Who is “they”?
The Japanese leadership couldn’t make it through the winter?
The people were already suffering horrifically and had been for a long time forced to “sacrifice” for the war effort. It wouldn’t matter if they weren’t going to make it, a lot of them already didn’t.
Ever see “Grave of the Fireflies”? I’d recommend the cartoon version, but its still too sad.
Much of the issues we had with the Japanese had as much to do with their unfamiliarity with us than with our unfamiliarity with them.
I firmly believe that had the United States been able to get the word out to the Japanese people that we were not going to rape and enslave them, we would have been successful in getting Japan to surrender. That is what happened at Okinawa. The actual people on Okinawa were willing to expose Japanese collaborators to ensure that they as civilians were not targetted by the Americans. Why? Because they came to realize that they had been lied to. Okinawa managed to save many women and children from suicide when this became apparent.
The real tragedy is how many people on Okinawa died, roughly a third. A third of Japan as a whole would have been a holocaust unmatched by anything else in the war.