[QUOTE="Ben Blaney"] Have you been to Asia? It's still the case.[/QUOTE] Which is *exactly* why millions more soldiers would have happily died rather than surrender, *unless* the Emporer told them different. [QUOTE] This I simply do not accept.[/QUOTE] How do you reconcile one with the other? Are you seriously saying that *less* than 240,000 people would have died if the Americans had forcibly recaptured every remaining territory, then invaded the mainland and removed the leadership? Given that nearly two million Japanese had already been killed *on the way* to the mainland, do you honestly believe that it would have been an easily won affair with fewer casualties? Without instructions from the emporer, soldiers and civilians alike were prepared to sacrifice themselves en-masse to destroy the invaders. In the event of a land invasion, there were eight million remaining servicemen *plus* the civilian population to be dealt with. If casualty rates on the mainland were consistent with the rates for the rest of the Pacific war, the Japanese would have lost another 1.1 million soldiers. This doesn't even address the fact that they were likely to be even *more* fanatical on their homeland.
