Skashion said:We could have though. Using Mosquitos and fighter-bombers like the Typhoon and the Tempest, the Hurricane was pretty decent with 40mms on as well, we used precision bombing to strike military targets. A review of effectiveness at the end of the war concluded the efficiency of the precision bombers like the Mosquito was far far higher than area bombers like the Lancaster. We did not need to area bomb and the Americans needn't have dropped the atomic bombs or bombed Japan to the extent it did. Innocent people died for no good reason.stony said:By and large I agree with you. No child deserves that, whatever it's colour or creed. But they were different times. You couldn't fight the Nazis by playing fair and you certainly couldn't fight the Japanese by playing fair.
The Japanese were a warrior nation, they despised weakness, which is why they treated our POW's so poorly. In their eyes anyone who surrendered was less than a man, that's why they didn't treat them like men. You can't fight a nation with a mindset like that by playing fair and you can't judge the people who had to fight them by todays standards.
The Japanese got off lightly, very lightly for the atrocities they carried out for the sake of conquest and expansionism.
We were defending ourselves, they were hell bent on conquest. You can't start complaining if you kick a dog and it bites you.
By that stage of the war we had lost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, the figures are still being argued about. Everyone was tired of fighting. If we shortened the war by only a day and saved just 1 allied life then for me it was worth it.
They were the aggressors, hell bent on carving themselves an empire. We were only trying to hold onto what we already had.
Would they have hesitated using an A bomb against us ? Not in the slightest.