On Dec 19, 9:37 pm, Charlie Self wrote:

...

I guess the revisionists haven't heard
of the fire bombing of Dresden, nor the fears that all the top brass
in the U.S. had at the time that the Japanese were prepared to defend
their land to the last person. I still believe that.


Some revisionists clearly have.

If you compare the civilian casualty estimates published in the 1950's
for the bombing of Cologne, Hamburg, and Dresden with those currently
in vogue you will find that they have been reduced by a factor of ten
or more.

That doesn't tell us which was closer to the truth.

It has also been argued that although the US did not directly attack
Japanese agricultural production, the destruction of the Japanese
rail system crippled Japan's ability to move food from rural to
urban areas. Had the war NOT ended by September, the rail
system could not have been repaired in time to prevent up to 25
million civilian deaths from starvation over the following winter.

I'm not convince that the Japanese could not have mitigated that
through labor intensive low-tech means, even foot traffic. But
there is no rational doubt that the rapid end to the war after the
atomic bombing saved millions of lives in Japan as well as
on the Asian Mainland where fatalities among Chinese, Japanese,
and Soviets were in excess of ten thousand per day.

Also, my father was scheduled to be in the second wave for the
invasion of the Japanese mainland.. He was on a train, broken
down in West Texas on it's way to Bakersfield, CA when Truman
dropped the bomb, quite probably saving MY life as well.

--

FF