the Japanese messages that were intercepted and decoded by the American forces, he presents a researched work that attempts to explain what might have happened if the bombs had not been dropped. The reader is left with the unshakable conclusion that the use of the bomb was a necessary evil--that the government of Japan was not ready to surrender, and even after the bombing of Hiroshima, the decision was to fight on. However, the conclusion of his book is that the bombing of Nagasaki (though nowhere near as damaging as the bombing of Hiroshima) persuaded the Japanese cabinet that the bomb was not a "one off" event, and that they faced certain destruction if they didn't sue for peace.
             According to Frank, "Most American strategists believed that the war with Japan would be a 'long drown out operation' with Japan's fanatical resistance extracting mounting casualties the closer the American forces drew to the Home Islands" (21). To understand this position, it is necessary to take a closer look at the American experience with the Japanese, during the war.
             The Japanese were known by their culture of no surrender; they would rather die than surrender. Particularly, in the Japanese military forces this tradition was prominent. Frank continues with a terrible example of this, "The first intimations that the Japanese would literally choose death over surrender-and not merely an elite warrior caste but the rank and file-came in August 1942 at Guadalcanal. Two small Imperial Navy island garrisons fought to virtual extinction." Major general Alexander Archer Vandegrift, the Marine commander wrote: "I have never heard or read of this kind of fighting. These people refuse to surrender. The wounded wait until men come up to examine them...and blow themselves and the other fellow to pieces with a hand grenade"(28).
             Another example, maybe as shocking, happened at the island of Saipan; nearly 30,000 Japanese soldiers fought to t...