NagoyaIan said:
I also hear that Japan had already tried to surrender before the first bomb was dropped, and the second was dropped out of scientific curiousity. That and the fire bombing of Tokyo were horrendous things to do. There is no justification for it. Japan was finished, even if it wouldn't surrender, it had lost the means to fight in any meaningful way.
I will check sources, but I don't know of any serious surrender discussions before the 1st bomb. In Hirohito's writings he tells of being in his garden when a US bomber dropped leaflets warning that Tokyo was going to be bombed the next day. He new then that the war was lost, but it was more than a month before Hiroshima. According to my sources it wasn't until the second bomb that the Emperor offered "unconditional" surrender.
Ending the war ASAP: There is a justification for the bombings of all of Japan's major cities (it may not be a great one, but it is a justification). And if Japan was finished militarily, but they still were killing allied soldiers and civillians daily. Entire suicide units were being organized to use planes, boats, subs, and any other means possible to kill the invading Americans. A plan to launch bombers from three large submarines to attack the Panama canal was in the works. The killing continued.
I don't mean to minimize the suffering of the nation, but Japan continued to fight on well after any hope of winning was gone. Japan could have avoided the whole thing by not starting the war. They could have surrendered in 1943, or 1944, or earlier in 1945. It may have been meaningless, but Japan still had millions of soldiers, and still presented a significant threat. If Japan had not surrendered when it did, the US bombing campaign would have been stepped up, and the shelling of coastal areas by battleships would have began. Millions of Japanese soldiers and civillans stranded around the Pacific by the destruction of the Imperial Navy were starving.
I'm certain that scientific curiosity played a role- why else did we choose previously untouched cities? Racism also played a role. I think in the Pacific we saw the Japanese people- the entire race- as the enemy unlike with Germany and Italy where it was Hitler, the Nazi's, and Mussolini that were the personification of the enemy. Checking the Soviet expansion was probably another reason.
In 1945, my father was in Italy waiting to be redeployed for the invasion of Japan. My uncle was in the Pacific clearing caves and bunkers as an engineer. Three of my other uncles were in Japanese language school waiting to be deployed as interpreters. I doubt that all of them would have survived an invasion of Japan.