“...The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all...”
The battle for Japan would have been house to house and it would have taken a terrible toll of American lives. They had been fed lies about Americans killing women and children, raping their women as a means of defeating the nation. They were ready to fight to the bitter end.
My cousin was a marine in one of the divisions waiting for the order to invade. He and the others had already met with the chaplain and written wills.
Hiroshima, I believe, was the center of the Japanese atomic bomb program.
You are correct about the bombs saving a large number of American lives, of course. But what is ignored in all of this is the fact that using the bomb to convince Japan to surrender almost certainly saved a very large number of Japanese lives as well.
Japan in 1945 was preparing for defense of the home islands by arming civilians - including women and children - with whatever weapons were available, down to sticks, rocks and the like. The Japanese people were conditioned to believe that surrender was disgraceful and that they had a duty to the emperor to fight to the death to defend Japan.
I’m the event of an invasion, our forces likely would have been faced with the prospect of being attacked by poorly armed civilians alongside regular Japanese troops, resulting almost inevitably in a.huge massacre of Japanese civilians. Certainly the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused massive civilian casualties; nobody can dispute that. It is arguable though that a conventional invasion might well have been even worse.