n. There wasn’t one prisoner who wasn’t told they were dead if the Americans invaded Japan. We were looking forward to an invasion, but we knew we might not be around to see it.” Another survivor of the Bataan Death March, Grayford C. Payne, was quoted as saying, “I had not been a prisoner for fifteen minutes before they bayoneted a fifteen-year-old Filipino kid right next to me.” A Japanese directive describes how the prisoners were to be killed: “mass bombing, or poisonous smoke, poisons, decapitation…. In any case, it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces.” An invasion was the most favored alternative of the allies to force a Japanese surrender, if the bomb was not used. The other alternatives were naval blockades, modification of unconditional surrender terms, conventional bombing, and waiting a little longer to see if the Soviets would enter into the war. The number of Americans and Japanese who would have died if such invasions had occurred would have been astronomically higher than the number who died at Hiroshima. Pentagon planners projected 132,000 American casualties for an invasion of Kyushu, and 90,000 or so for Honshu. Using Okinawa as a model, there would be one American casualty for every four Japanese casualties, and Japan’s slogan, “Fight to the very end,” didn’t improve those numbers. The atomic bomb saved an enormous amount of American and Japanese who would have perished under any other circumstances.The atomic bomb was payback to the millions of people who were suffering at the hands of the Japanese. Between the atom bomb and Japanese militarists, the bomb was the lesser of the two evils, and the bomb served a powerful purpose. Although nations are often led to believe that the Japanese did nothing to provoke an attack so horrific, the horror was not unrivaled. In 19...
