70th anniversary of atomic bombing of Hiroshima

[Torplexed]

Originally Posted by Raptor1

Tokyo wasn't particularly suitable as a target; much of it was burned to the ground over-night several months before in a firebombing raid that killed more people than either atomic bomb.

I guess the direction of war is never a task for the squeamish and it's easy to pontificate 70 years later, when you're not caught up in the pressure of events. The U.S. had already participated in a massive bombing campaign which had killed about three-quarters of a million German and Japanese civilians, and to which public opinion had raised few objections. It is much easier to justify the the decision to drop the atomic bombs than the continued fire-raising offensive of the Twentieth Air Force in Japan. The preoccupation of debate with the necessity of using using the bombs had meant that it always gets judged strategically against the looming invasion of the Home Islands, rather than the actual air bombardment underway at the time and with which it was unavoidably linked in the minds of the policy-makers at the time.

Cold as it may seem, General Curtis LeMay regarded the Hiroshima and Nagasaki raids as merely an addition ( and a redundant and unwelcome addition) to a campaign he felt his B-29s had already decisively won. If anything he was annoyed that they diminished the credit given his conventional bombers for flattening Japan.