Posted on 08/02/2014 8:08:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
And Curtis Lemay isn't even appropriate to include in a list like that. He openly admitted that he would probably be prosecuted for war crimes if the U.S. lost the war, because of the heinous nature of his war strategy ... so I'll let him stand as his own judge an jury on that one.
I'll even go so far as to suggest that Lemay -- and probably the others as well -- weren't even planning their war strategy around the defeat of the Japanese. More likely, they were fighting the next war to defend America's new global empire from the Soviets.
Oh, stop the theatrics, dude. With all due respect, I find it hard to believe that firebombings and atomic bombings of Japanese cities in the 1940s are the only thing that keeps me from being an enslaved man right now.
The passage in question was from the movie rendition of a court-martial trial during the Boer War in which the government and military leaders were the ones carrying out an outrageous prosecution of their own soldiers.
It's kind of disingenuous for anyone to use a quote from a military lawyer defending court-martialed soldiers for their actions in the heat of battle, to defend government and military leaders in Washington D.C. who weren't making any decisions in the heat of battle back in 1945.
Like you say,”...I find it hard to believe...”. By the by, you are enslaved.
?? The President is CIC and directs the overall war strategy at the highest level.
Generals follow orders.
FDR and all his advisors were from the old-money “Eastern Establishment”, they were all Rockefeller/wall street/harvard/yale/etc. men, starting with Sect’y of War Stimson.
“The story is that an Allied bomb hit the barn of some farm near a German factory. That gave Hitler the excuse to send his V2 to London, as we had started attacking “civilians”. Not sure how true it is.”
Fiction.
“Some of us grew up surrounded by the vets of WWII and we tend to take the events of that war as common knowledge. But someone now in college would have been born around the time of the first Gulf War and they weren’t glued to a black and white television watching Victory at Sea.”
Perfect.
Funny how those of us who are one generation separated from those who fought and read or were alive while it was going on have one concept, and those two and three generations later drink the kool-aid.
At any rate, high altitude bombing didn't get the job done. LeMay had the go low to get effects. I don't doubt that the two weeks before the bomb were easy on the B-29 crews, the Japs were shepherding their resources for the invasion they knew was coming.
On another note, combat losses were dwarfed by training losses and non-combat losses overseas. So while the thought of 5000 dive bombers a day sounds good, it isn't remotely feasible given the resources available. With no intel, there wouldn't be any targets.
It was invasion or the bomb, anything else is a pipe dream. Again, how many flyers or other military personnel would you sacrifice to avoid using the bomb?
The Japanese soldier certainly wouldn't, for the civilian population wouldn't want to be them. Most certainly, the US POWs would have starved.
And he ignored the fact that even after the bomb was dropped on one of their cities they did not surrender. And after the second they still had to be forced into it.
So what would Stewart's little plan done? Wasted the third bomb, which was the last one we would have for a few months.
Explains why he is a third rate comedian rather then anyone of value.
Atomic weapons were the least of our worries with Japan. They were working on a weaponized version of the Bubonic Plague and were very close to perfecting it.
Can you imagine the carnage that would have caused in Asia and Europe?
How? By soliloquy?
And we promptly brought the researchers doing the plague development into the USA to work for us in developing those weaponized plagues.
The Japanese relied upon imports for more than rice. Much of the grain and meat came from the mainland. But more than that, it was not the actual food as much as the internal food distribution system. By July 1945, the allied blockade had become internal to home waters. The coastal shipping that Japan relied upon for domestic commerce had been savaged by air attack, mining and submarine operations. The internal rail links were fragile, and were the next items on Curtis LeMay’s interdiction schedule.
Richard Frank documented all of this in “Downfall.” The Japanese were already on starvation rations during the summer of 1945. The destruction of the internal rail links would have reduced the food consumption even more. Frank estimated that as many as 20,000,000 Japanese would not have survived the winter even without an actual invasion. And those deaths would have been predominately the old, very young, and sick. Think of Leningrad on a national scale.
In fact, the very first thing the American occupation forces realized was that the Japanese were starving, and immediately began a program of food relief. Even though such an action was not politically popular in the United States.
It’s still use of a WMD against civilians. It doesn’t matter when it is used.
” afterward we’ll smile, buy the survivors drinks and ask “Hey, can we just get along now?” And then we rebuild the place.”
Yeah, we have a history of that. People call us an “Empire”, but I don’t see it. We’ve never kept much that other countries in different times would have kept.
Typical from someone ignoring the facts of WW2 .It took until late 1944 for the Allies to have the kind of air superiority you posit and bombers of that era flying at low altitude were very vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire from the ground. Vietnam era aircraft were vulnerable to surface to air missiles;McCain got shot down flying below the altitude he was supposed to be flying!The Gulf War smart bombs ,stealth aircraft,terrain-following missiles and all that were not available to the U.S.A, or Great Britain prior to the 1980s.
AA is a valid bombing target.
Read my post from wikipedia, it describes the generally accepted fact that Japan was in decline and there was not coming back. It was all downhill. No more carriers left, fewer and few planes every day.
Planes can be destroyed far more quickly than they can be built.
And what you run out of first is skilled pilots. Once you run out of skilled pilots your air force is no match for an air force loaded up with skilled pilots. You may get some “kamakazi” hits scored, but not many if your air force receives the full brunt of attack from a well-equipped, well-trained air force.
AA guns can be photographed from 30,000 ft and targeted for desctruction.
Just imagine if all the ordnance dumped on cities randomly was aimed at AA batteries.
There should have an an AIR WAR. Air-to-air combat. If there planes don’t come up to fight, they are destroyed on the ground. Their runways should have been bombed with the massive ordnance that was instead dropped on civilians.
Every day you keep doing sorties to flush out their air defences. Every AA action is reported back, and the next sorties go and destroy what was shooting. You keep doing this until nothing flies and nothing shoots at you. Then you have air supremecy.
Rather than fight their air force and finish it off, our leadership chose to fly above them beyond their reach and do area bombing - as if a valid goal of war is to lay waste to cities.
The whole “big bomber” design is not useful for hitting individual targets. It is designed for carpet bombing from altitude. It’s a weapon with that one use, area bombing. Because they do not fly around dropping one bomb at a time, they let the whole load go at once.
Think of how many P-51’s and dive bombers could have been manufactured if we never built any B-17’s or B-29’s. The B-25 was small enough do successful low-level targeted bombing.
That’s why the in reality the “race was on” to drop the atomic bombs before they surrendered.
The goal of the elites was to actually drop atomic bombs in wartime.
This created the “atomic age” of war.
If this was never done in war, nuclear weapons would be viewed as a crazy weapon that was not practical to use, as they simply wipes out civilian populations and thus are simply weapons with which to induce terror into the minds of civilians.
“Duck and cover”.
So you do wish we had lost the war. What a stupid concept, to think that we had the intel and targeting capability to attack successfully individual targets. But what of the indiscriminate fragmentation? That could kill 'innocents' as well.
AA guns can be photographed from 30,000 ft and targeted for desctruction.
With what in WWII? Our satellites? AA was and is mobile, no ongoing intel/comm pictures a few hours old are useless considering the CEP of the weapon systems of that era.
Every day you keep doing sorties to flush out their air defences. Every AA action is reported back, and the next sorties go and destroy what was shooting. You keep doing this until nothing flies and nothing shoots at you. Then you have air supremecy.
What are you, ten? You have all this regard for the civilians of Japan, but obviously none for American airmen. No way to communicate those positions for the 'second' strike. You have no concept of what WWII was about tactically, you continue to embarrass yourself for the sake of your Just War theory. Just argue that, leave aviation, targeting, intel, communications, and any other defense related topic off the table.
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