Greatest Strategic Air Missions

Hear, Hear. I came to the same conculusion in my MA thesis when I researched
the planned invasion (DOWNFALL). While U.S. and Allied casualties would have
been high (at least some 75,000 for Kyushu in OLYMPIC and 2x that for the
Kanto in CORONET), Japanese losses both military and civilian would have
been much, much worse than those of the Allies. Add to that the probable
U.S./Allied use of gas, and Marshall asking if the A-bomb could be used in
a tactical role in the preinvasion bombardment of the beaches in Kyushu,
and that adds up the butcher's bill very quickly. Be glad 15 Kt on Hiroshima
and 20 Kt on Nagasaki were used-it ended the war within a week of the Nagasaki
strike.


(WaltBJ) wrote:
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


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