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Originally Posted by CYDdharta
I didn’t say you had, I was merely going off the terribly vague scenario presented by another poster.
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.
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.
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? |
In my opinion, the dropping of the Atom bomb is a somewhat pointless debate.
I believe there are far more important and pressing topics facing us and I am just not willing to spend a lot of time on this one. I just threw in my 2 cents and that is that.
If I had been an American soldier during WWII, especially in the Pacific Theater, I probably would have supported the use of the atom bomb, although I believe I may have regretted it latter on in life.
If you look at how we use weapons today, we would never, ever, fire bomb a major city this day in age. Of course we have weapons which are able to hit precise targets now, so firebombing is not necessary.
You are correct about the difficulty of bombing precise targets during WWII. It was very difficult to do so in the best of conditions and in tough conditions, like flying at 30,000 feet, it was almost impossible to hit targets more than a tiny percentage of the time.
I still believe a blockade could have worked, but the American people were tired of war and they wanted their husbands, brothers and sons to come home.
Anyways, thanks for the discussion.