You are so righteous, but I am sorry, that’s NOT how the real world works, nor how it has worked in history - including our beloved OSS/CIA after WWII.
Standard procedure is to hang the leaders, and sift through and co-opt what remains.
The USA/allies “purged” or investigated something like 4-5% of the German adult population after WWII
In Japan, that number was miniscule - something like 0.2%. We left their political-economic structure in tact, and basically took over the top positions
And you can argue the Japanese government were far more murderous than even the Nazi were and deserved hanging even more. But that’s not what we did.
Yeah, and we are paying the price. An example there is found with Unit 731. It was a holocaust unit that put nazis to shame. There were zero survivors. they murdered around 400,000 in chemical and biological warfare experiments... including US POWS. They did that as a control to their experiments to ensure their disease weapons were not limited by race.
It was utterly insane. We arrested the leader, Shirō Ishii and protected him from war crimes and paperclipped him. The Chinese and Soviets both knew we had him because we told them so before we gave him immunity.
So how did that one thing blowback? In 1950 Korea and China were filthy ignorant places. When the Korean war broke out, immediately they had outbreaks of disease and plague as one would expect. Remember all those biological warfare claims they tortured our POW airmen over?
That wasn’t just a communist lie out of thin air, those NORK and Chinese idiots believed it MUST be true. After all, they knew we had Shirō Ishii on our side, and they were experiencing the same outbreaks of plague they had in WWII.
So when Bud Mahurin was being tortured, and tortured to make a biowarfare confession, things like that were a direct effect. They thought that eventually with enough oriental brutality, they could get the truth out of some pilot.
We should have got the information we could from Ishii and hanged him with some Soviet and Chinese witnesses.
Intelligence activities have caused untold misery and it’s hard to find any benefits we have reaped from them.
I know... “if we only knew... “. etc etc yadda yadda...
Unfortunately the reality was we didn’t have control of Japan like we did in Germany.
Remember, the US was planning to invade Japan directly with Operation Downfall. The US was expecting half a million casualties. The atom bombs fortunately stopped that. But the price was accepting the surrender of Japan. We didn’t completely wipe out the government like we did in Germany.
It wasn’t right to let the members of unit 731 go. But would it have been worth 500,000 US casualties to bring them to justice?