with bamboo spears in 1945. Air Force Magazine
10. An Awful But Rational Calculation of the Greater vs Lesser Evil
Japan’s leaders in the summer of 1945 refused to accept responsibility for the consequences of their choice to wage an unwinnable war. Instead, they resorted to histrionics and sought to save face via the destruction of their country and its people. They trained women to fight heavily armed invaders with bamboo spears and trained little boys and girls to fight soldiers with pointy sticks. Rather than sacrifice themselves in order to spare their country, Japan’s leaders sought to sacrifice their country in order to spare their egos from the humiliation of surrender.
Such dishonorable notions of honor meant that the estimated cost of an invasion was upwards of a 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, awful as they were, were an acceptable price in the eyes of the US government. For many, there was nothing exceptional about the innocent victims of the atomic bombings that would have justified sparing them at the cost of the millions of other lives that would have been lost elsewhere had the war continued.
