Keep this in mind the next time somebody tries to tell you that we should have extended the war by marching on Moscow. As a practical matter our divisions (as well as those of our allies) by the Winter of 1944 were operating far below their authorized strength in the all-important category of infantry.
This brings to mind the essay and letters I have developed about dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. Here is a portion.
In support of dropping the atomic bombs historians often cite the inevitability of horrifying casualties, if troops had landed on the home islands. They extrapolate from 48,000 American and 230,000 Japanese losses on Okinawa to estimates of 500,000 American and millions of Japanese casualties for mainland invasions. However, these optimistic figures arise from studies preceding the unfolding recognition by planning staffs of the American experiences on Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. These sanguine estimates are also over seven times the dead and wounded suffered by Americans during The Battle of the Bulge; casualties that shocked the American public.
Such estimates could have greatly understated casualties. Kyushu and Honshu at over 100,000 rugged square miles mathematically enable at least 500 defensive redoubts; fortifications comparable to that General Ushijima constructed to inflict most losses at Okinawa. This rapid increase in killing efficiency extended to planned stubborn defenses of their major cities just as the Germans had maintained in Berlin. The American “island hopping” strategy had ended, because the Japanese had determined the few regions within their mountainous country that could accommodate the huge armies and air forces needed. Harry Truman contemplated increasingly dire estimates causing him to reflect on the possibility of “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other”.
The Greatest Generation and their parents would have been enraged to discover a cabal had ignored the nuclear option for ending the war simply to indulge some personal moral orthodoxy. If there was any alternative, Harry Truman, Henry Stimson, and George Marshall were not about to procure the deaths of countless Americans in protracted ground campaigns following amphibious assaults exceeding D-Day.