Backroom Errata

[Montmorency]

Is there any truth to the story I've heard that a Japanophile in the US hierarchy specifically barred Kyoto from attack for its history?

Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, honeymooned in Kyoto and liked it. He was one of the architects/overseers of the Manhattan Project, and a prominent advocate of the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, as well as of MAD.

[Pannonian]

Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, honeymooned in Kyoto and liked it. He was one of the architects/overseers of the Manhattan Project, and a prominent advocate of the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, as well as of MAD.

So I didn't misremember the story. According to this, Stimson, who effectively had a veto whenever he chose to exercise it, wasn't a fan of mass bombing, and insistent on Kyoto being left alone.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

So I didn't misremember the story. According to this, Stimson, who effectively had a veto whenever he chose to exercise it, wasn't a fan of mass bombing, and insistent on Kyoto being left alone.

As I recall, there was some concern that firebombing Kyoto would end up killing the Emperor -- and they were NOT sure if that would help or hinder. After the island campaigns of 1942, 1943, and the first part of 1944, there was not a lot of "happy happy joy joy" about invading the home islands. We wanted a surrender.

[Montmorency]

Of course Nuclear Secrecy is the first stop on Hiroshima/Nagasaki historiography. I actually lifted the map above from one of the posts.

Wellerstein's collations are especially useful for the insights they offer on leadership psychology and epistemology. I wonder what Truman's awareness of the toll of the Korean War was.

[Strike For The South]

The Atomic bomb gets so much attention because it is not dozens of sorties with hundereds of planes dropping thousands of pounds of ordinance. It is one trip, one plane, and one bomb. It is much easier for the human mind to digest that kind of single snapshot of destruction rather than the logistical enormity that was the USAA in the final two years of the war.

The more depressing thing should be that the war machine kept rolling and that guys like LeMay and Macarthur advocated nukes in order to save lives.

[Hooahguy]

Something people often forget when discussing the atomic bombs is the fact that carpet bombing cities was the norm for the war and only much later did that sort of bombing raid become taboo. As my favorite history podcaster put it, it was logical insanity.

[Montmorency]

To be fair, carpet bombing was not a norm just like that, and strategic or terror bombing was pretty much universally condemned at the outset of the war. It developed over the course of the war in a series of accumulated escalations and path dependencies. The carpet bombing we know and love wasn't really mature until at least 1943. The systematic demolition of Japanese cities had hardly begun by the time Germany surrendered. The British and American air forces had some kind of unprecedented autonomy to sort things out for themselves during this war - and they had that institutional incentive to interpose their branch - and there may not have been much political oversight or understanding of what was actually happening, let alone popular consciousness of the issues.