over 50% would have died!!! because uhh... uhh... you know the thing... reasons.
The Nazis hyped themselves as steel willed fanatics willing to die for blut and boden, how they will fight for every inch of German soil, how they will continue the fight after the war as ferocious werewolves tearing apart the degenerate invaders.
Then Zhukov knocks the door.
Yeah, this type of propaganda has existed countless times throughout history, and has literally never been true on a large scale. This is also basically why Pol Pot thought he would beat the Vietnamese (before he got his ass handed to him).
It’s so fucking crazy how many people hold this view when it’s obvious horseshit, and even most of the US commanders later regretted it.
By their logic, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Austin, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Sacramento, and countless other US cities deserve to be nuked in response to American war crimes. Bet they'll have a change of heart when their loved ones crumble to ashes in their beds and they themselves die after 3 months of pure agony from radiation exposure
I always like to remember that we still cannot read Madame Curie's notebooks without protection. Radiation in warfare is criminal. It simply has to be, there is no other way that you could possibly look at it. You can't justify condemning generations, literal infants, because of the sins of their forefathers. No enemy is worth incinerating at the cost of future babies, literally born to die after short and miserable lives, in the 'peacetime' achieved afterward. That is hollow. Unbearably hollow.
No, no. Then it would be like "I didn't deserve this, I'm not Imperial Japan!"
It was also an island chain under total naval blockade. The situation was entirely under control.
It was to show the Soviets we were willing to genocide entire civilian populations. And of course the thing the USSR has was numbers. The Soviets were gearing up to invade Japan from the north anyway.
The Soviets were gearing up to invade Japan from the north anyway.
look buddy i like stalin as much as the next guy but idk about that one
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/soviets-declare-war-on-japan-invade-manchuria
amphibious invasions are very tough not just a matter of having the boats
insert crossing the Volga River in rowboats to retake the city of Stalingrad
again I like the red army as much as the next guy but Stalingrad was to reinforce a "beach head", if Japan wanted to set a defensive line at Hokkaido or further south, the soviets had 0 capacity to hold on to a beachhead they invested in defending and no way of ahcieving naval superiority really
I’m just busting balls. I don’t know enough of the history of the red army as I should
It's true that Japan would capitulate even without the nukes and the US was just testing out their cool new weapons of mass destruction, but also it is kinda true that there was a lot of fanaticism and many people ready to sacrifice themselves if the government decided to go down that route. I was reading Akira Kurosawa's autobiography and his description was pretty shocking. There was this protocol announced by the government named 100 Million Shattered Jewels, where supposedly if Japan were to be invaded, the entire populace would basically be sacrificed to fight the enemy. Kurosawa said that most people were prepared for that, and he believed it too. It seems like it was just propaganda and there was no real intention to carry it through but the fanaticism was real. It makes it all the more weird seeing how fast Japan just completely reversed their attitude.
A number of senior American officials including from the military later said it was not needed.
The native inhabitants, famous for being on really good terms with imperial japan and trusting what they said.
If this wasn't the dunk tank and I had the energy, I'd like to talk about Okinawa. That shit is so absolutely fucked!!
From what I heard in Hardcore History at least
