[Iris7]

Sorry, wrong. The nuclear weapons were pivotal. Read Okumiya.

Lived in Japan soon after the war when I was a youngster. I was at a very impressionable age. Picked up a lot from normal social relationships with the Japanese. The war was a very fresh Japanese memory in those days. You could drive from Tokyo to Yokohama and pass rubble fields without interruption for nearly a half hour.

The nuclear bombing had a hundred times more impact on the "Japanese psyche" than LeMay's firestorm that had made those rubble fields I saw. Views to the contrary view are incorrect.

The "liberals" of the era loved the Strategic Bombing Survey, done entirely by "liberal" academics, that purported to show that strategic bombing was ineffective and that the nuclear bombing was even less effective than that. I do not know why the Strategic Bombing Survey people wrote what they did nor whether we are looking at nonfeasance or at malfeasance. I would say self deception and lies.

[LS]

Nuclear weapons were very effective, esp. at pushing Japan over the edge. It's also true that militarily Japan was finished, and that a conventional bombing campaign, if we had not had the bomb and chosen NOT to invade, would have done the trick over time.

The issue was patience: Americans were running out of it. Already there was resistance by soldiers who had fought in Europe to transfer, and as Stephen Ambrose noted in his "Band of Brothers," at the end, based on the medal and point system, men who had never been interested in medals suddenly thought about them a lot.

Without question, the bomb saved an enormous amount of lives---ours, but some Japanese too. But the final outcome was not in doubt after Leyte, or, perhaps, Midway.

[LS]

BTW, I address the whole Strategic Bombing Survey in "America's Victories: Why Americans Win Wars . . ." and largely the analysts were far too narrow in their investigation. They asked, "Did the bombing stop German war production?" No, it increased. But what they missed was that the bombers themselves acted like giant roach motels, sucking up the Luftwaffe into air combat (later, un-winnable air combat due to long-range fighter escorts) that "attrited" the Luftwaffe down to nothing. Some 30% of German WAR PRODUCTION was directed at anti-bombing in the WEST, a fact that by itself means that the Battle of Kursk easily could have gone to the Germans without our bombers hundreds of miles away. The Strategic Bombing analysts were looking for evidence we destroyed the Luftwaffe on the ground. Their eyes were too low: we destroyed it in the air.