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Fabricated Stories About World War II Still Known by Many

Khalid Elhassan November 15, 2019 35 min

20. The Horrific Cost of Invading Japan

Japan’s wartime leaders’ dishonorable notions of honor meant that the price of an Allied invasion of their country would have been horrific. Allied planners estimated the cost of an invasion at upwards of one million Allied casualties, and tens of millions of Japanese, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.

Compared to that, the 200,000 casualties of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings were an acceptable price. Morally speaking, there was nothing exceptional about the innocent victims of the atomic bombings, that would have justified sparing them at the cost of the many more other innocent lives that would have been lost elsewhere had the war continued.

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.