What if we had dropped a half dozen of atomic bombs on them?
One is as likely as the other.
We were not able to strike Japan with that kind of force at that time. The Doolittle Raid resulted in the loss of all aircraft and most of the crews.
You try doing that on the scale necessary to "carpet bomb" and you will quickly run out of planes and crews.
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.