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thats... a tough one. I'm not saying you're wrong. We have a global standard we decided after ww2 about the extent combatants can "legally" injure civilians in a war.
When you look at the level of resistence by the Japanese during battles in Iwo Jima and Okinawa in particular, It points to the idea that they would not have surrendered, especially on their sacred island homeland. They had a split definition for "defeated" and "surrendered". They could logically acknowledge being defeated, but they still would not tender their surrender, and would have fought for every inch, to the death. Even now they say this. They expected to lose on the beaches in Kyushu, but they were still not going to envision surrender. Westerners don't think with this model of war, so we have to take this into account when introspecting what was an optimal path back then-- already a dicey path, as armchair-warrioring the past always is.
The firebombing of Tokyo killed double the number of civilians that the two nuclear bombs did. And yet we dont talk about those events so much. Its an interesting distinction to ponder.
I'm not an expert or military person, but I hear "war crimes" are actually very common in war. As an example, people note that the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam was particularly heinous, but I've seen documentaries which say that that sort of thing happened all the time It just seldom got acknowledged. Mai Lai was extraorindary in its unusual amount of publicity. If this interests you, check out Kill Anything that Moves
On the other hand with my modern understanding of justification for using nukes, my heart agrees with you. There are always possibilities to do something else, or wait. But can I apply that to pre-UN pre-nurembourg pre-geneva convention times? tough one.
I can tell you that I am married into a Japanese family now, and many of them feel it possibly had to be done, but that it was heinous, along with the rest of the war. They also feel the start of the war was more or less mandatory, as the US had locked Japan away from resources it needed to continue existing in the form it was in. No apologies tendered for the initial attack. They feel the US started it, and not expecting the pearl harbor attack was simply stupid.
My wifes mother (still alive) talks about running as fast as she could from place to place in tokyo to get away from the firebombings, and the starvation that followed where people even ate all the grass, then laid down and died or wandered into the countryside. Her parents died in the fires so she walked into the countryside and walked 350 km to Nagoya as an 11 year old alone to find her relatives.
I dunno whether or not you've been hit with this before, but if you haven't, it's your lucky day, have a two hour miniature documentary on the bombs specifically, and how they weren't really justified at all. People should probably still be pissed about it. I'd also say that stuff about japan being locked away from the resources it needed, is kind of dubious. I dunno if it passes the smell test, it smells like modern japan post ww2 nation building narrative stuff, to me. Maybe if we include "in the form it was in" to encompass the entirety of their imperial exploits up til that point. We maybe get, at some point, to the further debate about opening japan up as a more isolationist country through the use of force, by the US specifically. None of this is something I'm prepared to talk about in any respectable level of detail.
As for the prevalence of violence and war crimes in the world, I'd say, yeah, pretty undeniable, undeniably common. I don't much like war, many reasons, that is among them. I think that vietnam, and the continued and unerring deviation from what vietnam basically was, all the way until the modern day, where we're funding an apartheid state that's bombing a minority population, is a testament to the character of the united states. Which is not to say it's beyond rationalization, or is done out of pure evil, rather than cold self-interest, but I think that the true and fundamental character of the united states, as illustrated from those foreign escapades, is kind of self-evidently apparent. Trump's only notable characteristic is that he's turning that gun towards the domestic population a little more, or that he's more rhetorically fascistic, or some other difference, but this sort of a behavior is something I fully believe to be within our fundamental character as a nation. As a political system. Elon exists on that continuum.