See Fog of War, the Erroll Morris's interview with Robert McNamara, who was US Secretary of Defense during Vietnam and helped manage the bombing of Japan in WWII. McNamara says he and compatriots would have been convicted as war criminals if the US had lost, and IIRC says they were war criminals.
I mean it got to the point where we had to "save" Japanese cities to make them enticing targets for the nuke. If we had let our bombers go full force then there literally wouldn't have been a target left.
