It is certainly a widespread belief, then and now. There have always been those who disagreed, including Ike, George Marshall, Wm. Leahy, Curtis LeMay and IIRC Nimitz and MacArthur.
There have always been those who disagreed, including Ike, George Marshall, Wm. Leahy, Curtis LeMay and IIRC Nimitz and MacArthur.
I have never heard that, please give some specific links that shows your claim to be true. Thanks.
“...There have always been those who disagreed, including Ike, George Marshall, Wm. Leahy, Curtis LeMay and IIRC Nimitz and MacArthur. [Stingray51, post 37]
Bunches of senior officers voiced no opposition at the time, to employment of atomic bombs in action.
Cutesily, they only began voicing “moral” concerns after the war, when it became evident that the nation’s self-appointed moral arbiters and other members of the chattering class were making headway in their efforts to shift public opinion against the military establishment and nuclear weapons (today, they’ve pretty much succeeded). Every man on your list was politically sensitive to the whims of the public - they could never have risen so high had they lacked savvy.
There has also been the longstanding problem of interservice rivalry.
US Army and US Navy and their apologists/advocates have been competing since before the Constitution was ratified. Squabbles altered and intensified after 1926, when the Army Air Corps was created - hostility refocused on air power, which had already become more than mere potential during the First World War, and which was foreseen as soon to be decisive.
World War Two proved the predictions of air power advocates. Interservice squabbles did not let up during American participation and indeed reached new levels of hostility.
It came to a head after air attacks on Japan’s Home Islands induced the Imperial Japanese to capitulate without suffering invasion; in effect, proponents of the Army and the Navy could never forgive the Army Air Forces (by 1945 a separate armed service in all but name) for winning the war before they had a chance to win yet-greater glory.
Anyone inclined to doubt these conclusions ought to study up on disputes occurring after the Marianas were retaken in 1944. Tawdry, petty, and borderline violent.
Further insults to the preconceptions of traditionalists happened soon after 1945, when USAF became a separate service and a unified Department of Defense was established. USN resisted in a prolonged and vigorous fashion, refusing to concede the obvious as late as the 1960s, sometimes in obscure and arcane ways.
The elder branches clung tightly to their self-righteous backward-looking worldviews, insisting that their domination of two-dimensional environments was superior to domination of the only environment containing three dimensions. USAF had become the first line of national security and an indispensable arm of support for everything the senior services were doing, or hoped to do.
In reality, no single armed service can succeed without the others. Joint and Combined operations are the only way to proceed; that was officially conceded in 1947, but apologists for “pure” operations within their own pet areas of expertise & control still refuse to accept it.