If Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not been leveled by one atomic bomb each, they would have shortly been burned out by Curtis Lemay’s Twentieth Air Force, flying hundreds of B-29s each carrying thousands of pounds of incendiary bombs. Five months of seeing Tokyo and every other major city in Japan burned to the ground, with hundreds of thousands dead and millions homeless and starving, had not convinced the hard-liners in the Japanese government to surrender. It wasn’t until after we demonstrated to do with one airplane what had previously taken four hundred did Emperor Hirohito bestir himself and overrule his suicidal subordinates.
More people died in one night in Tokyo (around 125,000) and more territory was obliterated (16.4 square miles) than in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The only difference was that in Tokyo, it was 336 airplanes carrying napalm, instead of one carrying a nuclear weapon.
No, it’s not really something to celebrate, because so many people did die. But I still thank God for it, because my father’d already been told he was going to get transferred from his motor pool job on Leyte and get sent ashore on Kyushu. I might not be here today if it wasn’t for those bombs making Hirohito come to his senses. After all, the Japanese had THIRTY-TWO MILLION civilians ready to resist to the death, even if they were mostly armed only with spears or sticks.
}:-)4
The mother of all insurgencies...