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.
First we had to secure air bases within range of the bombers that were state-of-the-art then. That’s why we couldn’t just bypass all those islands.
From the secret base...
No. It may have made them consolidate their conquests and dig in quicker. IOW go on the defense.
It’s kinda interesting how fast tech was advancing in the day. It wasn’t long after the war that we could have bombed Japan with bombers launched from the US mainland using b-36’s, with massive bomb loads. And the Japanese fighters couldn’t have touched them.
Something like that would take naval and air superiority we had yet to establish. After all, we never DID invade Japan; we MERELY established that sort of naval and air superiority. In the meanwhile, we did engage in the sort of bombing that mere raids afforded us, beginning in April, 1942. Once the B-29s made it feasible, we bombed far more systematically in 1944.
Following the Sneak attack by the Japanese Navy the United States didn’t have the capability to mount offensive Strategic Air operations againts the Japanese mainland.
We were lucky to have the People who were willing to risk flying medium bombers off of an aircraft carrier. The planes B-24 Liberators were not designed for carrier use and didn’t have the range or the capability to return to the carrier following their mission.
The U.S. didn’t get the capability until the B-29 was brought online and then we were able to bring the whirlwind to Japan.
correct answer
Jap cities were indeed carpet-bombed as the possibilities became realized. An early March 1945 fire bomb attack on Tokyo arguably killed more people than either atomic bomb attacks.
What if FDR has a B-52?
Stupid question. We burned down Toyo and then it took an additional TWO ATOMIC BOMBS to get the Japs to surrender.
We did not have the capability at the time or we would have.......................
We had no capability to bomb Japan more heavily than something like the Doolittle Raid before 1944. There was no possibility of “carpet bombing” Japanese cities in 1942. We got there about as fast as we could. The long range of the B-29s was required, plus island airbases in the Marianas, and we did not have those until 1944.
p.s. We couldn’t reasonably fly more Doolittle type raids from carriers because (1) the risk to the carriers was enormous and it was a one-time mission (B-25s couldn’t come back and land on carriers, they had to fly to a land base); (2) after the initial surprise of the Doolittle Raid the Japanese were much better prepared to defend against such raids; (3) flying 16 B-25s at a time, once in a long while, is not any kind of “carpet bombing” — the military significance would have been inconsequential. The Doolittle Raid was great for shaking the Japanese psyche, making them devote more resources to defend their home islands, and probably helping lead their navy into the attempt to take the island of Midway (to complete their arc of island-based surveillance). But a series of Doolittle type raids going forward would have been much too expensive and too risky for too little military return.
We had bombed the crap out of Japanese cities prior to dropping the nukes. 100K died in Tokyo from one bombing run with incindiaries.
It worked out quite well. Eleven days of B-52 raids over North Vietnam in December, 1972 finally brought the North Vietnamese around to signing a peace agreement.
It was all those wooden houses that burned up.
Yes, operations Linebacker II and Rolling Thunder among others. There were severe restrictions placed on the Air Force as to what and when they could bomb for fear of Soviet/Chinese response. This would not have been the case after Pearl Harbor. Our own logistics to carry this out (as other responses have noted) aside, Russia by then had already been turned on by Germany and China hated the Japanese. Neither Germany nor it’s allies had the logisitical ability to come to Japan’s defense.
Impossible.
We had neither the aircraft nor airfields close enough.
Some peace agreement. Three years later, they marched into Saigon.
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