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#1:
The Japanese military command killed more of its own forces than the Allies did. Whenever they left Japanese troops to die, to defend to the last man, as was the case at places like Iwo Jima (and which was a frequently-used tactic), they received no further resupply. Those troops were completely abandoned. In the end, the failure to supply these troops in the field resulted in massive numbers of deaths from privation (disease, starvation, and dehydration). Those numbers, combined with mass suicides, exceeded the number killed in combat by the Allies.

The significance of these facts was not lost on the decision-makers in DC.

#2.
Despite all of the defeats the Japanese had suffered at the hands of the Allies, their Army was still virtually intact because all the defeats had been involved primarily naval forces and naval infantry. They still had a virtually full-strength army at their disposal to defend the homeland.

#3:
The commander of the Japanese armies was General Anami Korechika. General Korechika was so radical that when Emperor Hirohito addressed the nation by radio to tell them they had lost the war (which was his way of burning the bridges and undermining the cause of those who wanted to keep fighting), he committed sepuku (ritual suicide). If you think a man so committed to the sovereignty of Japan that he would cut out his own guts to protest not following through with plan to resist at all cost would not have employed that relatively intact army to inflict maximum casualties on the invading allies, you do not understand the Code of Bushido as it had been re-interpreted by the mid-20th Century Japanese professional military.

#4:
The first phase of Operation Downfall, the Allied invasion of the Japanese islands, was to have begun with putting 705,000 Allied soldiers ashore on the southern island of Kyushu. That’s five times as many men as went ashore on D-Day. So the Allied Command anticipated resistance so fierce that it would take five times as many soldiers to overcome as the invasion of Europe. Five times more men than D-Day.

But that wasn’t the end of it. There was another phase still to come. Six months later, another 1.2 million soldiers were to have put ashore at Tokyo.

That’s nine times more than D-Day. Combined with the Kyushu invasion, the Allies were looking to commit fourteen times more men than D-Day to the invasion of Japan.

#5.
Allied intelligence estimated a total Japanese force of 350,000 would be defending Kyushu island. Except that (because of its proximity to Okinawa) the Japanese guessed (correctly) that the initial Allied landing would be at Kyushu and began reinforcing their contingent there. By the time of the surrender, there already were 735,000 Japanese soldiers on Kyushu and in just a few more weeks the number probably would have been more than a million.

So the cost to take Kyushu island alone would have been staggering, and that landing force might have been too degraded to have any ability to support the second phase of the invasion at Tokyo.

#6.
All western accounts of the conditions in the Japanese homeland (including Louie Zamparini’s “Unbroken”) support the contention that the Japanese were preparing to fight to the last man.

When the war ended and their guards abandoned the prison camp where he was being held, Zamparini and the other escaped prisoners hijacked a train and rode more than a hundred miles across the Japanese countryside to reach the nearest Allied base.

One detail Zamparini notes in his book is that the only males he saw while on this journey were the elderly and infants or toddlers. Because all adult men and older boys had long since been conscripted. But by that time they also were conscripting pre-schoolers to train them as ammo-bearers for when the invasion finally came. Because even a child of four or five could be employed to pull a Radio Flyer-style wagon loaded with ammunition from one Japanese defensive position to the next.

Even men who had been spared military service because their work had been deemed too vital to the war effort were being trained as suicide bombers. The were given the WWII equivalent of a suicide vest and trained how to dig a hole to hide in so they could wait for an Allied tank or other military vehicle to pass. Then they were supposed to crawl under this passing vehicle and detonate the exploding vest.

#7.
Relentless US carpet bombing of the Japanese islands already had destroyed all cities with a population of more than roughly 50,000, yet the Japanese continued to fight on as if there was a chance they might yet win. But the higher-ups knew better. Even before Hiroshima, they knew the war was lost.

But they still believed the American will to fight was weak. That Americans were too soft-hearted, and if they could kill enough of them when they tried to invade the Japanese homeland, there would be such a great hue and cry from the American citizenry that the American government would be forced to offer Japan lenient terms for a surrender.

And to achieve that objective, they would willingly have killed every man in Japan apart from the royal family.

Taking Japan by force doubtless would have been the bloodiest operation of the entire war and almost certainly would have cost more American lives in particular than the rest of the war did.

Truman, BTW, did NOT order the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. He simply left in place orders already issued by FDR to do so. Those orders detailed the first two strikes in particular but then stated that if the Japanese had not surrendered, the bombings should continue as readily as more bombs could be made available.

By December of 1945, the two new nuclear reactors Leslie Groves had overseen the building of in Washington state were producing enough Pu-239 each month to build four more atom bombs the size of the Nagasaki bomb. So beginning in 1946, the US would have been nuking another Japanese city every week, forever, if necessary.