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Japanese schoolgirls training with a machinegun for the anticipated American invasion of Japan, WW2, 1945
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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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Those estimates have actually grown enormously as the years have passed, not surprisingly in parallel with the growth in criticism of the US for using the atomic bombs on Japanese cities. Estimates at the time were in the neighborhood of 50,000 allied casualties (where "casualties" include wounded and captured as well as killed); Truman at one point started throwing out 500,000 dead as a round number, and now in modern times we have "over a million" as a common estimate. In reality, who knows? One of the options being considered at the time as an alternative to invasion was just to continue the conventional firebombing as well as the submarine-based blockade of all of Japan's shipping, and starving Japan into eventual surrender without incurring a very high number of allied casualties in the process.
It's worth noting that a three-day firebombing campaign against Tokyo in March 1943 (using conventional ordinance) produced more Japanese casualties than did the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings combined.
In reality the USSR was planning the invasion of Japan and was strongly prepared for it, no American lives would have been lost and Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't actually a factor in Japan's surrender anyway.
That's a pretty fair argument, I was taking the 1 Million at face value previously and if it were true then the bombs would be an obvious choice. Basically, as long as the reliable estimate stays below the 226,000 (althought we only have that upper estimate in hindsight) casualties from the bombs then the bombs should not be dropped because all lives should be considered equal.
However, there are a total of 1,326,076 killed or missing Japanese Soldiers from 1937 to 1945 not including the injured or captured, so maybe you're being a bit silly with the lowball 50,000 estimate from an Operation Downfall.
Well, it wasn't me saying that. However, it's worth considering that the US only had about 90,000 soldiers killed in France and Germany from D-Day through to the end of the war, and while they were only facing about a fourth of the German military (the rest being occupied with the Soviets), that still represented manpower greater than what Japan had available with most of its army being trapped in China. And Germany had a still-mostly-intact industrial base more than capable of equipping its troops with as much modern weaponry (guns, artillery, ammunition, tanks and armored vehicles and airplanes) while Japan's industrial base (which had never been anywhere near Germany's in terms of productive capacity to begin with) had been smashed almost to nothingness. Schoolgirls with machine guns (and very little ammo) have much less military effectiveness than perhaps people imagine.
If 50,000 casualties would have proved to be an underestimate of the cost of an invasion, it likely would have been the result not of angry common Japanese armed with sharp sticks and fighting to the bitter end, but of the 6,000 to 10,000 planes the Japanese had amassed and hidden away for use as kamikazes. These piloted bombs (which were really one of the most devastating weapons of the war) caused considerable carnage despite the US' air supremacy; unleashed against large troop transports carrying thousands of soldiers each which of necessity would have had to have come very close to the Japanese coast, they might well have killed a lot more than 50,000 soldiers.