When I was an undergrad studying history people would come up to me and ask about what I knew about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of them wouldn’t even let me speak before they went on about how many people were killed.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were awful, but they ended the war. I find it strange that few people know, or even understand how devastating Curtis LeMay’s firebombing campaign was against the Japanese people. I never got asked about that!
No one can agree on the exact number of people killed in the firebombing. Estimates vary from one million on the low side to two million people killed. LeMay believed that firebombing would force the Japanese to surrender and that there would be no need for an atomic bomb and no need for an invasion of main land Japan. He was mistaken.
The Japanese had managed to stockpile some 13,000 combat aircraft hidden away in caves. They produced enough low-grade synthetic fuel to allow each plane a one-way suicidal trip. There were thousands of suicide boats packed with explosives ready to strike any attempted Allied landing. Japanese civilians were conditioned to believe that the Allies would kill them all. Women were given sharpened sticks that had been dipped in poison so they could jab US Marines. Millions would have died.
Two cities were destroyed when the atomic bombs were dropped and hundreds of thousands of people died and many more would feel the horrific effects for generations to come. Take this into perspective, ten times as many people died in the firebombing attacks than died in both of the atomic explosions. There was no moral debate, or even general awareness about the use of firebombing, yet we constantly debate “dropping the bomb” and the lives lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It irritates me.
