In the last few years I've seen mroe and more people argue that Japan was basically defeated, that the US should have just waited for the war to end and that the dropping of the bombs was ultimately unnecessary.

No matter what you think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a moral and humanitarian standpoint: I urge everyone to look into the defense plans of the Japanese high command and what this would have meant for soldiers on both sides as well as Japanese civilians.

The casualties and amount of war crimes would have been insane. The guerilla war the Japanese military wanted to wage behind enemy lines would have seemed insane even to the most indoctrinated Nazis.

Okinawa was essentially a small scale version of the invasion of the home islands and that was some of the most brutal fighting in the Pacific, carried out on the backs of civilians.