It would have been inconceivable, when tens of millions of Europeans and Asians had already died, as well as hundreds of thousands of Americans, to refuse to use a bomb that could end the war for fear of "killing too many people." The American public was becoming restless at the cost of the war already. Government ordered the minting of so many Purple Heart medals (awarded to soldiers wounded or killed in action) that the surplus stock is still being used to this day. Therefore the Allies made their decisions not in an atmosphere of imminent victory, but rather in the face of what promised to be an escalation of the Pacific War unlike anything yet seen, and mass casualties were expected. By the best estimates, the war against Japan was expected to continue 18 months after the German surrender, with Operation Downfall scheduled to not even begin until November 1945, with fighting expected to continue until 1947. With hindsight it is easy to forget, but nobody at the time knew the war was about to end. Casualty estimates, both historical and contemporary, vary wildly but almost all reckon on hundreds of thousands of American casualties and possibly up to 10 million Japanese. The Home Islands were projected to be much harder. Thus far only small islands had been taken. Everything the United States had seen up to this point in the war pointed to a fanatical, even suicidal, hostile population that would continue to resist at almost any cost. The United States was not enthusiastic about the prospects for Operation Downfall. At the heart of this fleet would be 42 aircraft carriers, with over ten thousand carrier-based aircraft. The largest and most powerful battle-fleet ever assembled would support them. Downfall called for seven times that number, with almost a million personnel, and supply lines stretching thousands of miles across the Pacific. The current record holder for that title is the Normandy Landings in Europe, involving 150,000 Allied troops from bases 100 miles away. Had it gone ahead, it would have been the largest amphibious assault in military history. Once this was secure, it would be used as a staging area to support an invasion of Honshu, with Allied forces sailing straight into Tokyo Bay and landing forces on the Kanto Plain. The first part entailed the capture of Kyushu, Japan's southernmost major island. As the Allied forces in the Pacific finally drew near, it seemed an invasion would be necessary to force Japan to surrender. Despite all this, the Japanese government remained outwardly defiant. The half-million men of the China Expeditionary Force had been largely cut off from supplies and were forced to scour the countryside for food and grain, even as Generalissimo Chiang's Guomindang moved to crush them one by one. However, Imperial Japan was still standing, despite most of Japan's cities being smoking ruins - the result of a sustained campaign of firebombing by the American air force. Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 8th 1945. In August 1945 the war in Europe was over. All parties knew that this reservation was strengthened by the possibility that an invasion might be unnecessary, as domestic rebellion or even revolution might topple the Japanese regime after widespread famine began in earnest (sometime in autumn 1945). This point was particularly important given that the Japanese Army and Navy were aware that President Truman and the US military had reservations about the monetary and human costs of a ground invasion. Show that Japan's conventional defense of the Home Islands against a possible Allied land invasion in October 1945 (''Operation Downfall") was untenable given the power and number of the Western Allies' nuclear weapons.Efficiently destroy two of the four remaining industrial cities (of a pre-war total of more than sixty) which climatic conditions had made difficult to raze with firebombing, as had been accomplished upon all other cities and most large towns.On the 6th and 9th of August 1945, the USA destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons, which resulted from the Manhattan Project.