Subject: Greatest Strategic Air Missions
From: (WaltBJ)
Date: 8/23/04 9:18 PM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id:

Every time this subject comes up I am both amazed and appalled at the
revisionist/PC thinking based on fragmentary knowledge of the
situation existing then. The US had just been thorugh the Peleliu, Iwo
Jma, Phillipines and Okinawa campaigns and the casualties were
horrendous. Now we were going to invade the Japanese Home Islands and
we could reliably expect the fighting to be grimly intense. I strongly
recommend y'all find books on the above campaigns and read through
them and then look up the plans to invade Kyushu and then the Tokyo
beaches. Especially study the Japanese planned counteractions - they
had deduced where the landings were to take place. Not very difficult
- there's not that many choices. The Combined Japanese Air Forces had
held back 5,000 air-lanes for Kamikaze use! Note that the Services of
Supply had ordered 400,000 Purple Hearts for the two invasions. Also
note that President Truman had been in combat in WW1. ISTR he was a
field artillery battery CO - not a staff officer. He knew plenty about
battle casualties from real personal knowledge. So, with the atomic
bomb handy, would you-all have the guts (and gall) to sened your
troops into battle knowing that the casualties would be horrendous,
far greater than Iwo or Okinawa? And you would have to recycle ETO
infantry combat vets to replace the fully expected losses - guys that
had already 'seen the elephant'? Face it - the US was running low on
front line troops -
Now - would I have given the order? Damn right I would - given the
choice between killing the enemy and saving my own troops or doing a
grim trade-off of my guys for theirs - I'd nuke and re-nuke them until
they quit. They fro damn sure earned it. Unlike most of you-all I've
lost enough very close friends in combat, men I've trusted my life to.
Now stop all your maunderings until you've done some study of the
situation - as it existed back then! As for collateral damage - the
Russkies did a pretty good job on Warsaw and points west, culminating
in Berlin. Massive artillery barrages take a little longer than nuking
the places but the result was pretty much the same except the area of
destruction is larger. Walt BJ








Not much to add to that..Well said Walt.