The people living in Hiroshima in 1945 were going to be killed by LeMay’s B-29s, atom bomb or no. This is indisputable. The only city the USAAF “saved” within its bombing range was Kyoto. The USAAF were sending missions to Japan in the hundreds of B-29s each; the only operational limit was their supply of firebombs coming from the factories.

And yet the Japanese refused our terms of surrender.

At one point, the enemy is going to surrender

yes, and in 1945 it took the Russians marching all the way into Hitler’s Berlin bunker before the Nazis surrendered to our terms. Nobody who had fought against the quite suicidal Japanese resistance that was demonstrated by them from mid-1943 could have expected any less of a last-ditch fight. There were still Japanese infantrymen fighting on in the jungles of Asia in the 1960s!!

The Versailles peace after WW I left militarists in place to restart the conflict. The Allies were not going to make that mistake again, which required the US to fully occupy Japan, something even the weak-ass “Peace” faction of the Japanese power structure was not comfortable yielding to.

Now, I fully agree, as McNamara later said, that LeMay’s terror bombing of Japan from mid-March 1945 through the atom bombings were, in isolation, war crimes. Their only defense is a utilitarian analysis of how many people were saved by changing the rules of how we were going to engage in taking down the Japanese militarists so we could attempt to reorganize Japanese civil society more to our liking.

The militarists themselves didn’t have a moral leg to stand on. Their predations in China had killed up to 20 million people.

While two wrongs don’t make a right, international law is really a collection of treaties, and once a nation begins ceases to observe these treaties its counterparties are no longer morally bound by them.

Apparently some people have no ethics and will justify being evil to feel good about themselves.

I feel no need to justify my joy that I got to know my Grandfather, who had survived Peliliu and Okinawa, and was scheduled to participate in the landings off Chiba later that year.

And name-calling is not an argument, but an avoidance device. The diplomatic and military challenges, not to mention domestic politics, involved into getting the Japanese to surrender to our terms in 1945 were incredibly complex.

Perhaps LeMay’s bombing was necessary, perhaps not. Perhaps more enlightened diplomacy by FDR’s minions could have finessed a surrender sooner from the dysfunctional Japanese state.

In this world, though, the first and last rule of war is kill the bastards before they kill you.

Note that the Vietnam conflict was an intervention into civil war and not a war in the total war sense, and I honor Dr Ellsberg’s heroic actions to bring sunlight and sanity into our government policymaking.

LeMay wanted to retry what worked in Japan in SE Asia, and the USAF had something of a free hand in Cambodia, which backfired immensely.

Looking forward to your further revelations.