“ Regime change is a direct product of “unconditional surrender,” which should be the goal of any U.S. military usage and loss of life.‘
Exactly the opposite of reality…at least that is what history has shown.
In WW2 the Germans and Japanese would have surrendered conditionally much earlier.
Japan for example put out peace feelers to Sweden (smart) and the USSR (dumb). Just with a guarantee of the sanctity of the Emperor they would likely have resulted in VJ in June ‘45. That would mean no A-Bombs dropped. No USSR invasion of Manchuria and thus possibly completely changing the future of Asia (The Soviets took all nearly all the considerable cache of weapons the Japnese surrendered in Manchuria and gave it to Mao and his blood thirsty hordes of commies who then won the Chinese civil war).
Germany is more uncertain with possible surrender in mid ‘44.
As about 6 million people died in 1945 even a relatively marginal earlier peace could have saved millions.
Meant noiseman as the recipient.
There's a lot of disinformation in those sentences.
In fact, the only serious peace feelers Japanese put out went to Moscow, not Sweden, in June 1945 and Moscow never forwarded Japan's conditions to Washington.
Washington knew of them only through MAGIC intercepts.
Japan's conditions included:
As for Sweden, no preliminary Japanese peace proposals were forwarded through Sweden, so that was a non-issue.
In the end, after the two A-bombs, Japanese reduced their conditions to just one, transmitted to Washington through Swiss and Swedish embassies: keep their Emperor, Washington accepted, and so peace was concluded August 15, 1945.
Phoenix8: "That would mean no A-Bombs dropped.
No USSR invasion of Manchuria..."
The Soviets had already agreed at Yalta (February 1945) to invade Japan within three months of German surrender (May 8, 1945), and so were uninterested in Japanese peace proposals in June & July, and did not forward them to Washington.
As per agreements, the Soviets invaded Japan on August 8, 1945.
Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945.
Phoenix8: "Germany is more uncertain with possible surrender in mid ‘44."
As for Germany, there were no German government peace proposals before the May 1945, leading to surrender on May 8, 1945.
Sure, plenty of German officials approached Allied or neutral diplomats, including Adolf Hess (1941), Ambassador Hassell, in Italy in (1943), diplomat Adam von Trott zu Solz in Switzerland (1944) and Heinrich Himmler to the Swedes (April 1945), but all of these were just individuals freelancing in hopes of playing a role in the post-war period.
None were approved by Hitler or taken seriously by the Allies.
Phoenix8: "As about 6 million people died in 1945 even a relatively marginal earlier peace could have saved millions."
The Second World War -- from September 1939 to August 1945 -- cost the lives of around 75 million people, roughly half military, half civilians.
If 6 million of those died in 1945, that is 8% of the total, and includes around 1 million who died between Germany's surrender on May 8, 1945 and Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945.
So the real issue in the first half of 1945 was whether the Allies intended to eradicate the root cause of those 75 million WWII deaths, or give up the effort in order to save those last millions?
They chose the former, and the world as we know it was the result.