I don't question that bombing civilians was not included in our written strategic doctrine any more that it was part of Britain's. I doubt that collateral damage was a major concern in Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, or Tokyo. Nor should it have been. Mass warfare has made civilians a legitimate target as part of the destruction of the enemy and the will and capacity to fight. When your very survival as a nation is at stake, you will do whatever is necessary to win.
The real problem was even with the Norden bombsight our bombers were so inaccurate that our own troops called the Eighth Air Force the “Eighth Luftwaffe.” Bitter battles were fought between US officers who did NOT want to use blanket civilian bombing and the British who did.
Putting aside for a moment the issue of technology, the Brits and the Russians for that matter had a far different perspective on the war than we had. We didn't as a nation experience the full weight of the German war machine. More than 20 million Russians lost their lives. The Brits experienced the blitz and V-2 rocket attacks.
On the other hand, we had a far more visceral feeling about the Japanese due to their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The brutal treatment of American POWs by the Japanese, the fierce resistance we experienced during our march to Tokyo, and the the significant damage their kamikaze attacks did against our naval forces, especially off of Okinawa made the decision to fire bomb Tokyo and drop two atomic bombs as a logical consequence to minimize American deaths, including those of my father and his four brothers who were serving from Anzio to Tarawa. For HST, it was a fairly easy decision. I have visited ground zero in Nagasaki and went to the museum there showing the extent of the destruction including human bones fused into stones.
Citing ANYTHING in Japan is meaningless because LeMay concluded that all Japanese industry ad been dispersed through the cities and there was no other way to get at it. But even in Tokyo, we went out of the way to avoid hitting the imperial palace.
The reason for that was twofold. We understood the role the Emperor played in Japanese culture and how important it would be after the war was concluded. We used napalm because we knew how devastating it could be given the construction of Japanese homes and other structures.
All a-bomb targets, unless you are named Lou Ayers or Howard Zinn, were prioritized on the basis of military value, not numbers of civilians killed. For the second time, I can give you any number of sources. Start with Michael Sherry.
Maybe I have not been clear about where I am coming from. Trump was asked last night about his strategy to target the families of ISIS and other terrorists. However, inartful Trump's response was, I agree that we should go after the terrorists even if it means killing some of their family members who may be at their side. Our ROE have handcuffed our troops fighting the war and placed them at greater risk. As a veteran, I find that immoral.
My wife is German. She was born during the war and lived there the difficult postwar period that saw the major cities of the country destroyed and the creation of East Germany. Her father was killed on the Eastern front, several of her uncles were killed on the Western front. One of her uncles was captured by the Russians and never returned. I lived four years in West Berlin. My German secretary was in Berlin during the Russian attacks on the city. It took almost a week for the Russians to take down the Reichstag. German women were raped and killed by the Russians. Young German teenagers were recruited to fight. I also lived a couple years in Warsaw and heard similar tales about the treatment of Poles by Germans and the Russians.
I served in Vietnam as a naval officer, a year in-country including during the Tet offensive and off the coast on an LPH that had a battalion of Marines on board who attacked the enemy via vertical envelopment using helicopters. We had a full surgical team on-board to treat the many casualties. Vietnam was the epitome of a war micromanaged by the political class. We tried to minimize civilian casualties even at the expense of American lives. We used to drop leaflets warning villagers of impending action by troops and shelling.
As I have posted elsewhere, we have created the illusion that we can fight antiseptic wars where only the bad guys get killed using our technology. And the politicians are more inclined to risk American lives to avoid collateral damage. It is a luxury that only a superior military power, which views the enemy as no real threat to its survival, can fight.
In Iraq and Syria we have constrained our forces. We didn't bomb the oil installations until only recently because the Russians started to do it. The reason we didn't, as stated by the Pentagon, was to avoid environmental damage and to preserve the infrastructure for Syria when it finally has a democratic government. We didn't even bomb the oil tankers taking the oil to Jordan and Turkey, preferring to buzz the tankers and not kill the drivers.
I will leave the discussion of the A-bomb attacks to another time. It is something that I have looked at in detail. Suffice it to say, I agree completely with HST's decision to do it and the US owes no one an apology. It saved lives, American and Japanese. It also provided the world with empirical evidence of the power of nuclear weapons and the dangers they portend the for future. It is a threshold that has not been crossed since.
We agree, I am just trying to differentiate the nature of a strategic, official decision and a general view of, “well, if civilians get hurt, so what?”
The difference with ISIS is, for the most part, the families are intigral to supporing the terror. They know what’s going on, they approve. This is a lot different than taking out all of, say, Cairo tying to kill 10 ISIS guys.
I apprecicate the differentce between our experience and the Brits (not to mention the Russians). Again, though, my point was that the USAAF deliberately rejected the “carpet bombing” approach-—but tacitly understood it was part of the overall bombing campaign cause the Brits were doing to do it.
I think a more interesting question would be “if we had the technology to surgically bomb Germany, would we have used it?”
I also support Harry Truman’s decision and have my classes read two different articles challenging the “low casualty” rates argued by Bernstein and other anti-a-bomb guys.