It is fair to assume that President Truman’s action was justified and that the dropping of an atomic bomb was essential. There is no sign of when, if ever, the Japanese will surrender. The operations planned for late 1945 and early 1946 were to be on mainland Japan, and the military fatalities on both sides, as well as civilian deaths, would have very certainly outweighed the losses caused by the bombing (Keegan 1996). The battle was costing lives as well as money to keep fighting. Japan faced the potential of an Allied landing on their nation, a Soviet Union onslaught, and the reality that by the time all of this happened (Keegan 1996). They would be receiving no assistance from defeated Germany, yet despite all of this, Japan would fight on. Who knows what might have occurred if the Pacific Theater battles had persisted? The Japanese were already using their pilots as weapons, and it’s impossible to say what would have occurred if the Japanese had landed in America. There was no sign that they were any closer to surrendering than when they destroyed Pearl Harbor.
Japanese persistence during World War II was unprecedented. A rational government would have conceded defeat. The country was on the verge of famine. It was staring down the barrel of disaster. In the Japanese concept, however, “face” prohibited it from embracing reality (Keegan 1996). The emperor and his military government were then handed a way out by two fresh crises in August. On August 6, 1945, an American plane exploded an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Manchuria was invaded by the Red Army on August 8 (Keegan 1996). On August 17, eight days after the second atomic bomb was detonated on Nagasaki and two days after the Japanese surrendered to the US, the Manchurian campaign was declared won (Keegan 1996).
Reference
Keegan, John. 1996. The Battle for History: Re-Fighting World War II. Toronto: Vintage books.