Decision To Drop Atomic Bomb Essay

According to the official Navy Department Library website, "The 36-day (Iwo Jima) assault resulted in more than 26,000 American casualties, including 6,800 dead" with 19,217 wounded. military had nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals manufactured in anticipation of potential casualties from the planned invasion of Japan.To put this into context, the 82-day Battle of Okinawa lasted from early April until mid-June 1945 and U. casualties (out of five Army and two Marine divisions) were above 62,000, of which more than 12,000 were killed or missing. To date, all American military casualties of the 60 years following the end of World War II, including the Korean and Vietnam Wars, have not exceeded that number.Of the 22,060 Japanese combatants entrenched on Iwo Jima, 21,844 died either from fighting or by ritual suicide.

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"For China alone, depending upon what number one chooses for overall Chinese casualties, in each of the ninety-seven months between July 1937 and August 1945, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 persons perished, the vast majority of them noncombatants.

For the other Asian states alone, the average probably ranged in the tens of thousands per month, but the actual numbers were almost certainly greater in 1945, notably due to the mass death in a famine in Vietnam. Newman concluded that each month that the war continued in 1945 would have produced the deaths of 'upwards of 250,000 people, mostly Asian but some Westerners.'" The end of the war limited the expansion of the Japanese controlled Vietnamese famine of 1945, stopping it at 1–2 million deaths and also liberated millions of Allied prisoners of war and civilian laborers working in harsh conditions under a forced mobilization.

Some debaters focus on the presidential decision-making process, and others on whether or not the bombings were the proximate cause of Japanese surrender.

Over the course of time, different arguments have gained and lost support as new evidence has become available and as new studies have been completed.

The Soviet Union declared war on Japan an hour before 9 August and invaded Manchuria at one minute past midnight; Japan surrendered on 15 August. Truman, United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Government Chiang Kai-shek issued the Potsdam Declaration, which outlined the terms of surrender for the Empire of Japan as agreed upon at the Potsdam Conference.

This ultimatum stated if Japan did not surrender, it would face "prompt and utter destruction".

In the Dutch East Indies, there was a "forced mobilization of some 4 million—although some estimates are as high as 10 million—romusha (manual labourers) ...

About 270,000 romusha were sent to the Outer Islands and Japanese-held territories in Southeast Asia, where they joined other Asians in performing wartime construction projects.

In 2003, there were still 120,000 of these Purple Heart medals in stock.

Supporters of the bombings argue waiting for the Japanese to surrender would also have cost lives.