Japan Trained Little Girls to Fight US Marines With Pointy Sticks
By the summer of 1945, Japan was reeling from a string of catastrophic defeats. Her once proud navy had been reduced to a shell, and her armies were in retreat across Asia and the Pacific. The merchant shipping fleet upon which the island nation relied to import many of life’s necessities was mostly at the bottom of the sea, and the country was under a blockade that threatened mass starvation. Japanese cities were gradually being reduced to rubble and ashes by armadas of American bombers, whom the Japanese air force could do little to even annoy, let alone halt. By all objective criterion, Japan had lost the war, but Japan’s leaders were too proud and stubborn to admit that and sue for peace.
So the Allies made plans to invade Japan and make that clear. Operation Olympic, scheduled for November of 1945, was to be the first stage of an Allied invasion. It aimed to secure the southern third of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s main home islands. The seized territory would provide airbases for land-based aircraft, and serve as the staging area for an even bigger invasion. That was to be Operation Coronet in the spring of 1946, directed at Honshu, the largest and most populous of Japan’s home islands.
The operation was to commence with amphibious landings on three Kyushu beaches. However, as was discovered after the war, the Japanese had accurately predicted US intentions and landing sites. Japanese geography was such that the only viable beaches for large amphibious landings were the ones selected by Allied planners for operations Olympic and Coronet.
The Allies would still have prevailed in the end, as the resources committed to the operation dwarfed those of the D-Day landings in France. They included 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts, tactical air support from the Fifth, Seventh, and Thirteenth US Air Forces, plus 14 divisions for the initial landing. However, casualties would probably have been horrific. Depending on the degree of Japanese civilian resistance – and Japanese authorities were busy training even women and children to fight the invaders with spears and pointy sticks – casualties would have been in the millions.
That, and the irrationality of Japan’s leaders, justified the atomic bombing of that country. The alternative would have been a massive invasion, which the Japanese government was determined to resist via national suicide. Japan’s leaders, morally bankrupt and cowardly, refused to confront the fact that they had led their country into an unwinnable war and lost. Ethical leaders might have shouldered the responsibility for getting their country in such a mess. Japan’s leaders sought to escape their burden via histrionics, and decided to immolate themselves and take their country with them. So they sought to save face by training women to fight off heavily armed invaders with bamboo spears, and training little boys and girls to fight soldiers with pointy sticks. Rather than sacrifice themselves in order to spare their country, Japan’s leaders sought to sacrifice their country in order to spare their egos from the humiliation of surrender.
Such dishonorable notions of honor meant that the estimated cost of an invasion was upwards of a million Allied casualties, and tens of millions of Japanese, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. Compared to that, the 200,000 casualties of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings were an acceptable price. Morally speaking, there was nothing exceptional about the innocent victims of the atomic bombings that would have justified sparing them at the cost of the millions of other lives that would have been lost elsewhere had the war continued.