There were starving Japanese on Sapian and Okinawa as well, but they threw themselves off cliffs or blew themselves up. We tried to reach them with megaphones, leaflets, even defector testimony, but it didn't work. There were some who surrendered to the Americans (unlike the Japanese soldiers), but there was not one major incident of actual resistance to the IJA. Even at the end of the war to act out against the Emperor was inconceivable to most (which is why the latter's individual intervention was so decisive in ending it). In all likelihood, choosing the "blockade" option would have meant two or more years of warfare ('patch work' famine would only have set in by 1946), functionally the same length of time required to complete Operation Downfall if not longer.
Worse, even this option would hardly have been bloodless. Even excluding the vast death toll in Japan proper such a strategy implies, an average of around 400,000 people were dying every month throughout Asia, most of them innocent civilians at the hands of the Japanese. The Japanese military, some 4,000,000 strong outside the Homeland, would have to be divided up and smashed bit by bit in a series of campaigns stretching from Manchuria to Malaya. With them would die millions more noncombatants and Allied soldiers. In a last, desperate act of barbarity the Japanese also planned to begin a systematic massacre of all Allied POWs and civilian internees under their control starting in August, something the Allied high command could not have known about until after the war.
It was a horrible situation, and I cannot think of any way short of Divine Intervention that Japan would have capitulated or stopped fighting without great loss of life.
Worse, even this option would hardly have been bloodless. Even excluding the vast death toll in Japan proper such a strategy implies, an average of around 400,000 people were dying every month throughout Asia, most of them innocent civilians at the hands of the Japanese. The Japanese military, some 4,000,000 strong outside the Homeland, would have to be divided up and smashed bit by bit in a series of campaigns stretching from Manchuria to Malaya. With them would die millions more noncombatants and Allied soldiers. In a last, desperate act of barbarity the Japanese also planned to begin a systematic massacre of all Allied POWs and civilian internees under their control starting in August, something the Allied high command could not have known about until after the war.
It was a horrible situation, and I cannot think of any way short of Divine Intervention that Japan would have capitulated or stopped fighting without great loss of life.
Last edited: