Proposed Changes to Details of the Campaign Against Japan. JCS 1388/1, 20 June
1945.
”This document shows (a) that agreement still had not been reached on JCS 1388 by the time of the
18 June meeting with Truman (prompting Gen. Hull to prepare his summary for the President) and (b)
that the casualty issue continued to be debated, with Nimitz's estimates remaining close to those offered
by MacArthur's staff and by the JWPC.”
Fixing the number of casualties that would occur in Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu, was a very, very difficult task. It was revised on more than one occasion, and numbers ran up to around a million casualties in total. All this was very important because the military knew that the public in general would have a very hard time putting up with a huge number of casualties. The public might want the government to accept some kind of peace settlement rather than the unconditional surrender that the government was demanding.
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