Almost every book I've read about Japan's surrender was written to support a point of view : that using the atomic bomb was/wasn't necessary to end the war. Robert Butow's masterpiece was written to give you the facts.

Butow went to Japan, interviewed the surviving leaders, read the documents, and remembered that people don't always tell you the truth, or even remember it. When he was done, his considered judgement was that the Japanese leaders themselves didn't know when they would have surrendered if Hiroshima and Nagasaki hadn't been nuked.

Butow lays out the inner workings of the Japanese war cabinet, showing how a few men refused to face the fact that Japan had lost World War II. He tells how Japanese diplomats overseas tried to get peace negotiations going, only to be undercut by their own govt. He describes the way the Allies tried and failed to understand Japan.

We'll never know what would have happened if the atomic bombs had not been dropped. But after reading JAPAN'S DECISION TO SURRENDER, you'll understand -- if you're honest -- how the Japanese leadership dithered away their chance to avoid the holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and why Truman felt he had no better option than using the atomic bomb.

Butow has sifted through all the available documents at the end of the war and compiled a chronological account of the ending days of the war in Japan. This book's strength is in its examination of the politcs and power struggles going on in Japan at the upper levels of the government and how this influenced the ending of the war. Can be read as a nice historical text, or used extensively as a source for a paper.