[airspirit]

Winewood, your post sums up evereything I've been trying to say. Okinawa has hardly the population of the main islands, and look at the death toll there. It is harly conjecture to estimate the death toll of a mainland invasion would be exponentially higher had we invaded rather than bombed. We managed to end the war with minimal loss of life in comparison to what would have happend had we stormed the beaches.

Like you said, it is nice to try to play with modern morals when considering this question, but let me ask this: is 100K deaths worse than millions? I wouldn't be surprised if the end death toll was well over 2.5 MILLION if we had invaded and pushed this to an endgame with traditional war methods. What we did was both a just and honorable means to end the war.

Don't think that the US would have had horrific death tolls upon invasion. Most of the Japanese forces were off the mainland, and it would have been primarily militia that would have fought on the lines, supported by light amounts of Japanese regulars. Our death tolls wouldn't have been near that of most of the other major conflicts because the opposition would have been poorly equipped and trained to handle such a conflict. The death toll to the Japanese would have been horrific beyond compare in any conflict ever fought.

Question these things with a humanitarian end if you wish, but keep in mind, those who believe that the bombs shouldn't have been dropped, that if your way of ending the war was followed then, the amount of suffering by that nation would have been such that they would be ravaged still up to this day, and there wouldn't be single person alive in that country that wouldn't have lost multiple relatives to that conflict. In doing things your way, we would have killed over ten or twenty times more than the way we did it.

Weep for the lost, but look at the forest through the trees: we saved millions of lives. Are those lives worth nothing? Even though their nation commited a heinous act against us, we had the restraint to prevent their utter destruction by conventional war. That is something for you to mull over when cursing the actions of the brave men that made that decision.