(June 19, 2018 at 4:13 pm)Huggy74 Wrote:(June 19, 2018 at 3:46 pm)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were Prefect capitals and military command centers, as well as munitions production centers. The special torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor were made at Nagasaki. One of the bombs went off directly over 5,000 troops lined up for morning parade. As for civilians, the Japanese War Minister had declared all adult Japanese to be part of the armed forces. The government also moved munitions production into the family homes to decentralize that work. We responded by decentralizing our bombing.
The bombs did cause the War Minister, Gen. Anami, to go from the hardline faction in the Big Six to the surrender faction. This made the vote 3-3 and caused the cabinet to have to tell the Emperor they had no recommendation on how to proceed with the war. Hirohito made the call to surrender.
Who were the fire bombings aimed at?
What they were aimed at and what they hit are two different things.
What they were aimed at officially was supposed light industry scattered around the area.
But we knew what we were doing.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-hist...g-of-tokyo
Quote: Should they land within Japanese territory, they could only expect the very worst treatment by civilians, as the mission that night was going to entail the deaths of tens of thousands of those very same civilians. “You’re going to deliver the biggest firecracker the Japanese have ever seen,” said U.S. Gen. Curtis LeMay.
The cluster bombing of the downtown Tokyo suburb of Shitamachi had been approved only a few hours earlier. Shitamachi was composed of roughly 750,000 people living in cramped quarters in wooden-frame buildings. Setting ablaze this “paper city” was a kind of experiment in the effects of firebombing; it would also destroy the light industries, called “shadow factories,” that produced prefabricated war materials destined for Japanese aircraft factories
Had we lost the war LeMay would have been hung.
We promoted him.
