Yes. A virtually unreported factor in decision making by 1945 was the war weariness of the American people. It also weighed in the decision to use the atom bomb in Japan rather than a bloody protracted invasion.
True.
All of these discussions presume the American public, and soldiers, would have been willing to engage in a new war.
I don't think that was going to happen in 45.
My parents told me what life was like during WWII, the entire country sacrificed to support the war effort. Their gas ration was 3 gallons a week. One of her aunts heard nothing from her son for over 3 years.
It's my contention that Truman would have been impeached for not using Fat Man and Little Boy, instead of a land invasion of Japan.
During the planning for a land invasion of Japan, the War Department placed an order for 500,000 Purple Hearts.
That supply has yet to be exhausted.
I used to think that was true. You should read the contemporary reports about Japan from the American field commanders. IF we had permitted a surrender that would have allowed them to keep their emperor, as Forrestal proposed, they would have surrendered without the nukes.
Why did we insist, drop the bombs, and then let the Japanese keep their emperor?
Paul Fussell's essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" ought to be required reading. Fussell had been combat infantry in Europe.
"When the atom bomb ended the war, I was in the Forty-fifth Infantry Division, which had been through the European war so thoroughly that it had needed to be reconstituted two or three times. We were in a staging area near Rheims, ready to be shipped back across the United States for refresher training at Fort Lewis, Washington, and then sent on for final preparation in the Philippines. "My division, like most of the ones transferred from Europe, was to take part in the invasion of Honshu. (The earlier landing on Kyushu was to be carried out by the 700,000 infantry already in the Pacific, those with whom James Jones has sympathized.)
I was a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant of infantry leading a rifle platoon. Although still officially fit for combat, in the German war I had already been wounded in the back and the leg badly enough to be adjudged, after the war, 40 percent disabled. But even if my leg buckled and I fell to the ground whenever I jumped out of the back of a truck, and even if the very idea of more combat made me breathe in gasps and shake all over, my condition was held to be adequate for the next act.
"When the atom bombs were dropped and news began to circulate that “Operation Olympic” would not, after all, be necessary, when we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow to adulthood after all. The killing was all going to be over, and peace was actually going to be the state of things.