A Political and Economic History of China Addendum: Critics of the Atomic Bomb, Part 2 of 4

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Photo: Japanese women train with spears to fight invading American GI's in the “Glorious Death of One Hundred Million” mobilization campaign.

6 MIN READ - The Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Economic Affairs continues his mini-series on the atomic bomb, this time refuting the argument that fewer lives would have been lost by simply invading and occupying Japan without destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Originally the Correspondent thought it would take three columns to refute the most common arguments against using the atomic bomb in World War II, but the sheer amount of history he needs to document will require a fourth.

In this column we’ll address the second common criticism of the decision to use the bomb:

2) “Estimates of Allied casualties in a conventional invasion/occupation of the home islands were wildly overstated. A conventional military invasion of Japan would have been less deadly than using the atomic bomb.”

During the summer of 1945 Allied war planners forecasted unthinkable casualties if U.S. and supporting British/Australian/Canadian troops attempted to invade the Japanese home islands. Most postwar historians agree.

Although the numbers vary, most estimates for Allied casualties range from 250,000 to nearly one million (dead plus wounded). To put that in perspective the United States suffered one million casualties in all of World War II of which 291,000 were battle deaths.

In addition to Americans, estimates of Japanese casualties, military and civilian combined, numbered in the several millions.

Hence the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing upwards of 150,000 people. 

The civilian death count was still appalling although mitigated by two factors: First, U.S. bombing warning leaflets had been dropped over most Japanese cities urging citizens to evacuate including Hiroshima, reducing its population modestly before the attack...

(see "LeMay Leaflets")

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And second, 40,000 of those living in Hiroshima were military, stationed at the Second Army General Headquarters which was responsible for the southern defense of Kyushu. The presence of the Army Command that would coordinate resistance against the Kyushu invasion was a major factor in the USA’s decision to select Hiroshima as a target.

But critics of the bombing still maintain Allied casualty estimates have been wildly overstated, both by the U.S. War Department and modern day historians, and that the Allies could have invaded and pacified Japan for far less than 150,000 deaths—Allied soldier, Japanese military, and Japanese civilian alike.

Using one customary example the late libertarian historian Ralph Raico, writing for the Ludwig von Mises Institute and making a case for trying Harry Truman as a war criminal, argued “the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.”

Raico’s source was Stanford historian Barton Bernstein whose research, also criticizing the unnecessary use of the bomb, calculated the same fatality estimate: only 46,000 Americans dead.

Some readers may find such a low forecast and others like it beyond belief, and for good reason. Simply applying lessons learned from past Pacific battles reveals the outlandishness of artificially depressing the numbers that low.

The U.S. suffered nearly 20,000 dead fighting for two rocks in the Pacific—Iwo Jima and Okinawa—with another 56,000 wounded

The Japanese suffered 115,000 dead on the same two islands and another 40,000-150,000 civilians died in Okinawa.

In both battles the USA enjoyed a 5-to-1 advantage in manpower.

Total casualties on both sides? 175,000-285,000 dead and at least 60,000 wounded.

And taking Japan itself would be a monumentally larger operation for which the Allies planned a two-invasion campaign. First would come beach landings on the home island of Kyushu (Operation Olympic), then clearing out and occupying the southern third of the island, an area of about 4,000 square miles.

Kyushu's ports and airfields would then be used to stage the second, larger invasion of Tokyo and the Kanto Plain—about 6,200 square miles—in March of 1946, dubbed Operation Coronet.

Thus the Allies aimed to invade and occupy 10,200 square miles of Japanese territory, more than 13 times larger than Okinawa and Iwo Jima combined. And unlike the latter two, which were surrounded by ocean in all directions, the occupied regions of Kyushu and Honshu would remain adjacent to Japanese controlled territory and thus subject to constant infiltration and counterattack.

In January 1945 the U.S. began making plans to invade Kyushu with 766,000 men, ten times the number of Americans at Normandy which to this day remains the largest amphibious invasion in history. According to intelligence reports there was only a single IJA division defending the island.

However after losing Okinawa Japanese strategists correctly anticipated Kyushu would be the Allies’ next objective, and by July 1945 the IJA had deployed 900,000 men and several tank brigades to defend the limited number of suitable landing grounds. 10,000 attack planes were also apportioned to Kyushu, most of which would be used in kamikaze attacks against offshore U.S. Navy ships.

Instead of a 5-to-1 advantage the Allies were now faced with parity which U.S. war planners were reluctant to accept.

Furthermore the Japanese government had mobilized every able-bodied adult—men, women, and students—to resist the invasion for the “Glorious Death of One Hundred Million” campaign. Footage of young Japanese women being trained with bamboo spears still exists in the archives today.

Had the Allied invasion proceeded then today we would undoubtedly have archival footage of spear-wielding Japanese women being machine-gunned or flame-thrown by U.S. Marines. And today’s A-bomb critics would instead be castigating “the brutal killing of Japanese women when the war could have been ended quickly with the atomic bomb."

To think that after fighting Japan for 770 square miles, with a 5-to-1 advantage and losing 20,000 dead, the U.S. would somehow only suffer 46,000 dead fighting at parity against 900,000 Japanese soldiers in Kyushu alone, 10,000 attack planes, and two million armed civilians over 4,000 square miles is pure fantasy resembling wartime propaganda.

And that's just Act One.

Remember more casualties were anticipated for 1946’s even larger Operation Coronet where Allied soldiers would invade the much larger, more heavily populated island of Honshu and engage in door-to-door urban fighting for Japan’s largest city and capital, although admittedly a great deal of Tokyo’s structures had been destroyed during the U.S. firebombing in March.

Moreover the USA lost nearly 20,000 dead over two rocks that most Japanese never considered part of the homeland. The level of fanatical resistance would have only increased when invading Kyushu and Honshu, the capital city of Tokyo, and the imperial palace.

Also keep in mind that Iwo Jima was devoid of civilians (already evacuated) and Okinawan civilians were not combatants, yet 40,000-150,000 of them died anyway. In Japan tens of millions of civilians were mobilized as militia to battle against Allied troops on the home islands. 

The painful process of neutralizing militarized civilian resistance may also have extended beyond just southern Kyushu and the Kanto Plain—to the entire country—if the emperor never gave the order to surrender or perished before he could issue such an order.

Disruption of what little economy Japan had left during the fighting would have also led to more deaths by starvation as hunger was already gripping Japan by mid-1945.

The estimates of many millions of Japanese dead are absolutely realistic.

And foreshadowing the subject of our next column, American and Japanese death counts would have to be doubled for those who remember the millions more victims who critics of the bomb callously disregard: the peoples of Japanese-occupied countries who were already dying in large numbers and would continue to die throughout Asia while the invasion dragged on. 

Assuming very optimistically that the invasion wrapped up by summer of 1946 an estimated 4 to 5.6 million more civilians—mostly in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam—would have perished while waiting for the Japanese surrender to finally come. 

More details on that macabre calculus in Part 3, but due to the atomic bomb those 4 to 5.6 million Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indonesians lived instead.

“Worst case only 46,000 American lives lost” is wishful thinking for the ideologically predisposed: critics who start from a premise that the Allies possessed a long list of peaceful, bloodless options to end the war, but that Harry Truman callously chose to ignore them all. 

Simple historical facts, like casualty figures from the Pacific battles of early 1945, dispel such fantasies.

The very ugly nature of the choices the Allies faced has been better summarized by knowledgeable historians: a list of exclusively horrible options for the Allies, the Japanese, and the people of Japanese-occupied Asia, with the atomic bomb being the least worst solution by far. Those critics who argue a full invasion of Japan or a blockade (coming in the next column) “wouldn’t have been that bad” enjoy the luxury of living in an alternate reality that American war planners and Harry Truman did not.