Agreed. I must admit to flip flopping on this issue over the years but ultimately, the dropping of the bombs saved lives, not just American but Japanese as well. You just need to see how they fought on Iwo Jima & Okinawa to understand what was in store for anybody invading Japan. It really boggles the mind when you consider that the USA had adopted a "Europe first" strategy after Pearl Harbor. Can you imagine how the Pacific war would of went had it got top priority?
While I can't disagree with your assessment of how the Pacific theater would have been effected, I do agree with the Europe first policy. Whether or not the US should have entered the war earlier was directly a result of the isolationist mood here. When we finally did enter the war England was the
LAST country to be standing so to speak. Had England succumbed to an invasion, the war perhaps would have been longer and more drawn out, same result though. So the "political" direction was Europe first, while supplying the Pacific with enough resources to prevent further Japanese advances. Of course this had the negative aspect of letting them prepare their defenses. Additionally the German/Italian armies were larger than the Japanese, but would ultimately be faced with much larger forces once Germany attacked Russia. Hitler in essence did what a more concentrated effort in the Pacific required, splitting your forces in two.
