Paul1405,
Gee, you do come up with some idiotic quips. If it were up to me the likes of you should have to go to Gaza instead of walking across the Harbour Bridge.
Or, you should have to work in remote Australia staying in shacks without windows with only a mozzie net to sleep under & a 20 litre fuel drum as a stove & no fridge for months on end & only get into the nearest town every six or so months.
Of course you wouldn't last a week but at least you wouldn't be the burden to society that you are in your bureaudroid job.
You et al are a sad legacy of being of parents the Goat sold out to.

JD writes: "That “2 million lives saved” figure didn’t exist in 1945. It emerged decades later when officials were defending the bombings against critics."

That just not true. As in, you've completely made it up.

1. The US, in preparing for the invasion, had manufactured 1.5 million Purple Heart, being medals given to those injured in battle. That is they expected 1.5 million casualties of which one-third would be deaths. They were aware that the primary Japanese strategy in the event of an invasion was to kill as many US soldiers as possible, irrespective of their own losses, in the belief that this would force the US to the negotiating table.

2. The Japanese High Command had prepared all sorts of reports about how they would defend the homeland. For example there is their Kyushu Defence Plan Document which talks of millions of civilian and military deaths just in Kyushu. And there were the Japanese General Staff Estimates in early 1945 which expected millions of deaths in Kyushu alone.

3. Remember that the US had broken the Japanese codes, so they, the US, were well aware of these Japanese estimates and war plans.

4. They were also well aware of the dire position of the POWs in lands still held by Japan and the urgency of getting to those groups as early as possible.

Its just fabrication that these factors didn't form part of the US planning although the level of Japanese deaths was the lowest priority. While Truman, when talking to the American people about his reasons for the bomb, naturally emphasised the saving of US lives, in private discussions and letters in August 45, he also talked of the save lives in Japan and China.

The Japanese Mogami class frigate deal knocks in the head the fantasy that we can or should build our own warships. The first three of the vessels will definitely be built in Japan, and hopefully so will the rest. Australia is beyond making anything these days - well, apart from mistakes.

Given Albanese's dislike of English speaking, much-like-us America, we should be forming a stronger bond with Japan.

Communist China wants to keep Japan and Australia apart just as they do with Australia and America. That means that their enabler, Albanese, will have to go before Australians can be safer than they are now. Hopefully, that will occur sometime in the next three years, as his hubris and stupidity can no longer be tolerated by the ALP itself. The Treasurer is already showing signs of wanting to replace him.

mhaze,

Nobody’s arguing an invasion wouldn’t have been horrifically costly. The issue is your claim that there was a single, contemporaneous “2 million lives saved” figure in 1945.

There wasn’t - and none of your points change that.

1. About 1.5 million Purple Hearts were made, but that’s not a precise casualty forecast. They were for both wounded and killed, produced in bulk for the Pacific and post-war years. That stockpile lasted into Iraq and Afghanistan. It was logistics, not a neat projection for Olympic/Coronet, and certainly not proof of a “2 million saved” total.

2. “Ketsu-Go” mobilised hundreds of thousands for Kyushu, and US intelligence tracked it. That showed ferocious resistance was likely, but your “millions in Kyushu alone” isn’t in any 1945 planning document I’ve seen. US invasion estimates varied widely - from MacArthur’s 50,800 US losses in the first month to higher joint-staff projections - but none combined into your 2 million figure.

3. ULTRA and MAGIC intercepts revealed Japanese deployments and strategy. That informed risk, but knowing the enemy’s plan isn’t the same as having a tidy casualty ledger that includes everyone from POWs to Japanese civilians.

4. POW conditions were appalling and urgent, no question. But again - where’s the 1945 document that adds US troops, Japanese civilians, POWs, and occupied populations into one round “2 million” total?

Truman wrote in July 1945 that the bomb should be used on military targets and “not women and children.” After the war, the “half-million Americans saved” claim appears in speeches, and decades later the wider “2 million saved” story emerges - by retroactively bundling multiple categories of hypothetical deaths into one morality-friendly total.

Basically, you’re combining separate facts from 1945 into a single number that didn’t exist at the time. That’s not how planners framed it then, it’s a later political narrative designed to make the decision sound self-evidently virtuous.

You seem to like your history, but only ever when it's revisionist.

"but knowing the enemy’s plan isn’t the same as having a tidy casualty ledger "

This isn't am accounting exercise. No one claims to have precise numbers. All of these were estimates with wildly differing ranges. But it is possible, if you want to look at all the facts, to see that the numbers who would likely die in an invasion of the Japanese homeland would be in the millions. The US thought it. the Japanese thought and planned for it.

In my first post I wrote "No one quite knows how many lives were saved by the decision to use the bomb." Now silly old JD tells me I'm wrong because no one knows how many lives would have been lost in an invasion. Struth!.

He also tries to hang his hat on some unresearched claim that no one concatenated the various estimates into a single neat number. Whether that's true or not is beside the point. That millions would have died in an invasion is really beyond dispute. That further millions would have died in S-E Asia awaiting the end of the war is also beyond dispute.

But somehow JD thinks that because no one, to his memory, said 2 million in 1945, all of this becomes fiction. Struth!

I never said that people in 1945 were saying that 2 million lives were saved. As usual, JD simply asserts that that's my claim and then tells me I'm wrong to think something I never thought. Struth!

You’re shifting the goalposts, mhaze.

In your OP you said:

“...a rough estimate of well over 2 million is certainly reasonable.”
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=10642#371375

That’s what I addressed - whether a single “2 million saved” figure existed in 1945. You now say you “never claimed” that, yet your own wording presented it as a reasonable, unified estimate. If that number was only ever a later amalgamation, then my point stands.

I never claimed “no one would have died” or that an invasion wouldn’t have been catastrophic. Of course it would have. The question is whether in 1945 anyone - US or Japanese - had a credible, contemporaneous calculation that added together US troops, Japanese civilians, POWs, and occupied populations into a single “well over 2 million” tally.

If you agree no such unified figure existed at the time, then we’re just talking about how later decades merged multiple separate estimates into one morality-friendly number. That’s not quibbling over an “accounting exercise,” it’s about recognising how history is retold.

Which, if we’re being honest, sounds a lot like you now agreeing with the very point you called “silly” a post ago.