Alex WellersteinVerified account

/2 Yes, the Japanese military was in rough shape *in Japan,* but there's been much historiography lately demonstrating that it was rearming rapidly, and was ready to provide formidable if unsophisticated resistance to any landing...

/3 ...but your comment on dodging the Kyushu landing by months skips the part almost all modern critics of the decision skip idly past. and that's the other 75% of the war that was still underway. Japan was isolated; the Japanese Army was not.

/4 My grandfather and 400k+ other allied troops were in active contact with the enemy on the Burmese border, while US Eighth Army was still fighting Japanese troops in Mindanao and Luzon. And lest we forget, in China...

/5 ...*the protection of which was, after all, the cause of the US embargo in '41* - you have millions of troops still locked in battle as well, which were very much on the US govt's mind. And then you have the civilians in occupied areas, + POWs -

/6 ...the former literally numbering hundreds of millions, the latter over 100k IIRC, who were known to be facing starvation or mistreatment to varying degrees depending exposure to disrupted food supplies, occupation & war crimes, or both.

If what you're getting at is, "war is hell and ending war is better than continuing it" — I mean, I agree, in principle. The question is always the means.

My point is that the "2 bombs on 2 cities in 3 days versus invasion" framework is inadequate, historically. It's a postwar creation meant to justify the bombings, not a reflection of how it was seen by anyone involved at the time.

You seem to be wanting to get into the moral question (which I've not really ventured into in this thread at all, just poked at), which is something a bit different from that.