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.
There is no way we could have carpet bombed Japan right after Pearl Harbor.
One of the most daring exploits of the war (the Doolittle Raid) took a huge amount of planning and risk just to drop a few dozen 500 lb bombs on mainland Japan.
There were a lot of lives lost, blood shed, and dollars spent to get to the point we were able to carpet bomb them.
Yes, we devastated nearly all of the 50 or so largest Japanese cities with “conventional” bombing before we did the 2 atomic bomb strikes. In face, we barely had adequate urban targets left to show the Japanese military and govt the power of the atomic bombs, yet Japan still would not surrender until after Nagasaki. But there was little capability for bombing Japan until 1944-45.
great point
while the doolittle raid had very little actual military impact, the psychological impact was incredible. It did indeed force them to make quicker decisions to consolidate their gains up to that time, and prompted them to make the decision to take Midway.
Some say that midway was the turning point....I tend to disagree with that. Personally, I think the turning point was the struggle for Guadalcanal, and the subsequent loss of their position in the southern Solomons.
just my .02, of course...
They used B-25's.
Which is why they used incendiaries.
Arguably the big benefit of the Doolittle Raid was to lead the Japanese Navy into what proved to be a trap for them at the Battle of Midway (because we had broken their naval code). But a series of Doolittle type raids would have been extremely risky and expensive, with rapidly diminishing returns, and probably would have cost us our carriers. No, we had to develop the B-29 and capture the Marianas in order to make major strikes against Japan, and that took until 1944.
How could we have “carpet-bombed” Japan? On the day the war began, we had only about 300 heavy bombers in service, and many of these were obsolete B-18’s and early-model B-17’s, which weren’t much better. And our closest air base to Japan was in the Philippines, which would have left most of the Empire beyond the range of our planes.
That was a Democrat controlled Congress that made us incapable of backing up our end of things to guarantee the protection of the South.
I don’t doubt for a single second that there were Democrat politicians who were communicating through back channels that if they invaded the South, there was no way we were going to even commit to bombing, so 1975 was a foregone conclusion.
The deal was okay as far as it went. I give Nixon credit for allowing our forces to finally bomb Hanoi, Haiphong, and other areas in the North to force the issue.
Linebacker II was one of the most sensible and effective campaigns of that war.
It does not necessarily destroy moral and weaken resolve and may infact stiffen resolve
People who have lost everything have little to lose
It's called "Military Deterrence."
And how were we supposed to get there to carpet bomb them after Pearl Harbor? Migrating coconuts?
I have worked with the Japanese and I have yet to find a single one who is not trustworthy, kind and caring. So carpet bombing them is a repulsive idea.
You can carpet bomb their politicians though.
If we could have, we would have at that point in time.
It took us a few years, but we finally put a stop to it. And in the end, it only took two bombs to get their undivided attention.
Eventually, we did.
My dad was on Bataan, did the Death March and four years in the Jap death camps.
His brother, Uncle Bill, was cutting beryllium in Los Alamos.
His brother, Uncle Kevin, was in L.A. building bombers.
His third brother, Uncle Marvin, was in the Seabees building airfields in the Pacific, so that bombers could reach Japan and drop the bombs that finally freed their brother.
I have flown over Tinian a couple of times. Some years ago, you could still see the runways. I thank God for that concrete and my Uncles and the thousands like them.
The limited bombing by Doolittle’s Raiders succeeded in spooking the Japs. They realized they needed to pull back some of their forces to protect the mainland. It was a huge success, for lifting the American spirits as well.
They would not have marched into Saigon had Congress not cut off all military aid to South Vietnam and had not the Watergate scandal paralyzed the Nixon Administration and elevated the limp-wristed Gerald Ford to the presidency.
We firebombed Tokyo. Killed 1/2 million people.
Yes. The Japanese poured a huge amount of men, machinery, ships, aircraft, and supplies into the Solomon Islands Campaign in what turned out to be a losing battle for them.
They were so fanatical that they had to lie to their own men when they finally decided to cut their losses and leave, because many may have simply refused to go. And that is saying a lot about their fanaticism, given in what horrible shape the remaining troops were in at that point.
I believe that is the last time in the Pacific war they extended that consideration to their ground troops (pulling them out) As the war progressed, perhaps that wasn’t even an option for them later on.
The Solomon Island Campaign was massively huge on its scale, and was one of the first battles of that scale to involve land, sea, and air combat all at the same time for the same territory.
What you are imagining was a complete physical impossibility, plain and simple, on many levels.
We did not have a means of bomb delivery at that distance. We did not have airplanes that could deliver more than a couple (2) tons of bombs before mid-war, at *any* distance, never mind 4000 miles away. We didn’t have quantities of even those airplanes until early mid-war. Before the Norden bombsight nominal bomb accuracy was upwards of 500 feet, on a good day. The Norden got it down to under 100 feet.
Don’t forget the US entered WW2 really at the tail end of the not-especially-ended Great Depression and was ridiculously, pathetically underarmed.
We did not have accurate bombsighting
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