I found the editorial tone of this particular "Osprey" booklet to be untypical of what one generally sees with the "Campaign" series. Usually, there's an effort to project immediacy. Here, one has a bland, dispassionate, tone that would not be out of place with official history.

Having said that, this work has two particular virtues. One, Herder treats the disparate aerial attacks, naval bombardments, and submarine operations conducted by the American and British naval forces as one campaign to "reduce" Japanese war potential to the point where further organized resistance would be futile, or would break Japanese society. Two, you can see in this whole way of war, that partook equally of blockade and siege, the paradigm of the preferred American operational system ever since, which only recently has the U.S. Navy been forced to reassess the validity of (when confronting the prospects of a war with Beijing in regards to Taiwan).

Herder concludes with a quote from the 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey that, even ignoring all other factors, such as the use of atomic weapons, the firebombing campaign of U.S. 20th Air Force, or the Soviet assault on Manchuria, the U.S. naval siege of Japan was probably sufficient to achieve military victory in and of itself. Perhaps. Nothing I've read negates the seeming impact of the one-two shock affect of Hiroshima, and the Soviet entrance into the war against Japan, in terms of bringing home to Tokyo (particularly the Japanese military) that all reasonable options had been expended, and the chance had to be taken that the Potsdam Declaration offered a semi-honorable exit alternative to national suicide. ( )