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In reply to the discussion: Hiroshima - quit lying to yourselves [View all]beemer27
(459 posts)tumtum,
My dad was going to be in the second wave of the invasion. The first wave would have had about a 100% fatality rate. The second would have had about the same. When he was part of the Army of Occupation, he saw the sharpened bamboo that you speak of. He also saw crude spears that the civilians were ordered to fight with. Had we not dropped the bombs, the blood bath would have been one of the worst in history. Not only would American troops be killed in unprecedented numbers, the Japanese population would have been killed in numbers that we can not imagine. Decimate does not even come close. The death toll would have been so large that it would have to be expressed in what percentage of the entire population perished instead of simple numbers.
It is easy for people who did not have skin in the game to "revise" history to satisfy their perception of right and wrong. The reality of what happened at that place and at that time was such that the bomb was the most effective method of bring the war to a swift end. As to the numbers of civilians killed, no one seems to remember how many we killed with fire-bombing Dresden or Tokyo. The revisionist also forget how many Chinese died at Japanese hands. War is dirty and cruel. I am happy that we won.