“Conventional bombing increased Japanese resistance. The reason nukes are effective is the shock effect where as bombing raids don’t carry nearly that level of shock.”
Every reading of Japanese people of that era holds that the firebombing of Tokyo shocked them more than the atomic bombings. Conventional B-29 bombing of Japan didn’t increase Japanese resistance. They were weakened in spirit and knew the end was coming. That nation was falling into despair from the B-29s roaming with near impunity and with the USN Battleships and carriers pounding the home islands at will.
This revisionism is everywhere that the 8th air force bombings had no effect on Germany, that the japan firebombings did no real good, that we could have bypassed the Philippines, New Guinea, Iwo Jima, etc.
The truth is all of those things hurt them, and hurt them badly.
My readings concur. The B-29 raids really impacted the Japanese. There was very little defense against them. Their war production had plummeted as had their food production. If we’d wanted to we could have starved them to death. Imagine how history would play that in today’s pc world.
That’s laughable. Japanese resistance intensified right to the very end of the war and in Germany Gobels admitted in his own diaries that the destruction of German cities increased troop resolve and war output, a view also afirmed by miltary commanders like Hans Von Luck in his book panzer commander.
Did London lose hope during the Blitz? The people gained resolve and fought harder. How about during the V2 raids?
Terror bombing advocates were convinced that it would work if only they could murder on an ever increasing scale and they refused to examine data that showed that thier butchery was ineffective.