Actually according to your own link the lowball was 50k. edit: actually no, MacArthur's staff thought only 23,000 initially.


The plans changed over time and a lot of those estimates were from before okinawa. The later ones in june/july are more like 50k-100k. Some of them are just complete guesses, which is there the million+ dead stuff comes from.


I don't think anyone really knew to be honest. If Koneg's document is really the best they had they hadn't even decided on anything but a couple sentence-long basic plan. It's hard to make good estimates when you don't even know what you are planning on doing in concrete terms beyond "attack san francisco and then L.A.".

From the Wiki Link:

 

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Right, that's the operation Koneg's report was for. Koneg's report doesn't have any more details that that single paragraph of the wiki article. It really is nothing more detailed than "attack SF and then LA." The report assigns troops to each area but in terms of actual objectives that's all there is. Pretty vague. If you invaded based on taht document it would be like doing D-day without even knowing what beaches you were gonna land on at what time and where your forces were going after they landed.


There isn't much information out there on how much planning they really did. That wiki article itself suggests there was a lot of pressure building to abandon the plan entirely or change targets.

Please read what I posted - you DID NOT HAVE TO INVADE!


Their navy was done. Their island bastions with airfields had been taken/destroyed.

All that was necessary was a 'Perry' interdiction, ie, control their shores.


Your government just wanted to test the 'bomb'.

 

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The two A bombs allotted 214,000 immediate deaths. (hard to tell the full effects in the decades to follow)

The choice for Truman and his advisers was either to murder 200 thousand (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) or to take the risk to lose 500 thousand American lives and up to 8 million Japanese.

The Navy prepared half a million Purple Hearts. The US built hospitals to prepare to receive 700 thousand wounded back in the States during the projected two year campaign,'45-'47.

That was just the estimated casualties for the initial assaults in Operation Downfall.

And again, it needn't have been as many as 200,000 casualties if the Japanese had shown a willingness to negotiate surrender after the Hiroshima bombing.

Not to mention many hundreds of Japanese civilians committed suicide in the last days of the battle, some jumping from "Suicide Cliff" and "Banzai Cliff".

Efforts by U.S. troops to persuade them to surrender instead were mostly futile.

Widespread propaganda in Japan portraying Americans and British as "devils" who would treat POWs barbarically, deterred surrender.

I don't see how they made the wrong choice or that it was something they did for political gains.

Millions of lives were saved from Japanese pride and arrogance.

In fact, naval strategist Takejiro Onishi claimed 20 million Japanese would die in a gyokusei campaign, meaning "crushing of the beautiful jewel" or mass, heroic death against any invasion.

 

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You're like 30 posts behind the thread. Your numbers are wrong, and that wasn't the actual choice. So pretty much 0/3.

we killed a lot more people firebombing japan. in a sense, the magnitude of the one nuke saved a lot of japanese lives.

Onward Christian soldiers!
Marching as to war!
With the nuke of Jesus
Going on before!!!!

 

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I am confident in my sources.

I don't want to read everyone's arglebargle.

 

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Why?

What was the alternative?

 

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