We carpet bombed North Vietnam, how did that work out?
great point. I hate woulda-coulda-shoulda!
IF we had dropped the same tonnage in bowling balls, as we did bombs in NV, we’d have stopped them.
Bombs moved dirt and they moved it back.
They would never have been able to move bowling balls out of the way.
It worked out quite well. Eleven days of B-52 raids over North Vietnam in December, 1972 finally brought the North Vietnamese around to signing a peace agreement.
Yes, operations Linebacker II and Rolling Thunder among others. There were severe restrictions placed on the Air Force as to what and when they could bomb for fear of Soviet/Chinese response. This would not have been the case after Pearl Harbor. Our own logistics to carry this out (as other responses have noted) aside, Russia by then had already been turned on by Germany and China hated the Japanese. Neither Germany nor it’s allies had the logisitical ability to come to Japan’s defense.
We weren’t in any position to be able to do that immediately after Pearl Harbor.
The Doolittle Raid, however, showed that we WOULD do it and it slapped them in the face as to what was coming.
Would they have acted any differently? No, I don’t believe they would have.
My uncles fought those people across the islands in the Pacific; they would not surrender. They died instead.
Tokyo and other cities were firebombed, and they didn’t quit.
It took atomic weapons and the threat of complete extinction to bring them to their senses, and STILL some wanted to go to the bitter end.
We didn’t carpet bomb Hanoi.
Or Haiphong.
Granted I was just a youngster at the time, but that really baffled me why we weren’t flattening the Communist cities.
No we didn't. Long after the war, tourists to North Vietnam heard that the Vietnamese couldn't understand why our bombing campaign was so limited. They also secretly admited that they recognize the Americans intentionally avoided civilian casualties.
The huge majority of B-52 strikes that could be characterized as carpet bombing were in the South.