***I suppose a few hundred incendiary missions could have been flown first...***
A couple of days after Nagasaki we did fly a mission with incendiaries over Japan and again killed tens of thousands but no one remembers that.
What gets the leftists upset is we used ONE plane with ONE bomb. If we had used 500 planes with conventional bombs and killed the same number nothing would have been said.
So true.
“...What gets the leftists upset is we used ONE plane with ONE bomb. If we had used 500 planes with conventional bombs and killed the same number nothing would have been said.”
RDdB hasn’t yet discovered the depth and ferocity of the Left’s opposition to this type of air power. They’ve joined in many protests against strategic bombardment of the pre-nuclear sort. A rallying point is the raids of February 1945 against Dresden (in which way more than 500 RAF and USAAF bombers dropped many thousands of bombs); it’s oft asserted that that German city had “no value as a military target”, but thirty seconds perusal of a map usually convinces honest observers otherwise.
They’ve consistently spoken against not only the mere existence of all nuclear weapons in the US armed forces, but against all air campaigns mounted by US forces, and against the acquisition of air-strike weapons systems.
Absurd enough, but in all of it they’ve been assisted by other military departments, who compete with aerial bombardment, for always scarce defense dollars. Not to mention various groups in the military and outside it, who have decided war is some sort of honorable contest, or macho posturing to see who’s toughest, sort of like a boxing match. They’ve made a fetish out of praise for the individual footsoldier, and utter phrases like “boots on the ground” as if it was a mantra. Now and then they take a break from activism and sit around congratulating themselves on their superior morality.