[Sangetsu]

People are so pampered nowadays, living in safe societies, with safety nets available to us if we get sick, lose or job, or get hopelessly into debt. We are well insulated against the difficulties human beings faced only a century ago. We look back with 20-20 hindsight and stupidly try to second guess the decisions of earlier generations, having no idea of the real life situations they faced at the time.

Does anyone realize why the Allies required an unconditional surrender? Does anyone remember the treaty of Versailles? Germany's conditional surrender to WW1? World War 1 was supposed to be the "war to end all wars", but that turned out not to be the case, didn't it? Only 2 decades after Germany's surrender, they once again started a world war. Germany's conditional surrender under the Versailles Treaty may have ended WW1 more quickly, and saved lives at the time, but in the long run it ended up leading to WW2, and costing the world countless millions of lives.

There was no way the Allies were going to repeat this mistake. When the war was won, they wanted it to stay won, and it worked. Germany and Japan were both permanently defeated, and never regained their military super-power status.