On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:34:58 -0500, gfretwell wrote:


The GIs who took Okinawa would probably dissagree with this assessment.
There were still Japanese soldiers holding out on islands years after
the war. I dsoubt there was any kind of attrition war that would have
defeated them and we might still have an Iraqi style insurrection around
the world.
Remember the Japanese invented the suicide bomber.

Exactly, at that time, the Japanese knew they couldn't win the war, but they had hopes that
they could make the cost of invading Japan so high, we would go for some sort of an
armistice. They had very little fuel, but they still had 10,000 planes to be used as kamikaze.
The plan was to target troop transports, rather than carriers and battleships. One Japanese
study suggested that they could eliminate 1/3 to 1/2 of the invasion force before it's landing.

Interestingly, 500,000 Purple Hearts were manufactured in anticipation of the casualties an
invasion of Japan would cause. Even after the Korean War, Vietnam, etc., we still have over
100,000 stockpiled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall