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In August 1945, there was no possibility that Japan would defeat the United States. However, in the early years of the war, it was a distinct possibility.

If Japan had defeated the U.S., the Japanese would have shown none of the forbearance, kindness, benevolence, and mercy toward the conquered Americans.

In fact--American forbearance, kindness, mercy, and benevolence shocked the conquered Japanese, who fully expected the cruelest possible brutality--which is exactly what they would have shown had they been victorious and which is why they were so shocked at American forbearance, kindness, benevolence, and mercy.

The Rape of Nanking would have been an afternoon tea party compared to what they would have done to the Americans,

And the Japanese knew it. That's why they were so pleasantly surprised at the Americans' treatment of them.

I agree with your post #106. The outcome of the war was very much in doubt at the beginning. We humans tend to think that whatever happened in history was inevitable when, often, the outcome hung on a few chance events. The outcome of the war was probably much more in doubt in the ETO than in the Pacific, though.

In your post #31, however, I thought you were talking about the decision to use the bomb on Japan, which decision was, of course, made in 1945. By that time the defeat of Japan was inevitable, although the terms were certainly still fluid.

I support the decision to use the atomic bomb for three reasons:

One, it saved many lives, both American and Japanese. An invasion of Japan would have been bloody far beyond anything we, or they, had seen up to that point.

Two, it allowed for the rebuilding of Japan after the war, whereas the bloodbath that would have followed an invasion would have embittered the American public to the point where massive help for Japan would have been politically impossible.

Three, you have to judge people according to their Zeitgeist. At the time the decision to use the bomb was made, no one, except perhaps some of the scientists who had worked on it, had any reason to view it as anything except a bigger and better bomb. We had been building bigger and better weapons of war for the last four years. This was no different, right? Wrong! It was different, but until we, and the rest of the world, got to see the results of these weapons, no one really understood that. We were setting foot in a new land, a qualitatively different world of the strong nuclear force, orders of magnitude more energetically dense that the forces of the electron shell.

As a side benefit, we kept the Soviets out of Japan by ending the war when it did.