"For the invasion of Japan, scheduled for the autumn of 1945 and spring of 1946, both sides loaded up. Gen. Curtis LeMay, the American Army Air Corps commander whose "burn jobs" had incinerated roughly a third of urban Japan and killed nearly a million people, had 5,000 B-29 bombers ready to go. To greet a half-million American invaders, the Japanese had at least 6,000 kamikaze planes and 2,350,000 regular troops, not to mention an enormous citizen militia of some 30 million. The women were given sharpened bamboo spears and were trained to use them (some of them practiced on dummies of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill). On July 21, a U.S. Fifth Air Force intelligence circular declared: THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF JAPAN IS A PROPER MILITARY TARGET... THERE ARE NO CIVILIANS IN JAPAN."
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"Some citizens, too, felt disbelief and anger. During the war, Kiyoko Kano, 79, had been a farmer's daughter in a small village not far from Hiroshima. She showed her diary from those days to NEWSWEEK. It records how she had faithfully arisen at dawn some mornings for "bamboo-spear fight training," and how she struggled to accept what the emperor was saying over the village radio on Aug. 15. "It sounded as though there was a truce situation. All of us felt disappointed," she wrote after hearing the emperor's declaration of surrender, bringing peace. "We could not help but feel frustrated."
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On the island of Guam, Pete Beninato and his Marine Corps buddies in the Third Tank Battalion had been pre-paring to invade Japan. "We weren't too anxious to go in there. The Japanese would fight to the last man—no surrender." When Beninato's men heard that America had dropped atomic bombs (on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9), destroying two entire cities, the reaction was incredulity. "We just looked at each other," Beninato recalls, amazed that so much destructive power could be concentrated in a single bomb. "Now people say we shouldn't have done it. But they weren't over there," he says. "They weren't getting shot at. They weren't expecting 80 to 85 percent casualties. I could've kissed [President] Truman."