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Fabricated Stories About World War II Still Known by Many

Khalid Elhassan November 15, 2019 35 min

The territory still occupied by Japan, in blue, at the time of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Gifex

22. Millions of Japanese Were Still in a Death Grapple With Allied Soldiers

In the summer of 1945, Japan also had millions of military personnel stationed in her overseas empire. They were fighting millions of Allied opponents, producing thousands of casualties on both sides every day. Moreover, Japan held hundreds of thousands of Allied POWs, whom it subjected to barbaric treatment on a daily basis, beating, starving, withholding medication from, or murdering them.

Those casualties from continued fighting and from Japan’s atrocious treatment of POWs would have continued to mount every day the war continued. However, the main justification for the atomic bombings was that the alternative would have been a massive invasion of the Japanese home islands, which the Japanese government was determined to resist via national suicide.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.