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The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb
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The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb Customer Reviews
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Fascinating
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This book is quite fascinating. What Skates has done is write a history of the planning for the invasion of Japan. The invasion never happened; the planning did. What he is doing is exploring the alternatives to the use of the atomic bomb that U.S. leaders thought they had before them in 1945.
Skates explores all sorts of plans including airpower, deception, the possibility of employing special weapons (everything ranging from missiles to chemical weapons) and the planned inclusion of British, Australian, and Canadian troops. What he finds is that the invasion never was considered an alternative. It was going to happen. American policy makers always intended to use BOTH atomic weapons against Japan and then invade. In explaining his decision to use the atomic bomb rather than invade, President Harry S. Truman was making things up. It never an either/or choice for the United States. This book was published in 1994 and became hugely controversial in 1995 as part of the crisis over the "Enola Gay" display at the Smithsonian Institute. He found that planners never expected the one million dead that Truman used to explain his decision. There were a number of figures floating around, but at worst it was 124,935 casualties (both dead and wounded). "While there is little evidence except assertion and repetition to support the huge numbers used by Truman and Stimson after the war, the U.S. leaders, both civilian and military, were extremely conscious of the costs of Okinawa and reluctant to repeat those loses" (p. 82).
Many revisionists have attempted to use Skates's study to argue against the use of the atomic bomb because of the low numbers. In interviews, Skates has said that he does not believe the general revisionist claims that Japan was trying to surrender, believing that the evidence argues to the contrary.
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