World War II/Japan
Atomic bombs
- Richard B. Frank, Why Truman Dropped the Bomb [1]
- Duncan Anderson, “Nuclear Power: The End of the War Against Japan”
- Roger D. Luchs, No Apologies for the Bomb
- Studs Terkel, “One hell of a big bang” (Paul Tibbets interview) [2]
Self-interested opposition
- “...the Strategic Bombing Survey was a tendentious piece of special pleading, designed to secure a large independent air force, which many believed would have been in danger if it had been shown that the atomic bombs alone produced the surrender.” [3]
- “The most damning research exploded the very low estimates of invasion casualties prepared by the army. These were shown to be the product of General MacArthur’s desire that an invasion should take place” [4]
Japanese militia
Bamboo spears
“ Over dinner, he explained why he wanted to teach me the spear. As it turns out, at the tail end of the war his job was to teach women how to use spears made of cut bamboo to charge invading American forces. This was not something I had ever heard of to that point- it was before the age of the internet so it wasn’t something as easily found as it is now. The idea of a group of 50 women going against a squad of Americans armed with M-1 Garands and belt fed machine guns almost seems comical. But my host explained that they thought that if a group that large all charged at once the Americans couldn’t gun down all of them before a few managed to stab the invaders.
Then he started crying.
He told how he saw children being trained by having mock anti-tank mines strapped to their back and approaching tanks with their hands up. Once they got close enough, they were expected to rush under the tank and trigger the mine, killing both themselves and the tank crew.
War is madness at its best, but this went beyond even that.
Think about what would have happened. Put yourself in the place of a machine gunner on a tank who has heard about a few of your fellows being taken out by kids pretending to surrender in that way. Now imagine you see a bunch of kids coming at you with their hands raised in surrender. The choice is simple, risk death or gun down the kids.
And of course, there were overt attacks that were willing to result in dozens of dead women for the chance of stabbing a few GIs.
As the military’s attempted interception of the surrender announcement shows, the rulers of Japan didn’t give a rat’s ass how many of their people died as long as they weren’t hung by the victors. All the way to wherever they finally holed up, scenes like the one with the tank gunner would have been repeated over and over again.
