We are going to do this the way the Republicans do it...

[flashman13]

18. That is one point of view. Let's try another POV. There was no need for an invasion of Japan.

If you consult your map you will see that Japan is a string of islands. Japan has very limit resources and totally relies on supplies from outside sources. That was the whole rational behind the Japanese starting the war in the first place. We controlled the seas and the skies. We could have continued the existing siege of the islands and starved the population back into the stone age. If they all died, so much the better.

At the time of the atomic bombing, the Japanese were already attempting to negotiate a surrender through various third parties, including the Russians. We chose to ignore their entreaties. They were willing to surrender if they could keep the emperor. That is the one condition they ultimately were granted.

The bombs were dropped as a demonstration to the Russians of our power, not to win the war. It was already won.

Of course we also wanted to see just how destructive our bombs were. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were exempted from our earlier bombing which had already burned out every other city in Japan just for demonstration purposes. We had already burned out 14 square miles of Tokyo and killed more than 100,000 people in a single fire bomb raid.

So the false claim that it was either the atomic bombs or an invasion resulting in mass casualties was a ruse to salve our moral concerns. As they say, the victors write the history books.