I understand your viewpoint. Curtis Lemay made his decision to use firebombs on Japanese cities almost out of desperation. His B-29s were trying to use European-style “precision” bombing (which killed quite enough civilians as it was, ask the residents of Dresden) but they were running into the jet stream over Japan, and the 200+ mph winds at altitude were shoving them miles off target.
The Army knew that Japanese cities were mostly wood and paper. Lemay took a gamble—that if he switched to incendiary bombs, flew the planes in at night, between 5,000 and 10,000 feet, and without any defensive gunners to allow for extra bombload, that he could do decisive damage to the Japanese industrial infrastructure and maybe, just maybe, cow them into surrender. He did the first, but not the second.
The fact is, if the Japanese had not been bloodied to the point that Emperor Hirohito finally had to say, “Enough,” to his advisors (and even then, most of them wanted to continue fighting!), there would have been a land invasion of Japan. Millions of American troops, facing off against millions of Japanese civilians ready to die for their Emperor. It would have been a bloodbath that dwarfed any cruelty seen on the Eastern Front. Japan as a nation, and maybe the Japanese as a people, would have been all but destroyed.
It’s a tough moral call. And it’s definitely worth noting that two of the most controversial figures in the Allied military after the war weren’t the colorful, famous ones like Patton and Montgomery—they were Curtis Lemay and Arthur “Bomber” Harris.
}:-)4
I believe that a great many collateral casualties would have been justified in order to utterly destroy the Japanese war machine. They had butchered God-knows how many multitutes of people (I hesitate to put a numerical figure on it, but it was astronomical) and it was solidly probable that they would continue to do more of the same.
Even so-called "precision bombing" was in no way precise in WWII. It is jaw-droppingly horrifying to contemplate the number of civilian casualties even from bonbing runs that were legitimately intended for military targets. And yet the civilian casualties were (1) not directly intentional, inasmuch as sincere efforts were made to minimize noncombatant deaths, (2)unavoidable in the course of knocking out port facilites, arms factories, massed troops, and (3)grimly but truly proportionate, inasmuch as the Japanese military was overtly genocidal.
Are such things justified? I say yes. Those kinds of civilian casualties are not directly intended, they are unavoidable, and they are proportionate. Those are the key moral categories in a grim business such as this. I am not a pacifist, and I can see this.
However what is morally corrupt about Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and Dresden and Hamburg etc.) is that apparently by this time, all such moral fixed points had been swept away.
There is every indication --- as far as I can see -- that the civilian casualties were fully elective and strategically intended. If by some fantasyland fluke, Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's 2nd General Army Headquarters and the military transshipment facilities had been obliterated, but the civilian population left untouched, the atomic bomb --- let's face it ---- would have been considered a vast disappointment.
The purpose was to make a dramatic and psychologically traumatizing flambeau of civilian flesh. Hiroshima as such was a military target only if you can also say that New York City as such is a military target.
That is not justified by any warrior's ethic. George Washington would not have done it. Lee would not have done it. It is a violation of US law, international law, and the UCMJ. It is against God's law. Only God can judge the individual heart, and may He do so mercifully. But as a policy, it is damnable.