food from the countryside.
Japanese agricultural production was dependent on lavish application of chemical fertilizers, but these same chemicals were also needed in the production of explosives and munitions, and the Japanese government, in 1945, had diverted the remaining stocks for this purpose. A combination of lack of chemical fertilizer and adverse weather caused the 1945 Fall rice crop to fail; and what little was harvested was allocated by the Japanese authorities to feed military troops. If the war had not ended when it did, Japanese historians estimate that more than six million civilians would have died in a famine.
As it occurred however, the war ended in August, 1945, (the surrender documents were signed in early September), just in time for the United States to organize an emergency program to ship 800,000 tons of food to Japan which arrived in early 1946. This was the only reason that several million Japanese civilians didn’t starve to death. This of course, wouldn’t have happened if the war was still being fought beyond August, 1945.
Whether it was intended or not, the atomic bombs saved millions of Japanese civilian and military lives, not to mention hundreds of thousands of American lives.
I believe the Chemical Corp made extensive, unsolicited plans involving various forms of chems and their delivery–most o which is still classified IIRC. The initial plans call for extensive use just prior to landings to kill or incapacitate defenders on the beaches…
Interesting, thanks for the info. Frank doesn’t mention that in his detailed description of the plans for Operation Olympic. Perhaps it was still classified when Frank was writing?
I honestly believe that at the end… Japan was unable to mount any kind of defense of Japan itself. It might have been slow going, but I don’t think Japan could have done much - by the time the bombs fell, I they were having problems feeding themselves.
I think they were looking for a reason to call it quits and the two bombings gave them the reason.
One of the books I have in my collection is by a submariner, and their sub was ordered to Tokyo for the surrender. Somehow directly afterwards the writer of the book ended up touring a local submarine base, and his description of the base itself and Japan at the time makes it sound like they were barely getting by as it was.
