Operation Downfall

I am guessing that most of you have never heard of this. I was aware of what it was but never knew the name. After watching some of the D Day commemoration activities this weekend and then a documentary on Pearl Harbor Saturday night......Okay, yes I watched a documentary on a Saturday night! This put me in mind of a few things.
Some of you may not know about Operation Overlord, it was the name of the invasion of France, D Day. Operation Downfall was the name of the invasion of the islands of Japan. Just to give it some prospective, the number of troops and support personnel for D-Day was around 300,000. The number called for to take Japan was around 4.5 million.
US casualties were estimated as high a a million, Japanese casualties would have been much, much more. Japan was training its civilians, including children to fight to the death, encouraging them to commit suicide rather than surrender.
The documentary, giving all sides, suggested that the United States decision to drop the A bomb was retaliation for Pearl Harbor. That decision, in my opinion served two purposes, the first and most important was to save American lives. For example, preparations were being made for this invasion. One of these preparations was the minting of Purple Heart medals. So many were minted that we are still using those medals today. And unless there is another wide scale conventional ground war we may never run out.
Second, because we knew that the Japanese would not surrender from our countless battles like Iwo Jima and Guadacanal, we were going to have to break this army's spirit, take them out of that frame of mind. How do you truly defeat an enemy that will not surrender? An enemy that thinks it is divine to kill themselves while killing their enemy. You, unfortunately, have to convince that enemy that you have the means and the will to completely erase their existence from the face of the earth.
Before anyone launches themselves from their seats remember the one thing that has bothered me since I was old enough to understand history; we had to drop that bomb twice. Japan decided not to surrender after the first one.
The use of those bombs were indeed a tragedy but necessary. In comparison, the Japanese civilians that died during those bombings and afterwards is nothing compared to those who would have died had we invaded.
The only alternative I could think of was to detonate the bomb on a remote island in front of Japanese generals, but because they did not surrender after the first bomb it would not have worked.

Ask a veteran who was in or on their way to the Pacific during 1945 if they think we should have used it, veterans like my grandfather. They were the ones who would have paid the price. Ask them quickly though, their numbers get smaller every day, D Day was 65 years ago. I don't know about you but I am glad there is only one invasion ceremony.