Actual World War 2 Deaths in 1945 and Deaths if Japan was Invaded

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The Oppenheimer movie has brought up the question of whether two fission bombs were needed to end the war with Japan.

This question requires understanding the situation in 1945. Germany did not surrender until after Berlin was taken. Germany was pushed back to near its own borders by Dec, 1944. Germany was mainly defending within the borders of their country in 1945. Germany lost over 700,000 soldiers and civilians in defense of their country. They were hit by the Soviets at the
225,000 soldiers and civilians were killed in the Battle of Berlin. The Western Allies had the Battle of Bulge with about 60k to 80k killed on both sides.

The most commonly cited estimate of Japanese casualties from the actual US air raids in 1945 was 333,000 killed and 473,000 wounded. Other estimates of total fatalities range from 241,000 to 900,000. This means far more Japanese were killed in conventional air bombing than from the two nuclear bombs. The US hit over

The strategy for Japan final WW2 defense was a plan called Ketsu-Go. It was outlined in an 8 April 1945 Army Directive. It stated that the Imperial Army would endeavor to crush the Americans while the invasion force was still at sea. They planned to deliver a decisive blow against the American naval force by initially destroying as many carriers as possible, utilizing the special attack forces of the Air Force and Navy. When the amphibious force approached within range of the homeland airbases, the entire air combat strength would be employed in continual night and day assaults against these ships. In conducting the air operations, the emphasis would be on the disruption of the American landing plans. The principal targets were to be the troop and equipment transports. Those American forces which succeeded in landing would be swiftly attacked by the Imperial Army in order to seek the decisive victory. The principal objective of the land operation was the destruction of the American landing force on the beach. Ketsu-Go operation was designed as an all-out joint defense effort to be conducted by the entire strengths of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

Continued Deaths in China, Philippines and Asia

The war between China and Japan had 19 million Chinese deaths. Famines and the occupation of China was still resulting in military and civilian deaths.

The Nationalists fought in 22 major engagements, most of which involved more than 100,000 troops on both sides, 1,171 minor engagements most of which involved more than 50,000 troops on both sides, and 38,931 skirmishes. The Chinese communists fought a guerilla war behind the lines against Japan. Japan used chemical and biological weapons against China because China did not have chemical weapons.

In January, 1945, over 100,000 civilians were slaughtered by the Japanese Navy in the Battle of Manila.

The Soviets attacked Japan in Machuria in August, 1945. In less than two weeks the Kwantung Army, which was the primary Japanese fighting force, consisting of over a million men but lacking in adequate armor, artillery, or air support, had been destroyed by the Soviets.

Each month of world war 2 in 1945 was causing the death of 200,000 to over 1 million people.

53 thoughts on “Actual World War 2 Deaths in 1945 and Deaths if Japan was Invaded”

  2. I always love how the historical revisionists edit out the horrors Curtis Lemay unleashed on Japanese cities. It is so much easier to complain about nuking two cities when you conveniently forget that the US had already firebombed a dozen cities in to oblivion and killed more Japanese citizens with conventional munitions than they did with nukes.

    • so what?
      it was us versus them.
      One’s genocide or the other.
      There was no happy ending – just the culmination of rich countries’ imperialistic and/or existential values.
      We hate you people that we hardly know – and you all hate us that you all hardly know.
      Our societies can’t co-exist. One’s presence is the potential extermination of the other – or so the media and governments would have us believe.
      We need to stop pretending there is good and evil.
      We’re all broken.
      If we just focus on our local issues, our societies will find internal value so that we won’t crave the destruction of others – since we (back then) presumed that it was a zero-sum world – your success is our failure. To some degree, we are starting to become disabused of that – we can all progress.

    • Right or wrong, Truman was staring down the casualty numbers coming in and the projections for the invasion of Honshu. He believed he had a “golden arrow” in his quiver that would bring a quick end to the war and save millions of lives on both sides. He did drop two bombs and Japan surrendered, bringing the war in the Pacific to an end. No amount of revisionist history will ever change that.

      • Please note: After the 2nd bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese ruling council voted to continue the war.

  3. Freeman Dyson wrote that Japan surrendered because the USSR invaded Manchuria, not because of the two nukes. Japan and the USSR had a non-aggression pact, and Japan had been negotiating with Stalin to serve as a mediator with the Allies. When the USSR invaded, Japan wanted assurance that the emperor would stay in power and did receive a vague assurance that the emperor would retain his status. Japan then surrendered.

    After I read the Dyson article, I emailed him for clarification and we had a brief exchange, to my delight. He suggested several books, which I read. Unfortunately, I did not keep his emails.

    The two nuclear bombs did not end the war! The Japanese government had no idea of the nature of the bombs. 100,000 people died in Tokyo, and tens of thousands in other cities. It took weeks for the government to learn the devastating effects of the war. In early September of 1945, a US military spokesman denied that there were widespread radiation deaths (which was a subject not considered at Los Alamos).

    Here is the Dyson article: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11732

  5. Japan was trying to force the U.S. into choosing one of these
    a) make a deal with them to have a “conditional” surrender — and allow them to keep part or all of thier overseas empire
    b) invade Japan which would have involved hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers dead.
    Either of these options would have been horrendous.
    The dropping of the two bombs upset this equation. The U.S. could lay waste to Japan with no loss of life of its own. Good. This is what put an end to the war.

  6. The US had planned on a conventional invasion of Japan. Because of Japan’s early surrender – not expected by the US military who largely was not aware of the atomic bombs – the US had already manufactured millions of purple hearts for the expected dead and wounded soldiers.
    The US is using “Japan Invasion” purple hearts to this day because that planned conventional invasion never happened.

    https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/176762

  7. The Japanese did not surrender after the first bomb AND the Soviet Union declaring war. And after the second bomb the military staged a coup. So no, a demonstration would not have mattered.

  8. I lived on Okinawa for a time, once. I visited the war memorials and the various historical site. As a teeny tiny preview of what a land assault on the main islands would have been like, it was highly instructive. In that place and time, the use of two small atomic bombs, and the result, was a mercy for both sides. The icing on the cake, though I won’t argue it was intentional, is that their use then has probably greatly contributed to most everyone’s reluctance to ever see them used again.

  10. It is baffling to argue the morality of the atomic bombs in a war that killed 70 million people. Nevermind they prevented further bloodshed and the Japanese were STILL going on a massacring spree in Asia.
    Like my dad used to say, it wasn’t any worse than what they did to everyone else

  11. Amazing how easily people can ‘justify’ evil acts.
    When your strategy includes killing children as ‘unavoidable casualties’, you are by definition being evil.
    It is always a ‘lesser evil’ when the ‘good guys’ do it.
    The Japanese did NOT put their children deliberately in harms way, so you can not say they were being used as ‘human shields’.
    There is NO scale that says killing these hundreds or thousands of children is BETTER than the possibility of ‘our’ soldiers dying.

    When your strategy is ‘we will slaughter every man, woman, and child’ to PROVE how aggressive we are, so the enemy will fear us and surrender to save themselves … you are evil.

      • Killing ‘their’ children because ‘they are EVIL’ is not justified.
        Children are NOT accountable for ANY action done by their parents!
        ALL 18 month old children are innocent… 100% innocent.
        It is wrong to say killing these children is somehow ‘justified’ because their parents are evil.

        ANY strategy that directly includes killing babies (NOT being used as human shields) is EVIL.
        All involved in nuking children have committed sin.
        Mankind may not punish them but rest assured God will.

        • Your sense of morality is laudable. However, ‘God’ doesn’t discriminate at the gates of Heaven between innocent children, innocent bystanders, innocent parents, grandparents, green-grocers or millinery workers. Polio alone took millions of ‘innocent’ lives, without a single bullet fired. Death is death. Just as the über-Lıberal “Love is love” has been cliché’d endlessly. Death is death.

          We can MOURN the dead. We can wish they never perished. We can rant and rave about the causes of death and the ignonimy of it all. The kid that falls off an air-bridge over a canyon because the construction is weak. Sue, sue, sue!

          Bottom line is that WAR is about Conquering and ultimately tested by Power and Death. The morality of war is very often questioned — and has been since the dawn of Philosophy — yet it remains: Almost (but not all) war is perpetrated by an aggressor. Defended in turn. Then as the grind moves on, all too often retribution comes about, and the defenders turn into aggressors. And the aggressors, defenders. All the while, bullets, bombs, land mines and torpedoes are launched. All the while, death, death, death and more death.

          MORALITY? There are only 3 ‘moral’ outcomes: capitulation, conquering or armistice. With enough force, surrender (capitulation) becomes likely. With not-enough, then the war very likely goes on. Resulting in death, death, death and death.

          Just saying… It really isn’t about the morality or lack-of-morality of killing The Innocents. The whole point is for the battling forces to test each other’s resolve against their enemy, and optimally to decide to surrender, or retrench for battle later. That’s it.

          -⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-
          ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

      • The Pacifists have no problem with people of color killing other people of color.
        It is just white people doing it that is wrong if the government is not their government.
        If it is theirs, every one opposing them is White & Fascist.

        It is not a problem if russian-speaking Ukrainians are killed by their government if it supports their party policy (and money laundering).

    • The degree of historical ignorance needed to think of WW2 in the pacific theatre being limited to US vs Japan. At the time of Japan’s surrender Japan was occupying and killing Koreans, Chinese, Thai, Indonesians, New Guineans, Burmese, Vietnamese, Singaporeans, etc. Ending the war as soon as possible saved the lives of innocent people who did nothing to merit invasion. Reducing WW2 to US v Imperial Japan intentionally diminishes the horror of what Imperial Japan did and was doing up to the moment of forced unconditional surrender.

      Further las time I checked Imperial Japan was the aggressor who started things in the Pacific. Imperial Japan invaded the Korean peninsula. Imperial Japan invaded China. Invaded the Philippines. Invaded Singapore. Invaded Vietnam. Invaded Thailand. Attacked the USA. It is morally depraved to equate the clear aggressor with the attacked countries who never did anything to merit being conquered.

      • I have ZERO problem with soldiers fighting soldiers.
        If the enemy uses children as human shields, you CAN morally attack them, the sin is on them.
        You can NOT EVER justify the deliberate killing of the enemy’s children to ‘terrorize’ the enemy into surrender.
        ****The enemy’s children are NOT the enemy!****
        A four month old child is an innocent, even if they have the most evil parents ever.
        Nuking a city (killing every man, woman, and child) is wrong!… always… always… ALWAYS!! there is NO moral justification… EVER!!!

        • Looks like you need to blame the Japanese govt, who treated the Pacific and Asia like their own personal shooting gallery.
          Don’t like that Japanese children are the victims of war? Then I guess the Japanese should have picked a fight with someone else

          • They nuked the shipyards.
            Unfortunately they were near a city.

            A city is not a shield like a child is not a shield.

        • Nothing more than propaganda and psychological brow-beating. A sales-pitch, disguised as moral conversation. A powerful mental and psychological fulcrum, deliberately chosen, for rhetorical gas-lighting.

        • I don’t think you understand two things.

          1. WWII was total war. The entirety of each nation was devoted to the war effort. This was the case for Germany, Japan, US, UK, Russia, etc. Everything in the society was contributing and was a valid target.

          2. By the time of WWII Japan’s education system existed to inculcate Bushido warrior ethics in children as well as an ideology of Japanese racial supremacy. Imperial Japan was intentionally raising their children to be soldiers.

          A better cautionary moral tale would be what happens when The State takes over all of society and views people as disposable instruments to accomplish the supremacist will of The State.

    • Oh wow. How easy for someone in the first world to say who didn’t have to storm beaches and capture an island filled with zealots that had almost no context for surrender.
      The Japanese were massacring MILLIONS of people in Southeast Asia.
      Just killing civilians? In a war like THAT that the Japanese initiated, you dont HAVE to justify what you do to them.

    • You are evil and stupid. Japan started the war and killed more Chinese then Hitler killed jews. A few hundred thousand people died in the atomic bomb. 5 to 10 million would have died in the invasion. Japan still occupied much of China, Korea, and other countries. Should we let them stay there? Look up the rape of Nanking and tell me who is evil.

    • Amazing how people impose one set of morals on one set of people while giving another set of people a free pass. Actually it was a lesser evil — it ended up saving many times that many childrens’s lives in the end, by averting a military invasion of Japan.

    • Amazing how you can totally overlook facts and take a false moral high ground base on your wishful thinking.
      – The Japanese attacked first.
      – The Japanese were brutal in their treatment of occupied territories and even worse towards prisons.
      – They had a “never surrender” mentality. It was a HUGE cultural taboo.
      – Island hoping and the final battles in Okinawa proved they would fight until they had totally exhausted their human capitol.
      – The invasion estimates of losses to both sides were staggering.

      Your solution… wish it all away because war is evil? Hope that the Japanese would suddenly have a change of heart and say sorry? Condem those who fought against Japanese war machine because Japan lost so they must be victims – victims to pitty. Shame on the winners.

      Well keep wearing the rose colored glasses through which you view history but that does not change the fact that the bomb saved millions of lives.

    • Let’s consult an expert:

      “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
      ― William Tecumseh Sherman, The Complete Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman: With original illustrations

    • The Germans had factories that could be bombed. The Japanese of that time did huge amounts of their war manufacturing in small shops scattered throughout large wooden cities. It made for ugly choices.

  12. My father was a marine and fought in Okinawa. He was set to invade Japan. If he had, I doubt he and many others would not have survived. I was born in 1942 and I would have ended up fatherless. Thank God we dropped the bomb. The Japanese military were fanatical.

  13. Generations of propaganda fueled annihilation. Both sides would know unimaginable loss and still today suffer it greatly. Just as with the European theater. (2 films referenced here are “final account” and “eizengruppen”. Hirohito would have been assasinated by the IJA and war council. His peaceful people lulled by lies would have split the county and most would die in the crossfire. Everything in Oppenheimer is spot on allowing for dramatic influence for a movie of course. Gone would be millions more youth of America. Gone would be the the great culture of a great people in Japan. And as I see these postings I see no mention of China or Russia. They too would have wanted a piece of Japan. The use of nuclear weapons is evil. Morally indefensible and yet at that time and place absolutely necessary. This is the genesis of the tension. It is good that tension is still felt like a raw open wound.

    • Nukes are morally unacceptable yet the Japanese were still going on a butchering campaign in Asia and both sides routinley bombed cities

  14. This was the right call. The Americans would have had tons of intelligence and analysis (and practical experience) suggesting the taking of the mainland island would have been a horrendous ordeal for all involved.

    I would add that the use of such small bombs early in the history of atomic weapons served humanity well. Think if they hadn’t been used and they were used say, ten years later when they were more powerful and other countries had them.

    No, it was the right time and place to use them. It told the world how very terrible these weapons were and worked to re-insert the nuclear genie bac into the bottle to where it remains until this day.

  15. It’s extremely likely that the Japanese were and did build one nuke during WWII. We have first hand testimony from one of the people working on the program. it was done in Konan Korea. Conveniently, that’s the same spot the North Koreans made their nukes.

    See, “Japan’s Secret War: Japan’s Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb” by Robert K. Wilcox.

    http://www.historynet.com/book-review-japans-secret-war-japans-race-against-time-to-build-its-own-atomic-bomb-robert-k-wilcox-wwii.htm

    Further confirmation comes from the enormous resources put into the ultra long range submarine that Japan built carrying only three airplanes. They only military use for such a vessel would be if it carried nukes.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400-class_submarine

    There’s some good interviews with Robert Wilcox. If this catches your interest they’re worth listening to.

    The real question is would the Japanese have used nukes if they had them and you know the answer. These constant attacks on Whites and the US have become tiresome. All this attribution of evil to Whites when they do not follow some sort of imagined hypermoratlity while no else is even pretending to do so. “It’s all so tiresome”.

    • Without reading your links or knowing any details my skepticism of the whole idea as revisionist history is based n the fact that the US would have had access to everything done by Japan after the surrender and obviously be very interested in this and while it might have classified such things immediately after the war, by now they would part of mainstream history not something that’s radically novel.

      • “…the US would have had access to everything done by Japan…”

        The Russians overran the place and shot down one of our reconnaissance planes when we tried to take a look. So no, we did not know everything. The rest of your criticisms are odd, so I say read the book. There’s much more evidence, but I’m not going to go over all of it.

    • The submarine aircraft carriers have always been very publicly known after the war and don’t in any way imply an atomic bomb program. Did the Doolittle raids? All sides invest in military R&D that in retrospect seems questionable.

    • they only had 2 bombs at that time (not enough for a demo that might not acheive surrender. And avoiding any american deaths (understandably and correctly) had priority over the enemy

        • True, that.

          It was kind of ironic, that the rate with which the US could refine 235U was limited to hundreds of grams a week (with some ridiculously mighty facilities), so that the ‘easy bomb’, the ‘gun’ type couldn’t be made faster than a couple per year, tops. The plutonium type however, ‘implosion’ style, were much, much easier to MAKE, though the possibility of them not working as advertised was more real. Oppy said that there was only a 25% chance that the implosion type would work, but 95% that the ‘gun’ type would.

          So, to your point, 3 was what they had: the first in the desert, then the 2 over Japan. And probably another 3 to 5 being worked up simultaneously. Of both types.

    • Demonstration on what exactly? Hiroshima and Nagasaki were on the A-bomb target lists because they had suffered comparatively less damage that other cities. These were the demonstration.

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