And I think most Americans' understanding of the situation is fundamentally wrong. Yes, when I was growing up, that is what I believed, that we would have had to fight our way to Tokyo and millions more would die, but that simply wasn't the case. That's the myth.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."
-
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Now, he was mostly a European Theater guy, so maybe he didn't know what the situation was.
"When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."
- Norman Cousins, one of MacArthur's advisors, in his book
The Pathology of Power