What do you think we did on the Continent ?
There was AA all over and Luftwaffe all over.
We just kept chipping away at them. Everyone knew that it was game over.
However, instead of focusing exclusively on AA and Luftwaffe, we diverted enormous materiel and effort into bombing other things.
If we had made it the first order of business to finish off the Luftwaffe, the skies would be ours to support our ground troops.
Same thing would have worked against Japan.
That’s why that is the way we do things nowadays.
It works.
We would never ever today send in divisions of ground forces, leaving them very exposed to air attack, with significant numbers of enemy aircraft in the area and our air forces still trying to win the airspace.
We win the airspace first. If it flies, it dies.
Different gear, different era.
Never had that supremacy over Japan. The enemy always gets a say in strategy. The ground forces would have been protected, the Japs would have went after the fleet, which we would have protected. Just like Okinawa, but now the Japs had a shorter distance to fly. How many Americans would you have sacrificed to not use the bomb?
“What do you think we did on the Continent?
There was AA all over and Luftwaffe all over.”
This would be news to my 94 yr old father. The anti-aircraft battalion he belonged to spent their time on the Continent firing at German infantry and armor because there wasn’t any Luftwaffe to keep them occupied. There had been some Luftwaffe raids when they were on Sicily and Corsica but not much on the Continent.
You don’t see film footage of Luftwaffe attacks on American military columns in France or Germany. You don’t see any portrayed in films like Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. The Luftwaffe spent its resources trying to keep our bombers out of Germany. They did very little in the way of ground support.