They weren’t innocent, they were willing and eager subjects

Just no. Tens of thousands of those killed were children and babies.

Massacring civillians using the excuse that they “all” are collectively responsible for their leadership is a war crime. You’re in very bad company. Osama Bin Laden explicitly used that same excuse for 9/11. Israel is using it now for Gaza.

In the documentary Fog of War McNamara admits that him and Curtis May were essentially behaving as war criminals.

There’s absolutely no reason to try to carve out this weird moral exception for the US in its slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civillians at Hiroshima and Nagisaki.

There is no shame in learning from the mistakes of the past.