Skander -> RE: Invasion of the home islands (1/3/2005 1:15:27 PM)
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Civilian casualties in the Ryukyus (Okinawa) were over 100,000, which was about 33% of the population. This came about for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the air raids, bombardment and battle consumed about 40 million tons of ordenance. That's about 1 million boxcars full. We blew the crap out of that island, which is only about 300 square miles. Secondly the Japanese Army significantly increased the civilian casualties in several ways. A lot of effort was put into propoganda which deemed death as the only honorable way for civilians, and backed it up with propoganda which outlined hideous abuses which could be expected at the hands of the allied forces for anyone who was too cowardly to surrender. They also used civilians to screen their own attempts to get behind the American lines as the battle dragged on, resulting in many casualties at checkpoints both directly and indirectly. Of course the initial disposition of Japanese forces put them squarely in the most densely populated portions of the island, which increased the civilian casualties from the pre-invasion air raids and bombardments. I lived on Okinawa for 6 years in the 1960s, and in an average year 5-10 people would die from (previously) unexploded munitions. I found human remains on more than one occasion, and hand grenades and small arms ammunition on numerous occasions. This was 20 years after the war in a fairly populated area. Every Okinawan we knew lost family members, and many were traumatized for life. One of my uncles joined the Marines in 1942 at 17 years of age. He fought on Guadalcanal (mop up), Saipan and was severely wounded on Okinawa. He spent 8 months in the hospital. In all of his experience he never saw more than a few Japanese prisoners taken, and indeed these may have been Korean slave laborers for all he knew. His platoon killed several Okinawan civilians in a confused firefight with Japanese infiltrators, and another woman at a checkpoint at night where they fired at a noise and listened to the woman scream almost all night. At dawn they found her body. This scene haunted my uncle for years afterward (it probably still does, as he is still alive). During the Korean War he and his wife adopted 4 Korean children who were orphaned, I guess as a way of making amends to the children of the woman they killed on Okinawa. This is all my way of saying that I'm glad that we didn't invade the mainland. While one cannot predict with certainty that the fighting would have produced the sorts of casualty rates that Okinawa did, if it was anything close to that then the atom bombs saved a lot of lives on both sides in the aggregate.
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