What other options were there to beat japan in 1945?

Answer 1

Most officers did not know in advance of the atomic bombs, and would not have understood their power if they had known. They could not be told to preserve the highly secret bomb program from exposure, so the bulk of officers continued to operate as if the war had to be carried on and won by conventional means. There were two amphibious landings already in the plans for the Home Islands of Japan, Operation Olympic to land on Kyushu in October, 1945, and Operation Coronet to hit the beach near Tokyo in March, 1946. It was estimated that American casualties alone might reach one million, and it was assumed that all the Japanese would have to be killed, given the recent experience on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and the suicide of Japanese civilians on Saipan in the summer of 1944 (first killing their own children). The Japanese defense ministry was arming women with bamboo spears and hand grenades and training them for suicide attacks, imbuing them with the idea of taking at least one American with them. Alternatively, assuming the American people would have put up with an indefinite extension of the war, and would not have insisted that the nation that made the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and whose officers liked to have beheading contests with their Samurai swords and to dine on the livers of POWs be absolutely crushed, a close naval blockade could have been attempted, but there's no guarantee that this would have ever brought the Japanese to surrender. Its more likely that the Japanese would rather have seen mass starvation of the civilian population down to levels that could be kept alive on whatever agriculture they could manage in the Home Islands, and continued to hold out - provided the Russians allowed that to go on. The Russians had agreed at Yalta to (finally!) enter the war against Japan (and perhaps avenge their stinging defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905) within 90 days after the defeat of Nazi Germany, which turned out to be August 7, the day after the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Thus the Russians only had a week, but still managed to grab Sakhalin Island, and would most assuredly have taken more, and if given time would probably have happily overrun all of Japan. In 1983 a Korean Air Lines 747 went off course and overflew Sakhalin Island, which the Russians had jammed full of military installations. The Russians scrambled fighter jets and shot down the civilian airliner, killing nearly 300 people.