“...this is the one subject where I have referred to Christian teaching to demonstrate that the United States, on a moral plane, fell short. Targeting innocents isn’t wrong because I’ve said it was wrong...we were going to burn Japan to the ground to win the war, and we knew it before we fired the first shot.” [Captain Walker, post 149]
You labor under the misconception that belief trumps reality. Assures you a rhetorical win, at no cost, while you cling to a hypothesis that cannot be falsified.
Do you also labor under the misconception that the Allies won the Second World War by dint of superior morality?
Your final sentence is both factually and historically wrong.
Senior USAAF personnel worked long and hard to prove their thesis that air bombardment of enemy “civilian” workers and industrial facilities would affect a conflict’s outcome. They made come true in many instances, but with the limits on surveillance and other intelligence sources, this wasn’t apparent at the time. Not until the 1980s did it become known that Nazi industrial production of some commodities and components was so profoundly affected that reserve stocking levels dwindled to a few days. Morale among the industrial labor force stood on the brink more than once.
The strategic air campaign against Japan ran into different problems. Certain weather factors were found to exceed limits of adjustment in sighting systems: production had been disaggregated to such levels that individual residences were equipped with machine tools.
These target characteristics greatly compounded difficulties in obtaining results. Large-scale raids using incendiary munitions was a response. But incendiaries were not chosen beforehand.
Messy? Yes. Brutal? Yes. If that troubles you, it can only mean that you prefer the deaths of Allied troops to the deaths of Imperial Japanese troops and Japanese civilians.
I cannot accept such a tradeoff as a moral outcome. Why do you?
I hate to break it to you, my friend, because I feel like I'm telling some kid that there's no Santa Claus, but this statement is simply not true.
Look up "JB-355"; spend a few minutes reading about it.
As I said before, Chennault, as head of the Flying Tigers, was pushing Roosevelt for B-17s to be used to drop incendiaries on Japanese cities as early as the summer of 1941. ("JB-355" was the resolution FDR signed in July of 1941 that gave the green light to Chennault's request; it's the reason that the B-17s were in the Philippines on 8 December 1941, and it's the reason the Japanese destroyed them.)
Chennault: "A small number of long-range bombers carrying incendiary bombs could quickly reduce Japan's paper-and-matchwood cities to heaps of smoking ashes."
General George C. Marshall, before the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor: "If war with the Japanese does come, we’ll fight mercilessly," General George C. Marshall told news reporters in an off-the-record briefing on November 15, 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor. "Flying Fortresses will be dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians—it will be all-out."
Again, Dolittle's men dropped incendiaries on Tokyo in early 1942.
I've provided sources for this information; LeMay himself acknowledged that he would have been tried for war crimes in the event the Japanese were to win the war.
The following article (which I linked to in a previous post) describes "Operation Meetinghouse"; this was the raid on Tokyo in March of 1945:
In this article is a map of the city of Tokyo that was prepared by the U.S. Army Engineers; the map identifies sections of the city by their level of inflammability. (It didn't identify military targets; it identified the different areas of the capital by how well they would burn.)
The map was prepared in 1942, 2-3 years before the bombing campaign began.
On a side note, none of this troubles me; I wasn't around when any of this was going on and I'm young enough so that my understanding of the war didn't come from a father (or uncle) who had served in it. Because of this, I have no more of an emotional attachment to this conflict than I do to the War of 1812. (And because of this, I have no problem looking at this objectively.)