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Originally Posted by Norrin Radd
I agree with your assessments of Japan's strength at the beginning of the war.
I never said anything about pulling back to defensive positions in 1945.
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I didn’t say you had, I was merely going off the terribly vague scenario presented by another poster.
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Originally Posted by Norrin Radd
What I don't like is carpet bombing cities, especially fire bombing cities and the use of the atom bomb on a city.
Look how we wage war now. Yes, I know technology has vastly improved, but we still had the capability to bomb specific targets, of course it was WAY tougher back in 1945.
I know Germany carpet bombed London, as well as other cities. I know Japan did horrible things during the war, especially to the Chinese and Phillipinos.
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Nobody likes carpet bombing. If there had been another bombing tactic that was at least as effective I’m confident we’d have employed it. Why would we have risked more pilots and planes than we had to? The Norden Bomb Sight was, perhaps, the most advanced device of its kind fielded during the war, but it wasn’t accurate enough to allow targeting and destruction of specific structures without allowing for a significant number of misses. If it hadn’t been for the tight control of the media by the Office of Censorship, the Norden would likely have had a reputation far worse than the Patriot got after Desert Storm; and deservedly so.
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Using the Norden, bombardiers could, in theory, drop their bombs within a 100 foot (ca 30 m) circle from an altitude of well over 20,000 feet (ca. 7 km). The high altitude would allow for long cruising ranges and keep them out of range of most ship-borne anti-aircraft fire while the bomb pattern would still give an acceptable probability of a "hit". The Norden was marketed as the tool to win the war; and it was often claimed that the bombsight could drop bombs into pickle barrels.
In practice the Norden never managed to produce accuracies remotely like those of which it was theoretically capable. The RAF were the first to use the B-17 in combat, and reported extremely poor results, eventually converting their aircraft to other duties. USAAF anti-shipping operations in the far east were likewise generally unsuccessful, and although there were numerous claims of sinkings, the only confirmed successful action was during the Battle of the Philippines when B-17s damaged two Japanese transports, the cruiser Naka, and the destroyer Murasame, and sank one minesweeper. However these successes were the exception to the rule; actions during the Battle of Coral Sea or Battle of Midway, for instance, were entirely unsuccessful. The USAAF eventually replaced all of their B-17s with other aircraft, and came to use the skip bombing technique in direct low-level attacks.
In Europe the Norden likewise demonstrated a poor real-world accuracy. Under perfect conditions only 50 percent of American bombs fell within a quarter of a mile of the target, and American flyers estimated that as many as 90 percent of bombs could miss their targets.
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Norden bombsight - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The necessity of the fire-bombings is much harder to verify. Undoubtedly the incendiary attacks caused much more damage than would have been inflicted by more conventional high-explosives.
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Originally Posted by Norrin Radd
Since Japan was an island nation with almost NO natural resources, a simple blockade would have prevented them from re-arming. We could have plinked away at the remnants of their navy and clogged their shipping lanes, cutting off their forces that were in theater and preventing them from rearming.
It is estimated that the firebombing of Tokyo killed 100,000 and injured another 100,000. It made 1,000,000 people homeless. This was just in Tokyo.
In the space of ten days, the Americans had dropped nearly 9,500 tons of incendiaries on Japanese cities and destroyed 29 square miles of what was considered to be important industrial land.
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I don’t believe a blockade would have been particularly simple. In order to be effective, our ships would have been well within range of the remaining Japanese fleet and the kamikazes. Subs would always be a problem. My question is, why would we consider this? It certainly isn’t to spare US servicemen’s lives. Is it to spare Japanese lives? You won’t do that without suspending or drastically reducing the bombing campaign, and if you slow or stop the bombs, they have a chance to regain morale and start rebuilding their shattered industries. Eventually, we would have come to terms that everyone would agree on, but do you really think anyone would have come out ahead?