Agreed but that was not what ricmc2175 was doing.
involved mainly U.S. troops and Navies (with some commendable help from the Australians),
The Chinese suffered 4-6 million military deaths in WW II tie-ing up a considerable portion of the Japanese army. The British and other allied troops had over 1 million men in Burmah and India. Slim's Fourteenth army wiped out the Japanese 15th army and reduced the Japanese 28th Army by half.
My father fought in that war and had little respect for the political general class.
As did my father who had little respect for any of the regular army generals. He believed that the people who won the war were the officers who enlisted early, rapidly made Colonel and did most of the detailed planning.
MacArthur, OTOH, not only learned from is mistakes but became a capable postwar administrator and a hero to the people he conquered.
I'm afraid you and I must differ on MacArthur. He handled the Japanese with kid gloves after the war such that to this day they do not acknowledge their role in starting the war and the manner in which they conducted it. Hirohito should have been hanged as a war criminal. An uncle spent a number of years in a Japanese POW camp. They were every bit as barbaric, if not more so than the German National Socialists. My main beef with Truman is that he didn't have another five A-bombs ( preferably one dropped on the Imperial palace in Tokyo) to really emphasize how upset we were.
Today, we have a strong and loyal ally in Asia which votes with us more often than even Canada does in the United Nations and other international forums. Japan is a check on China expansionism, a positive force for keeping stability on the Korean peninsula and the largest and most consistent contributor to U.S. military operations save only the U.S. taxpayer.
Burma and China were both sideshows to the main war in the Pacific which, while they tied up a lot of men and material, did not turn around until the Pacific War was won.
Unlike the Germans, the Japanese did not elect the military leadership which led their country to disaster. They took over in a coup. So yet another apology from a people who had little control over the situation would be empty and meaningless.
Finally, had your bloodthirsty "solution" been implemented, Japan would've been little more than a vassal state much more receptive to Russian or China's dominant interests than to ours.
Bergamini laid a very rational argument for Hirohito being chiefly responsible for Japan's aggressive war policies. Naturally, the Allies were eager to have a subdued Japanese population after the war and let Hirohito off the hook.