trexx wrote: |
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I have that book. A Torch to the Enemy: The Shattering story of US Air Power and the Fire Raids that Destroyed Japan, by Martin Caidin. My copy was printed in 1960.
The only way to disarm the Japanese military complex, which was comprised of not only giant factories, but hundreds or even thousands of mom and pop shops intermixed around cities, neighborhoods, and outlying areas, was to bomb the whole place to smithereens. Fire bombing was the most effective way to accomplish this. Yes, it killed every one in sight but it smashed the manufacture of anything of military use.
If you want to talk about wanton fire bombing, let's talk about the 1945 Dresden raid, essentially Churchill's way to improve morale, that killed thousands of innocents. Some called it a 'British baby killing scheme.' American newspapers condemned the attack, saying that the USAAF had 'slid across the same moral threshold that the RAF did in 1942.' An ironic aftermath of this horrific episode came Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
Either way, war is a horrible thing. Wasn't it Robert E. Lee who remarked after Fredericksburg that 'it is well that war is so terrible or we should grow too fond of it.'
At the Montana Club in Helena, Montana, a building which predates WWII by some sixty years, the floor is covered in swastikas. In one of my history books, there is a picture of a women sitting in a waiting room of some New York City building with swastikas in the tile work. Swastikas are all over the place.