Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!cbnews!military
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Hiroshima/Dresden
Message-ID: <1990Aug15.031932.25509@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 15 Aug 90 03:19:32 GMT
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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
>From: convex!cash@uunet.UU.NET (Peter Cash)
>... I think that casualties at Hiroshima
>were around 50 thousand. Anybody have any reliable figures?

Whose reliable figures? :-)  It very much depends on who you ask.  The
"official" figure for Hiroshima is something like 90k, as I recall, but
Japanese estimates go as high as 250k.  Part of the difference is the
difficulty of estimating how many bodies were never found.  The low
estimates come from "hard evidence", the high ones from trying to count
people who were simply never seen again.  The truth is probably somewhere
in between.

(The problem has some resemblance to the difficulty in assessing kills by
anti-aircraft gunnery.  Even with determined attempts at enforcing strict
rules of evidence, WW2 inland gunners consistently scored fewer kills than
coastal gunners, because the inland gunners couldn't count a kill unless
wreckage was found, and there was no such independent check on coastal
kill claims.  The problem still exists:  the official British figures on
antiaircraft kills in the Falklands -- mostly over water -- significantly
exceed the total Argentine losses.)

As to the original underlying question, there is little doubt that really
determined firebombing campaigns, notably Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo,
easily produced casualties in the same range as Hiroshima/Nagasaki; I
believe that the Tokyo figures significantly exceed H/N by anyone's count.

                                         Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                          henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry