True but the Japanese engineers were brilliant and working feverishly on the project but the nukes ended everything before it got rolling.
Posted on 04/20/2018 9:55:26 AM PDT by ExpatCanuck
Just wondering if that would have put a halt to the Japanese aggression and given them a sense of what they were up against and what we were willing to do. Could it have saved thousands of American lives in the South Pacific? As an alternative history buff I’m curious about the opinions here.
A big problem the Japanese had was that their fighters, especially early in the war were too lightly armed.
The A6M2 Zero had a pair of 20mm cannons and 2 rifle caliber machine guns and had great difficulty with the American 4 engine bombers.
The effective range of the 20mm on the Zero with it's short barrel was well within the effective range of the Browning .50.
Exactly.
The best example of carpet bombing was the breakout from Normandy. Carpet bombing is intense, close, tight bombing in a limited area. Think of it as every bomber in the air dropping their bombs along a 20 mile road and not going off the pavement.
Dresden was not carpet bombs. Berlin was not carpet bombed.
As you can imagine the carpet bombing process takes a ton of resources and you are dropping bombs on a lot of ground that doesn’t need to be bombed.
We certainly did not carpet bomb Japan. We certainly fire bombed the bejezus out of them.
But, it took us a long time to get the bombers close enough to even fire bomb.
With what? From where?
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The absolutely best response.
LOL! Stop coconut violence!!
Now if we had retained control of the Philippines it would have been a different story. Which is why they moved quickly to gain control over every speck of land that was within bombing range of the home islands.
The Japanese were brutal and ruthless but they were not stupid.
What if we had KEPT what we conquered?? No- we fix up enemy nations and feed them. At least Japan seems to have learned it’s lesson. IMO if Americans fight and die for it, it should be OURS.
“And the Japanese fighters couldn’t have touched them.”
At the tail end of the war, the Japanese had a very sophisticated and technologically advanced jet fighter program underway. It was at least on a par with the ME 262 and would have given Japan air superiority. But like Germany, too little and too late.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakajima_Kikka
The Kikka was even slower than some late war US fighters.
And they had no pilots left even for that.
Correction, should have read what I was going to post first. It should have said:
After reading your link, I’m left with the impression, in terms of what strategic targets were destroyed, Gen. LeMay knowing how to effectively use his B-29’s made him one of the greatest warfighters the US, or any other nation, has ever produced. They basically shut down Japan’s war fighting ability.
I watched the old movie of H.G. Wells called “Things to Come”. From 1936 - Hitler had just had the night of long knives, pulled out of the League of Nations and rebuilding his army in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
The movie starts out as “Anytown” goes about it’s lives. Then the blitz rains down on them. It then fast forward with images of war and gas and bombs (1937, so it is pretty lousy special effects compared to now - but it tells a good story). As it fast-forwards the years tick by. 1936, 1937, 1940, 1945, 1950, 1960, 1966. The war is over and Anytown and the world is in ruins.
I thought - “H.G. Wells got a lot of things right in his future - but he didn’t see nuclear bombs. Ended the war quickly - and kept another one from beginning.”
Although I guess it didn’t take the nuke to beat Hitler, so over time we would have beat the Japs too. Or the Soviets would have. I’m guessing that if the Soviets had Japan that would have changed a lot of things.
No fig leaf. We essentially won the war, with most of the South Vietnamese population and all of the provincial capitals under Saigon's control at the time the peace agreement was signed.
The Army was testing out bats (the animal - not divert their attention with baseball) with timed incendiary devices. Drop 100 bats in a “bomb” that opens up at 100-feet. When day comes the bats find a house or eaves to sleep in. Then the bat-bomb goes off and lights the house on fire. With 1000 bats causing spreading fires.
During testing, things went awry and some bats got loose, went inside a hanger, and burned it down. They shortly thereafter abandoned the idea. Seems to me that was sort-of proof that it would work!
True but the Japanese engineers were brilliant and working feverishly on the project but the nukes ended everything before it got rolling.
You got brilliant right, they put a working copy of the BMW003 jet engine on it working from nothing but a cut away drawing from the Germans.
They had no fuel or pilots for it though.
I am of the opinion the Dolittle raid would have been more effective had the strategy been to firebomb the population centers than to hit the industrial production centers.
The US military had no capability to do so at the time. That's why the Doolittle raid was so important, but it was a one way trip for all the planes and several of the crews.
late in the war, when the U.S. finally had the resources in place to flatten Japan with repeated carpet bombing so intense that the bombing was doing little more more than just bouncing the rubble throughout the industrial and civilian regions, Japan wouldn’t consider surrendering, even though they had already lost their entire navy, nearly all of their aircraft, nearly all of their trained pilots, all of their offshore armies, and all of their conquered territories and the vital resources therein.
Japan did not even consider surrendering after the first atomic bomb was dropped. And after the second atomic bomb was dropped, they took a week before finally deciding to surrender.
Does that answer your question?
The counterfactual has been discussed with nukes already.
I don’t believe that the massacre by fire of hundreds of thousands of Japanese women and children would have been accepted by our people in December 1941, and probably not in December 1942, either.
After news of atrocities in combat became widely known, and after many unexpected Japanese victories, the people’s mood shifted in a way to make the B-29 campaigns possible.
“The reason the ones you met are so nice are because they utterly got their asses handed to them as wages of their prior cruelty and finally learned their lesson.”
But I totally disagree they “had their asses handed to them” (except for the total war defeat). On the contrary, the priority of the governorship of MacArthur had been to treat the post war Japanese with kid gloves, to not humiliate them to avoid repeating a situation like post WWI Germany where hurt feelings led to rising nationalism. For example Japanese textbooks were allowed even up until now to never mention the imperial Japanese atrocities.
So no, if the Japanese are (seem ?) nice and decent, it’s NOT because they were taught that over one or two generations (who could believe that, except leftist social engineering fanatics???). It’s just because they are fundamentally so.
According to my Dad, who set up one of the first radar units on Iwo Jima on D+2, a landing base for crippled B29s was actually a secondary reason for seizing the island.
The primary reason, according to my Dad, was to provide fighter escorts for B-29s. Fighters, of course, had a much smaller flight range than the B-29s, which took off from more distant islands.
Also, Iwo Jima (specifically Mt. Suribachi), when held by the Japanese, was used as an early warning radar outpost against B-29 bombing attacks on mainland Japan.
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