Most of what you say moves the goalposts, from ending the war as soon as possible, i.e. with the least loss of life, especially non-Japanese, to the hypothetical of &quot;defeat&quot; equaling actual surrender, which things like the Battle of Okinawa make quite questionable, and could at worst set up another cycle of war (see ending comments).<p>After the fact statements by non-Air Force flag officers?  Probably in the context of nuclear weapons being perceived as making their services obsolete (a mistake that took the bloody Korean War to start correcting, but before that see e.g. The Revolt of the Admirals)?<p>As for Sakhalin, it was an invasion of the southern half of the island.  The USSR used an amphibious landing of a rifle brigade and a marine battalion in the effort, that&#x27;s not the same thing as landing 100K, and the rest of the islands the took were quite small.  Could they have taken a fair amount, or maybe even all of Hokkaido?  Very possibly, but this is not hardly the same sort of thing as occupying Eastern Europe.  Today the island has 4% of the total Japanese population; due to it having 1&#x2F;4th of the home islands&#x27; arable land, I&#x27;d assume it was larger in proportion back then, but compared to grabbing most of what was traditionally &quot;Germany&quot;, with a very long land border, plus almost all of Eastern Europe (does Austria count as part of it)?<p>Anyway, your thesis rests on the assumption our end of WWII leadership, ridden as it was with Soviet agents, was so bloody minded they&#x27;d casually slaughter 10s of thousands of Japanese merely to decrease Soviet influence in East Asia.<p>An extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof when the simpler explanation works so well.  That the two atomic bombs ended up saving even more Japanese lives, 250,000 civilian lives per month in the rest of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, and 10s of thousands of Allied military that would have been lost in the invasions.<p>The only debatable point I see here is that of unconditional surrender, which after WWI, after, as Tom Lehrer put it &quot;<i>We taught them a lesson in 1918. And they&#x27;ve hardly bothered us since then.</i>&quot;, we were determined that we wouldn&#x27;t go through another cycle.  Which we accomplished; maybe Germany and&#x2F;or Japan will once again threaten the world, but that&#x27;s not in the foreseeable future.