[Charles Martel]

And Japanese lives were saved, too. Many more Japanese casualties if an invasion had been fought than would have died by the bombs.

Particularly if the Soviets beat us to the invasion of the Japanese home islands, as was quite likely.

[angryoldfatman]

You both are on the money.

Mr. McGowan needs to imagine if he was Truman, and if he decided to withhold the bomb and let a mainland invasion proceed.

Imagine what kind of monster that history would have declared him to be, letting millions of people die instead of ending the war with less than 200K casualties. The same number of casualties, I would add, happened in 2-3 weeks of incendiary bombing of Tokyo and other largely populated Japanese targets.

Maybe Mr. McGowan could sleep well at night after years more of war, like Obama does. Truman, being old school populist pro-American Democrat, probably would not.