They had been raping, pillaging and murdering their way across Asia and the Pacific (Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere) for more than a decade.
The Terms of Surrender the Chinese wanted were:
1. All males over the age of 16 executed.
2. All females and all males under the age of 16 handed over to the Chinese for enslavement as they (the Chinese) saw fit.
The Chinese relented on these terms only after they saw what Curt LeMay had done to the Japanese cities.
I'd say the Japanese got off darned easy.
The last dozen years would have been a lot simpler, and hundreds of thousands of lives saved, if President George HW Bush had held out for "Unconditional Surrender".
The Chinese relented on these terms only after they saw what Curt LeMay had done to the Japanese cities.
The less vexatious of the critics of Truman's decision to use the atom bombs usually point to three things:
1) Curtis LeMay, generally seen as the hardest of hard-liners, strenuously opposed Truman's decision to use the atomic bombs on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, believing as he did, that use of conventional bombing would be effective and would achieve the desired results in an appropriate period of time, and without the need for a land invasion with its undeniable toll in U.S. casualties, 2) The decision to bomb Nagasaki was unnecessary because the Japanese were preparing to accept unconditional surrender and Truman was too hasty in his use of the second bomb, and 3) The decisions to use the bomb on largely civilian populations, rather than on military targets, were grievous, problematic and unacceptable under international law.
Would you be prepared to address any or all of these considerations ?