Just a few thoughts, possibly non-sequiturs, but I'll post them anyway.

Firstly: I think that all informed Japanese (though there would have been few of these) must have known that Japan was indeed militarily impotent in mid-1945. Their navy, and air forces, had been almost completely destroyed, along with the bulk of their merchant shipping. The home islands were almost entirely cut off from the sources of raw materials elsewhere in Asia. Even if they could build more aircraft, they were almost out of fuel, and before long they would be unable to mount even kamikaze attacks.

In this respect, the situation was not at all like that of Britain in 1940. Britain could rely on large reserves of manpower and industry in the Dominions, had undisputed naval superiority over Germany, had measures in hand to expand the Air Force to equal and overwhelm the Luftwaffe, and could also rely on support from the USA under Roosevelt. Churchill needed only to overcome the immediate crisis, and could then be certain that Germany had no way of directly defeating Britain. (The U-boat was essentially a one-dimensional threat. Once the technical and numerical odds in the Battle of the Atlantic favoured the Allies, the U-boat's defeat was inevitable.)


Secondly: the casualties inflicted by the atomic weapons were only part of the civilian casualties caused by Allied bombing of Japan. For example, on the night of March 10/11th, Superfortresses dropped 2000 tons of incendiaries on Tokyo. In an area consisting mainly of buildings shoddily constructed from softwood, the resulting firestorm was more destructive even than that which engulfed Hamburg and Dresden. There were estimated to be from 80,000 to 200,000 dead, and anything up to 1.8 million injured (mainly suffering severe burns) and homeless.

Superfortresses were eventually making similar raids every other day. They are believed to have inflicted a total of half a million deaths, and made 13 million homeless. The Japanese could do nothing to prevent such attacks. However, other than dislocating civilians and destroying some factories caught in the general conflagration, these attacks did not directly affect Japan's capacity to continue the war. (It should be remembered that these raids were only just beginning after Churchill and others had begun having second thoughts about the morality and effectiveness about the Dresden raid.)


I believe that, with or without the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan would have been forced to come to terms before the end of 1945. The slaughter of civilians must eventually have swayed the Emperor, the Russian declaration of war with their occupation of Manchuria and the destruction of the Japanese Kwantung Army would have convinced all but the most deluded military leaders that resistance was at an end.

(Had the war continued, the second half of 1945 would have seen a British / Indian invasion of Malaya, and perhaps the recapture of Singapore, the surrender of starving units of the Japanese South China Army, and the invasion, in November, of Kyushu and perhaps Hokkaido. Sooner or later, this succession of blows must surely have driven the Japanese to surrender.

Furthermore, while Japanese history, or at least the folklore which accompanied the warrior code, emphasises that death is preferable to disgrace, it was noted during the last stages of the fighting on Okinawa (June, 1945) and Manchuria, Japanese soldiers and civilians were starting to surrender rather than fight to the end. To be fair, these were people numbed by months of privation and ceaseless fighting, but I think it possible that this tendency might have been even more marked had the war continued to the end of the year. Evidence of this failure of will might also have contributed to a decision to surrender.)


I don't think it can be disputed that the atomic bombs did indeed hasten the Japanese surrender. They did so at cost of terrible casualties. However, I think that had they not been used, the Japanese civilian casualties would have been as numerous and tragic, had the Allies (particularly the US) continued to use the same strategy and methods as they were doing. One cannot imagine commanders such as Curtis LeMay or Admiral Halsey deciding to let up attacking Japanese targets for a few months while the Japanese supreme command mulled things over, and the Army slowly gathered itself for an invasion. So, while the use of atomic weapons was cruel, it cannot by itself be called wanton cruelty, not in the context of the time and situation.





As a footnote, I note that the Japanese have not been entirely forgiven for their own cruelties, in China at any rate. As someone posted somewhere, the "Rape of Nanking" and other atrocities are still remembered. The Chinese evidently feel that, although Japanese civilians also suffered during the war, the criminals who authorised, condoned and perpetrated that and similar crimes did not themselves suffer as a result, and Japan still owes some atonement for those crimes.

So far as I am aware, such an attitude is not so marked in other countries the Japanese attacked or occupied. In some cases (e.g. Indonesia), the Japanese inflicted no worse atrocities than the previous colonial power. In others, such as Burma, the nation's own subsequent internal turmoil has involved similar or worse acts.