Re: Arthur T Harris

William Black wrote:
<mtfester@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:hjo50h$n4p$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Actually, the Pacific War was won by naval superiority; the bombs merely
hastened the surrender.

You mean they wouldn't have needed to invade Japan?

The nuclear bombs pushed Japan into surrender, but the war
was already lost for them.

Further, there's a difference between the effects of the
incendiaries and the nukes. The single most lethal
bombing attack was the March firebombing of Tokyo, and that
did not seem to affect Japanese deliberations any.

You are becoming irrational.

Please confine your attacks to people's arguments, and
you would do well to provide reasons when calling people's
arguments irrational.

The European War was won when Germany was invaded by the combined allied
armies.

True.
However a nuclear bomb on Berlin would have hastened the process.

Which had approximately nothing to do with what Harris was
doing. The USAAF and Bomber Command dropped a whole lot of
bombs without weakening the German will to resist. If
a nuke would have made Germany surrender, then there was a
good reason to drop a nuke. That doesn't apply to conventional
city bombing.

As we saw with Japan, the conventional bombing did not push
Japan into a surrender. It was the nukes. (There is a
school of thought, which I do not share, that what pushed
Japan into surrender was the Soviet offensives. If that
is true, then the Japanese surrender was not due to bombing
at all.)

--
David H. Thornley | If you want my opinion, ask.
david@xxxxxxxxxxxx | If you don't, flee.
http://www.thornley.net/~thornley/david/ | O-

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