“If the war had continued, it’s entirely possible that as many as 27 million Japanese might have died, as the Allied armies blasted their way from the initial landing zones at the Kyushu Peninsula up towards Tokyo.”

 By Dr. Tom Lewis

THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS of Japan, which occurred 75 years ago this summer, stunned and horrified the world.

The first blast, which obliterated Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, killed more than 100,000 people, most of them civilians. The second attack, which targeted Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killed another 80,000.

Most victims died in the immediate detonations and resulting firestorm; many additional thousands were burned or succumbed later from exposure to fallout. And the misery only continued: Cancer rates in post-war Japan skyrocketed, while future generations suffered the long-term effects of radioactive contamination.

Yet, despite the humanitarian catastrophe that stemmed from the decision by the United States to drop the two bombs on Japan, a conventional military campaign to conquer the home islands, planned under the codename Operation: Downfall, would almost certainly have exacted an even greater death toll. Consider the following:

The Empire, though shattered in 1945, was far from beaten. Around 10,000 kamikaze aircraft awaited the troopships. The lesser-known suicide speedboats would have attacked in similar numbers, while beneath the waves 600 submarines would have carried their one- and two-man crews on a one-way voyage. Exact figures are hazy, but roughly 35 million armed militia and regular forces would have fought the invading Allies.

Added to these grim figures were the hundreds of thousands already dying every week fighting to secure Japanese-held lands. As late as August 1945, Japanese forces were still fortified in Indonesia, Malaya, China and a myriad of countries and territories taken by the Empire earlier in the war. Dislodging them would prove costly.

Worse, there were approximately 300,000 POWs in captivity in Japan by mid-1945. As Allied troops landed, Japanese commanders would likely have made good on their plans to execute the prisoners en masse, thereby freeing up the guards to go and meet the invaders.

There would likely have been over a million Allied combat deaths as well. In fact, some have estimated as many as 15,000 Allied military fatalities a week through to the end of 1946. Unbelievable? Consider this: From the June 6, 1944 Invasion of Normandy to the Liberation of Paris, the Allies lost 73,000 dead.

It’s been argued that there were alternatives to dropping the two bombs. The Soviet Union’s entry to the war might have convinced the Empire to surrender. There are no guarantees of that. Japan had famously beaten the Russians in 1905. Besides, the U.S.S.R., which had most of its military might positioned in Europe, lacked the capability for amphibious assault. Furthermore, Russia had few naval forces in Pacific, and no aircraft carriers or battleships to gun the beaches as did Britain and the U.S. military.

Simply waiting and starving Japan out has also been put forward as an alternative. But under such a strategy, dwindling food supplies would have almost certainly been denied to civilians in favour of the Emperor’s soldiers, which would have produced mass famine. And Japanese civilians were already braced for hardships, even death. Young teenagers were being pressed into training for armed resistance. The Japanese patriotic song “One Hundred Million Souls for the Emperor,” meant just that. One line went: “The day is near when the one hundred million people as one man will be in active resistance to the enemy.”

This was the ultimate irony. Dying made perfect sense to many in the bizarre world of wartime Japan. Millions of soldiers and sailors had already perished. How many more of Japan’s six million men still under arms would have been killed rather than surrender?

British general William Slim, one of the best fighting leaders of the war, expected the Allies to face tenacious defenders.

“There can be no question of the supreme courage and hardihood of the Japanese soldiers,” he wrote. “I know of no army that could have equalled them.”

In fact, the Emperor’s troops died at a rate which some came to call the “Saipan ratio,” referring to the 97 per cent of Japanese troops who fought to the death or committed suicide rather than surrender during the 1944 battle for the island.

In the Home Islands Japanese schoolgirls learnt to use rifles, and women learnt sharpshooting so they could harass Allied troops from the mountains. The use of “satchel charges” was taught, where the user hurled oneself under an enemy vehicle and detonated it.

A Japanese doctor, Shuntaro Hida, working at the army hospital in Hiroshima, listed as one of his tasks the education of medical orderlies regarding the techniques of suicide bombing.

“The soldiers were trained to strap bombs to their bodies and throw themselves against the tanks,” he would later recall.

Even after the two atomic blasts the official line was propagated in the newspapers that the country would, and could, continue the war. A typical newspaper carried a headline: “No reason to fear new style bomb” and went on to review countermeasures against atomic weapons.

Amazingly, the loss of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were initially seen as no great obstacle to the steadfast orderliness of Japanese people continuing the war. One soldier on leave from Hiroshima when the first bomb fell, Toyofumi Ogura, simply reported for duty as the supervisor of a student work group charged with making hand grenades. They continued their task, even on the outskirts of a city which had seen massive destruction. The Allies dropped, to no avail, millions of leaflets advising people to petition their leader and evacuate their cities.

It took the decision of the Emperor to bring it all to a halt.

Even then a revolution began, to save him from the “misguided advice” he had received. But saner heads prevailed: “one plane, one bomb, one city” was so convincing an argument the war suddenly stopped, as the Emperor broadcast by radio his decision to the nation.

It’s odd that over the years some people have pushed a concept that the use of the A-Bombs was wrong. Better, most would agree, that in the terrible arithmetic of war, that 200,000 should die than many millions.

If the war had continued, it’s entirely possible that as many as 27 million Japanese might have died, as the Allied armies blasted their way from the initial landing zones at the Kyushu Peninsula up towards Tokyo. The mountainous terrain of the entire country would have favoured a cave and tunnels defence, and the Allies would have attacked with overwhelming artillery and airpower rather than risk their infantry. But Japan’s brave people would have been eventually annihilated. Ironically, The A-bombs, as horrible as they were, had indeed given salvation.

Dr. Tom Lewis is the author of Atomic Salvation: How the A-Bomb Attacks Saved the Lives of 32 Million People. A military historian, editor, teacher, and former naval officer, he had written 14 books and continues to work on a variety of military history research projects.