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To: LeonardFMason
"NOTHING MORE.” simply doesn’t square with the facts."

You make it sound as if B29s flew over Tokyo, and without regard to targets, dropped ordinance anywhere they felt like it. They didn't. Those are the facts.

And again, drawing any comparison to what was done in Tokyo to killing for sport is a spurious claim. I'm sorry you keep making it.

101 posted on 09/11/2010 8:51:19 PM PDT by OldDeckHand
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To: OldDeckHand

“The US resumed bombing of Japan after a two-year lull following the 1942 Doolittle raids in fall 1944. The goal of the bombing assault that destroyed Japan’s major cities in the period between May and August 1945, the US Strategic Bombing Survey explained, was “either to bring overwhelming pressure on her to surrender, or to reduce her capability of resisting invasion. . . . [by destroying] the basic economic and social fabric of the country.” [23] A proposal by the Chief of Staff of the Twentieth Air Force to target the imperial palace was rejected, but in the wake of successive failures to eliminate such key strategic targets as Japan’s Nakajima Aircraft Factory west of Tokyo, the area bombing of Japanese cities was approved. [24]

The full fury of firebombing and napalm was unleashed on the night of March 9-10, 1945 when LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from the Marianas. Their mission was to reduce the city to rubble, kill its citizens, and instill terror in the survivors, with jellied gasoline and napalm that would create a sea of flames. Stripped of their guns to make more room for bombs, and flying at altitudes averaging 7,000 feet to evade detection, the bombers, which had been designed for high-altitude precision attacks, carried two kinds of incendiaries: M47s, 100-pound oil gel bombs, 182 per aircraft, each capable of starting a major fire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 per aircraft in addition to a few high explosives to deter firefighters. [25] The attack on an area that the US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated to be 84.7 percent residential succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of air force planners. Whipped by fierce winds, flames detonated by the bombs leaped across a fifteen square mile area of Tokyo generating immense firestorms that engulfed and killed scores of thousands of residents.”

Dude you couldn’t be more wrong. I didn’t say they didn’t have targets. Your the know-it-all that said all of the targets were military industrial complex. YOUR WRONG. They targeted residential areas.

I am not equating anthing except death. Dead civilians are dead civilians. They die in war. Does it matter to them how?


110 posted on 09/11/2010 11:49:55 PM PDT by LeonardFMason
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