Laos and Cambodia weren't participants in the war but that doesn't really feel like it matters all that much. Whenever I talk about the bombings of Cambodia and Laos with Americans (who - liberals and conservatives alike feel they must always defend) I sometimes here "well we bombed cities in Germany and Japan in WW2 and no one talks about those being war crimes". But were they? I really don't know much about those bombings. My gut says yes they were also war crimes but we just accept them because they were combatant countries?
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't even necessary to end the war, they were definitely not important to ending the genocide in China. Japan's war in China, and the war in general, was fully lost in 1945; their genocidal rampage through the country had basically withered and fallen apart through the year before. The US seeking an unconditional (except the Emperor condition, eventually) surrender from Japan has nothing to do the atrocities they committed in China, it was pure realpolitik, as any war of that scale is. Nuking hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in militarily insignificant cities, in a war already nearly over, perpetuating the strategy of terror bombing which only made the war deadlier to civilians instead of hastening its end, is not any kind of just retribution for Japanese war crimes. It's not even effective punishment; it murders all the wrong targets. Fascist dictatorships don't care about civilian deaths, there were many in the Japanese leadership who wanted to keep fighting, including in China, even after the nukes dropped. None of the military leadership, none of the war criminals who brutalized China, Korea, Indonesia, the Phillipines, and Indochina died from nukes, only civilians subject to fascism and a decade of total war.
I thought Japan's war in China was going fine. It was the war in the Pacific that was going badly.
Japan was in no danger of losing in China. They were hip deep, of course, because China is virtually unconquer-able, but they weren't actually losing.
From what I remember there were several million Soviet soldiers ripping through Manchuria when the nukes were dropped, and American command was worried that if they didn't stop the Soviets then the Soviets would invade and occupy at least China, and maybe Japan too.
The Soviet invasion of Manchuria destroyed their logistics chain, caused a majority of their force in the North to rout, and basically made field operations in China impossible. They'd have lasted 3 months tops with 1.5 million Soviet Guards pressing from the north.
In fact those fascist were kept in power by the US,