Leave aside the deaths of civilians that would have resulted from an invasion and the Chinese and Southeast Asians dying in the Co-Prosperity Sphere's slave labor camps, you have to love the dismissal of the prospect of 2 million battle casualties as "merely improv[ing] the price (in Allied lives saved) of victory."
Even if necessity-based arguments for terror and atomic bombing are considered, such arguments fail. Where such methods were used later in the war—after the “supreme emergency” had passed—they were not used to ensure Nazi or Japanese defeat, or even to prevent genocide, but merely to improve speed and price (in Allied lives saved) of victory. 33 It is also difficult to appreciate how killing German civilians, to undermine morale, was related to the end of a Nazi defeat, since it may have contrarily steeled the German will to resist 34 (although exterminating a population inevitably defeats it). |
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