Eisenhower never had to deal with the fanaticism/total dedication of the Japanese soldiers.
The Kamikaze attacks against our ships, the Bonzai suicide charges on a number of the islands, the suicides of women and children jumping off cliffs in Okinawa all give credence to the conclusion that an invasion of Japan would be very costly to both sides.
" The Emperor could simply have lost face..." Please!
BTW, it was FDR who demanded unconditional surrender. How would Truman look politically if he had retracted that demand. Stalin would have benifitted from that sign of weakness.
Yes, the military dictatorship would ultimately have surrendered if they were certain that the Emperor could remain. But when would that surrender have occurred? How many more cities would have been fire bombed. Would we have needed to land troops or send our battleships into Tokyo Bay before they would finally surrender. The "peace overtures" that were sent to Moscow came from civilians, not the generals.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, their documents revealed that Stalin had planned to invade Western Europe if Truman had not sent troops into South Korea.
I agree that Vietnam was a war of unification that we should not have intervened in and, in fact, we violated the 1955 accord.
Desert Storm I was absolutely justified. More recently, we should have taken out Assad one way or another and have done the same to Hussein without blundering into an invasion.
