This is a false dichotomy. There was a third choice. As Eisenhower, Marshall, Herbert Hoover, and others urged, Truman could have agreed to a conditional surrender allowing the Japanese to keep the emperor thus avoiding both the mass slaughter of Japanese innocents (including babies and civilians in Nagasaki, the center of Japanese Christianity) by agreeing to let the Japanese keep the emperor. In the end, he agreed to this anyway because the Japanese still assisted on this condition despite two bombs!
I’ve always believed the Nagasaki bomb was overkill, so to speak.
I think the Hiroshima bomb made the point.
You are just wrong and apparently one of the so called revisionists. But after all, those of us who are old enough to have been there, are also old enough to not count for anything now.
No serious historian on the topic takes this let’s-start-negotiating “third choice” nonsense seriously. Mainly because we had been offering the Japanese terms for years — at least since Cairo — and to no real effect.
Your conditional/unconditional surrender dichotomy is recycled Communist agitprop that falsifies continual US efforts to end the war by offering terms (Potsdam declaration is another example). What we meant by “unconditional” changed throughout the war, as is not surprising with the diplomatic “definition of words.” It’s embarrassing that you and others have been repeating this old canard.
The Imperial Japanese gov’t bears a lot of responsibility for not evacuating urban areas that they knew were legitimate military targets because of the presence of army barracks/military industry/military port facilities. That they didn’t try to mass evacuate after Hiroshima is just criminal, but was part and parcel of the Imperial Japanese govt’s depraved de-valuing of the lives of their own citizens.
In fact, Truman had many choices on how to try to end the Pacific War... as did the Imperial Japanese gov’t. I think Truman gambled and ended up making the BEST choice based given the options available to him.
Your continual irrational harping on US nuclear “war crimes” while ignoring Japan’s criminal unwillingness to surrender in the face of what happened previously: serious and unbroken military setbacks since Midway, the bloody debacle of Okinawa, the city firebombings, etc. — strikes me as unwarranted and irrational.
By the way — you wouldn’t be related to the old Freeper “Bones McCoy,” would you?