There was some compassion in their disposition, thpugh our strong propaganda had caused most of the American people to hate the Japanese.
Tokyo & the imperial city of Kyoto were specifically removed from the target list.
“thpugh our strong propaganda had caused most of the American people to hate the Japanese.“
Seeing tens of thousands of horribly wounded young men coming home to every town in America had something to do with it, too.
L
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen simply because they were intact, utterly not out of any form of compassion.
140,000 is less than the number killed in the napalm fire bombing of Tokyo-Yokohama a few months before the atomic bombs were used.
“... it is instructive to look at a map of where Nagasaki and Hiroshima are located. Both are at the very south of Honshu... as far away from the main population centers as they could be ...” [imardmd1, post 8]
There are no cities far from others in Japan, and there weren’t in 1945 either.
The 509CG crews had orders to deliver the atomic bombs by visual aiming only; on the strike mission of 9 August 1945 their primary target of Kokura was obscured by clouds. They flew on to Nagasaki, where they found more clouds; the bombardier managed a quick peek through the visual sighting system and dropped the weapon. Bockscar barely made it back to an Allied-held airfield on Okinawa: fuel trapped in an auxiliary tank curtailed their endurance.
The master targeting plan for B-29 strikes on Home Island cities was carefully arranged to spare some urban areas, but planners weren’t told why. The reason was to keep some targets undamaged, to test the limits of the destructive capacity of any weapon that the Manhattan Project might come up with.