November 1, 1945
November 1, 1945
Since this is now in "Something Different", I feel like I can continue to post in it.
Here's the text I just sent to the local newspaper as a letter to the editor. It oversimplfies, alas, due to size constraints:
"I note with interest the varied memorials today to those who died in the nuclear attack on the city of Hiroshima. And I presume that on August 9, there will be similar memorials to those who died in Nagasaki. There were approximately 120,000 people who died in the initial attack and perhaps twice as many over time from a variety of injuries caused by the attacks. Horrific as that number seems to us, today, separated by the expanse of 60 years they really aren't that many. For example, the firebombing of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe had killed more people than did the two nuclear attacks. But even those casualties pale when compared to other possibilities.
On August 1, 1945 there were two paths to the future for Imperial Japan and the United States. I will not go into what brought these nations to that point, any of dozens of good history texts can tell you that. Instead I would rather take a moment and encourage anyone reading this letter to remember this November 1 as the 60th anniversary of the most important event of World War II that did _not_ happen. That was to have been D-Day for Operation Olympic.
That was the day that an unimaginable bloodbath for both nations was to have begun. It has been estimated that 500,000 Allied soldiers would have died and up to 2,000,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians during Operation Olympic. This would have only been in the battle for the southernmost of the Japanese main islands, Kyushu. Operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu at the Tokyo Plain south of the capital, would have been still to come. In the end it was estimated that conquering Japan would cost 1.7 to 4 million American casualties, including 400,000 to 800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities. It is important to remember that in our world where Hiroshima and Nagasaki were attacked, there was a total of 292,000 Americans who died in battle, with another 671,000 wounded, in all theaters and battles of the war.
Nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals were manufactured in anticipation of the casualties resulting from the invasion of Japan. As of 2005, all the American military casualties of the following sixty years — including the Korean and Vietnam Wars — have not exhausted that stockpile.
Finally I would simply like to ask the readers of this letter to remember how many of their relatives served during the war. Had this invasion occurred, a large number of you would not be here to read this letter for your fathers and grandfathers would have died in what would have been the greatest bloodletting the world had ever seen.
It is hard, in the context of a nation tangled up in a needless conflict brought about by our leaders greed, to remember that sometimes a cause is just and that sometimes a great violence is the only way to avoid an even greater violence. Would the additional millions of deaths really been preferable? That is a question that each of us can only answer in the small, still, silence of our hearts."
William
