EVEN WITHOUT MEDIA, 75% OF AMERICANS WANTED TO STOP THE WAR AGAINST JAPAN

Whenever the body count of Americans gets too high Americans will not support wars. Even in 1945 after the defeat of Germany, 75% of the country was opposed to the never ending slaughter of American boys.

In respect for VJ Day, the History Channel has been running an excellent series of programming. One segment (I can't watch all of all of them) really woke me up. I've posted here many times about the horrible casualties in the Pacific caused by the Japanese determination to fight to the last man, a determination that caused total annihilation of each and every Japanese defense force on every Pacific island as we moved toward Japan gory island by gory island. Our losses were about one quarter of theirs, but bloody bloody bloody nonetheless. I also related here the letter from an emailer who related family and neighbor horror at the picture of the dead at Tarawa that appeared on the cover of Life Magazine. It seems that there was some secret polling in January and February of 1945 done by the War Department that showed Americans wanted the war in the Pacific stopped by a margin of 75% to 25%. The strategy of the Japanese general staff was to cause so many casualties on invading Americans that we would lose the will to fight. Remember, the media was totally behind the war and there was no negativity, but the GIs coming home with photographs for everyone to see and coming home in coffins had shaken the entire country. The horrendous losses on Iwo Jima and Okinawa finally awakened America to the true costs of continuing the war. Had we not dropped the bomb we might have had to make a deal with the Japanese which would have allowed their army to try war criminals, supervise all disarmament, and forbid American troops from entering Japan. At the time of the A-Bomb drop, the Navy, totally convinced that the loss of American life in an invasion of Japan would approach one million, was on record as opposing a landing on the Japanese mainland; the Navy was so against an invasion of Japan that Nimitz, the commander of the Pacific theater, was going to openly oppose it. Many in the Pentagon were horrified at the number of civilian casualties we were causing by the firebombing of Japanese cities and a few others were in various shades of not wanting to go. Only Marshall, the architect of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, and the Army General Staff was totally committed to the invasion, and even advocated the use of poison gas on the Japanese.

The dropping of the A-bombs combined with the Soviet invasions of Manchuria and China ended all the speculation, but all of us has a limit. A democracy will only tolerate losses of their sons and daughters for so long. This time we have the media totally against the war. Last night both MSNBC and CNN ran feature after feature of mothers who have lost their sons in Iraq. We may be at the point right now, largely manufactured by a hate America Left, that seems to be close to a majority.

We’ll have to see.