This is a very strange assertion. The first strike by US land-based bombers against Japan wasn't attempted until June 15, 1944. In this raid, 68 B-29s based in China managed to hit a steel plant in Yawata on Kyushu with a single bomb. The last great carrier battle (the battle of the Philippine Sea) was concluded within a week of this. No effective attack by land-based bombers on Japan was made until December 18, 1944. By this time, most of the Imperial Japanese Navy and merchant marine were at the bottom of the ocean.Originally Posted by KrooK
The murder of several million Jews, many of whom were German citizens, had absolutely no military utility. Strategic bombing at least had the goal of destroying enemy manufacturing, transportation, and war material.Originally Posted by ShadesPanther
Daylight precision bombing was so costly that inaccurate night-time area bombing was adopted by the US in Europe, although daylight bombing was never completely abandoned. The choice was to attack at night and inflict large civilian casualties or not to attack at all.
It should be noted that this approach was also adopted with regard to non-German civilians in occupied Europe. Prior to the Normandy invasion, a plan for air attacks on transportation facilities in France (to slow the arrival of German reinforcements to the battle area) encountered difficulty because it was believed that the plan might cause 20,000-40,000 French civilian deaths. The objections were overruled by Churchill and Roosevelt; fortunately, no more than 12,000 frenchmen were killed.
By the time Tokyo was firebombed on the night of March 9-10, 1945, the city as a whole was considered the target, but destruction of industry remained the aim. This was still due in part to the continuing high cost of daylight bombing and inaccuracy of night attacks, but reinforced by the fact that Japanese manufacturing was remarkably decentralized. Curtis LeMay (I will stipulate he is not an objective party) wrote in his memoirs:
Other sources testify to the Japanese practice of farming out piece-part industrial tasks to individuals who performed them in their own homes, even before the war....I'll never forget Yokohama. That was what impressed me: drill presses. There they were, like a forest of scorched trees and stumps, growing up throughout that residential area. Flimsy construction all gone... everything burned down, or up, and drill presses standing like skeletons.
The bombing was an ugly thing, but it can be plausibly argued that it ended the war sooner and saved as many lives as it took. The same can not be said about killing the Jews.
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