Don’t forget Jericho and God ordering the complete extermination of whole populations by the sword and the taking of Egypt’s first born in revenge for Pharaoh killing the first born of Israel.
By every measure Imperial Japan was evil and we’d have been perfectly justified in exterminating all of them had it come down to it.
Without the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo we’d have had to wipe out probably 80-90% of the population to conquer the Islands conventionally not to mention the million plus allied lives that would have been lost in taking it.
Something few consider, even the historians is that at the end of the war the Japanese had jet and rocket powered “wonder weapons” capable of sinking a ship, one for one and they had enough at that time to sink at least 500 of them. Given six more months they could easily have produced another 1500-2,000 such jet and rocket powered ship killing Kamikaze aircraft.
Our ships and aircraft had no workable defense against these weapons either.
In the last six months of the war they had pulled back all of their fighters and bombers for defense of the home Islands as well giving them a total of around 2,000-3,000 more potential Kamikaze planes.
Now imagine flights of a hundred or more conventional aircraft closing in on our invasion fleet with the high speed rocket and jet powered planes coming in to time a concurrent assault.
Even if only half the wonder weapons and a quarter of the conventional kamikaze attacks were successful we’re talking about the loss of 3,000-5,000 allied ships being lost before ever getting in sight of the home Islands.
Each of those ships would have carried 700-1,800 crew plus all of the invasion troops and equipment they could get on board.
Their plans were to target first the capitol ships, then the destroyers eliminating our carrier based aircraft and ship borne air defense with the wonder weapons and then wipe out the transports with what was left.
What wold that add up to just in human losses?
If and when the invasion was successful they were then fully militarized as a nation and sworn to fight to the death with every man, woman, and child sworn to die for the emperor.
Based on the casualties during the last six months of Island hopping and the invasion of Okinawa 80-90% of Japan’s population would have had to be exterminated to accomplish the mission.
Can anyone honestly say that would have been the preferred outcome?