There was an alternative to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was on the books. The date, called X-Day, was set for November 1, 1945. It was to be the invasion of the southern beaches of Kyushu.
The invasion was to use the combined naval armadas of the Allied powers, a fleet larger than any actually assembled in history. The entire U.S. Sixth Army was supposed to be landed on 35 beaches.
Though deception plans were made and began to be put in action, the Japanese correctly guessed where the Americans would strike next, right down to the port cities and beaches the Americans planned to hit first. The 3 to 1 local advantage in troops considered by the Americans to be essential for success would have actually been closer to even; 40% of all the ammunition in the Home Islands was already concentrated in Kyushu.
Ten thousand planes--most of them planned for suicide
kamikaze strikes--were being husbanded for the battle. None of them would have to fly as far or through as much air cover as they did against the naval forces assembled off of Okinawa, where they hit one ship for every nine suicide planes launched. As a result, they felt they could reliably hit one ship for every six launches--sixteen hundred hits on ships, and since the Japanese Navy was wrecked and could never hope to challenge the U.S. Navy again, there was no need to target anything but troop ships.
The Japanese also planned to conscript every male
and female capable of fighting on the island. They apparently did not plan to give the women modern firearms, because they did not have enough. Muskets and bamboo spears would have to be good enough.
Other tidbits essential for total disaster were floating around. General MacArthur was by 1945 known to all as a pompous ass who wildly overestimated the strength of the enemy in order to corner as many men and as much equipment as he could. For Operation Olympic, the Kyushu part of Operation Downfall, MacArthur's staff inexplicably made a straight call which, it turned out, was surprisingly accurate. Nobody believed them. Later, when it became evident that the Japanese were building up in the exact areas we planned to land, MacArthur refused to alter the plan.
MacArthur loved the WMDs, too, as we all nearly learned to our total demise five years later. Serious consideration was given to the use of poison gas to prevent the Japanese from using their now familiar cave-fighting tactics. It was thought that there would be about seven atomic bombs ready for use by X-Day, and that they could be used to blast passages through the Japanese lines. The planner suggested that American troops should wait
forty-eight hours before moving directly through the radioactive blast zones. Had that happened, the entire U.S. Sixth Army would have been dead by Christmas, or well on its way.
And that was only the beginning, for the next step in the plan was Operation Coronet, the invasion of the main Japanese island of Honshu in early 1946. That would have been a much larger operation, with more troops and more nukes.
Initial American casualty estimates for Olympic were guessed to be 456,000, with over 100,000 American fatalities, if the operation could be completed in 90 days. The combined estimate--a very conservative estimate, in light of what the Americans did not know at the time--for Olympic and Coronet were guessed to be 1.2 million American casualties, including 267,000 fatalities.
And for all that time, Japan's cities would be fire-bombed, again and again, each time the bombers seeking smaller and more refugee-filled targets because except for Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki (and maybe one other--Nagoya?), all the Japanese metropolises had already been burned to the ground.
As it turned out, total U.S. combat deaths for World War II were 291,000, so the two operations of Downfall very likely could have doubled that.
Among those slated to eventually go in to the maw of Operation Downfall were many of the American infantry veterans of the European theatre of war, as well as most of the USAAF air crews. Virtually all of America's male Class of '45 high school students were conscripted and being trained for the invasion of Japan, because the war industry was already winding down and there were no more war-essential positions left to be filled. The Army had already revoked its deal to put officer candidates through school first, and fed all those kids into the Battle of the Bulge as replacement privates. We were already chewing through our best and brightest, and we were planning on killing just as many of our boys as had already died.
So forgive me channeling General Buck Turgidson, but we would have got our hair mussed on that one. Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed, over time, around 300,000 people, admittedly innocent people. But by 1945 there were no volunteers left on any side; everyone was a conscript. Everyone, including women and children on the Japanese side, was expected to fight and die. And they would have died in numbers that would have made even Stalin cringe--maybe, since he'd also be grinning about picking up Hokkaido and Manchuria for the Soviet Union.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall http://www.ww2pacific.com/downfall.htmlhttp://www.historyofwar.org/articles/wars_downfall2.html
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