Hiroshima and Nagasaki were at best 2nd rate, if not 3rd rate, targets. Curt LeMay had already taken care of everything else with B-29 incendiary raids. Most people don’t understand this.
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki were at best 2nd rate, if not 3rd rate, targets. Curt LeMay had already taken care of everything else with B-29 incendiary raids...” [FreedomPoster, post 20]
Partly the case.
XXI Bomber Command (the B-29 outfits flying from Guam, Saipan, and Tinian, under command Heywood Hansell, then Curtis LeMay after 20 January 1945) was not able to strike every possible target in the Japanese Home Islands. Hokkaido - northernmost of the four - and the northernmost part of Honshu were beyond the B-29’s combat radius.
The first area bombing campaign ended in June 1945; 40 percent of the urban areas of 66 of large Japanese cities were destroyed by the area attacks. General H H Arnold, chief of USAAF, approved a campaign against 25 smaller cities in June. At times, as much as 3/4 of the total XXI Bomber Command sortie count was directed against southerly targets in support of the invasion of Okinawa. Precision strikes against industrial and military targets never really ceased; the largest single air attack of the entire war was conducted on 1 August: 836 B-29s dropped 6145 tons of munitions on four cities.
In addition to direct air attacks on land targets, the B-29s air-dropped mines in Japanese coastal waterways and harbors. Beginning in late March 1945 and continuing past the end of June, the mining effort completely closed major harbors, disrupted domestic waterborne traffic, and accounted for 9.3 percent of all merchant-vessel losses during the war, at a greater rate and at less cost and risk than the US Navy’s submarine interdiction effort.
XXI Bomber Command was ordered not to strike certain cities. They were not told why; the real reason was that the cities were being reserved for the atomic strikes (assuming “the gadget” worked), and the Joint Targeting Group did not want the data to be adulterated by damage from earlier strikes. Hiroshima was on that list but I don’t recall the rest.
Carrier aircraft of US Navy did stage some attacks against coastal targets but these were minor. On their very best day, the Fleet’s airplanes acting all together could deliver 200 tons of bombs; an average day for the B-29s delivered 3000 to 3500 tons (note that “average” was a moving figure in this case: total delivery capability increased as more and more B-29 units arrived in theater, week after week). Also, the carrier aircraft lacked the range to strike far inland. And the USN carriers did not enter the Sea of Japan while the war lasted.
The US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that Imperial Japan would have surrendered by the end of 1945, due to the combined effects of the air raids and the naval blockades - without employing atomic bombs and without intervention by the USSR. This ex-post-facto “prediction” was seconded by some senior USAAF leaders, but was strongly opposed (perhaps not surprisingly) by some senior leaders of the other US armed services. Atomic strikes were condemned by ADM William Leahy in his memoirs.