Checking the "facts" quoted from Wikipedia all I found were references to the people quoted, not that they had expressed informed opposition to dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.   I am sorry it took so many deaths to convince the Japanese military and their emporer god that the war was unwinnable, but if it comes to a case of sacrificing a few bombers and their crews, the two B-29s that actually dropped the bombs were accompanied by a number of other bombers and other aircraft documenting the two explosion, or several hundred thousand soldiers and a much larger number of Japanese soldiers and civilians, I'll sent the bombers every time.

    It is increasingly popular to blame the overwhelming horror of one country killing a quarter of a million helpless people by dropping two atomic bombs while totally ignoring the casualties resulting from the previous firebombing of Tokyo and similar targets which killed far more people, and left few casualties other than would result from any house fire on a gigantic scale.

    During the Pacific Island campaign we saw that it wasn't enough to seize an area, we had to eliminate every able bodied soldier before we had anything approaching pacification of the area. The fact that over the years, even as late as 2000, the odd former Japanese soldiers are still coming out of the bush, apologizing for their inability to continue a war lost 55 years in the past, shows that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have required complete devastation of every area captured, with the attendant loss of civilian lives and military lives on each side of the conflict.

    We had a quick one-two punch, a hasty accepted peace treaty, and our people, under General MacArthur, with his aims for the Japan of the future, began rebuilding Japan's infrastructure, society, and economic conditions so that they were rapidly available to take their place in the Pacific regions, and the world at large. We were able to accomplish this because we were not dealing with the Soviet influence in accomplishing this task, due to MacArthur's unwillingness to accept ANY Soviet presence in Japan, which was not the case in Germany, or any of the Warsaw Pact countries who have only just began to exist as autonomous countries again, 60 years after WWII was over in Europe.

    Dave