Due to the extreme number of people that would have died if the war had continued, the use of atomic weapons was necessary, because it spared countless Japanese and US lives. Less than a month before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, on August 6th 1945 the American bombers completed a deadly firebombing raid, centred on Japan’s largest city, Tokyo. The firebombing raid, now known as, “the single most deadly bombing raid in history.” quickly turned 40 acres of Tokyo into a raging inferno, killing over 100,000 people almost as many as Little Boy, in Hiroshima, and more than Fat Man, in Nagasaki. US Air Force general Curtis LeMay, the man who ordered the raids across Japan, once said “the US military scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night ... than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined” In many ways this raid was worse than the …show more content…
The reason the Japanese were so reluctant to surrender mainly came from the idea of total sacrifice, the Japanese government was willing to sacrifice countless lives, both soldiers and civilians and the Japanese people were willing to die for their government, “The imperial Japanese army could never contemplate surrender … their army was prepared to accept up to 28 million civilian deaths.” The other reason the Japanese government needed to be shocked into surrendering was because surrendering is against the code, bushido. Bushido was originally a samurai code that was adapted into hagakure in the years leading up to World War II. Hagakure states that above all else a Japanese soldier must be willing to die for his lord. This mindset, “seemed to fuel Japan’s determination to fight to the very last man, woman and child.” The atomic bombs were necessary to shock the Japanese government into surrendering, without them the war might have lasted much