Also Japanese construction was conveniently, for the US, extremely flammable so you could do way more damage starting a firestorm than you could with the same number of bombers filled with traditional bombs.
There was also the incredible plan to fill a bomb with bats strapped with tiny incendiary charges on timers so they would be dropped, go roost somewhere, and hopefully start even wider spread fires. They spent about 2 million dollars on it before it was cancelled because the atomic bomb was showing much better progress. They also accidentally proved it's effectiveness and burned down part of the testing facility.
Similarly, the Japanese launched over 9000 incendiary balloon bombs against the US & Canada, but they were generally ineffective. Six civilians were killed in Oregon in 1945.
Yeah one of the few instances of damage on the US side of the world from WW2 and it barely did anything. The US was incredibly fortunate to not have to fight basically any of the war on the home front. We rode that wave for a couple decades as Europe and Japan etc rebuilt.
It was the great success of the Allied firebombing campaign that inflicted suburbia on the United States. US construction is just as flammable but fire is less likely to spread when the houses are farther apart.
(Let's rephrase the success part. The campaign was destructive and deadly for the civilian population but did nothing to end the war earlier. Bomber Harris and the Lord Lindemann got a career boost, though.)
There are many contemporary sources on the Japanese side that suggest the firebombings did hasten the (inevitable at this point) surrender. The US certainly had a strategic desire for Japan to surrender to the US rather than the USSR.
Yeah it turns out the whole idea of morale bombing is pretty flawed, it largely just galvanizes the population it turns out; Japan, England and Germany all reacted similarly, maybe for different cultural reasons but it was ineffective everywhere.
Really? To assert this, you need to show not that Axis production didn't decline, but that the damage done didn't prevent production from increasing even more. How does one show that?
Which, of course, proves nothing. What matters is how much it would have increased without the bombing.
Actually, it's even worse than that, since one must also subtract from this production the resources Germany was putting into air defense. This effort was massive.
I did. He was critiquing theories that airpower could win wars. This doesn't mean airpower can't help win a war. There's a large space between "useless" and "all important".
The Germans ended up devoting 1/4 of their war production and a million men to antiaircraft defense.
You are completely ignoring Japanese mindset during that time. Absolute devotion to emperor, casualties could be in millions and that wouldn't change anything. Their suicidal charges and not giving up alive are pretty famous and this comes from certain place, same as kamikadze. Some rational counting of outputs may be for bureaucrats but those were not holding any real power in Japan empire.
There is a lot of speculation why emperor and generals surrendered, even atomic bombs may not have been the triggering point as much as soviet declaration of war to Japan at 8 August 1945. Most probably it all compounded.
It's not impossible we have internal documents from the time, the US was actively reading all of the diplomatic traffic and basically anything broadcast via radio anywhere in the Japanese government. One big sticking point that appears in a lot of discussions is the demand for unconditional surrender, a lot of effort diplomatically was spent around getting past the allied agreement to only accept unconditional surrender. One big factor in that from the primary sources was the possibility of the emperor being executed or completely dethroned.
The war in Europe is highly arguable in both directions.
To assert that the bombing campaign did nothing for the war in the Pacific flies in the face of recorded history. We literally have the imperial Japanese equivalent of meeting minutes where they talk about this stuff and toward the end the sheer destruction of the bombing campaign did affect the credibility of the militarists "yeah we can still pull this off" claims in the eyes of many of the others.
There was also the incredible plan to fill a bomb with bats strapped with tiny incendiary charges on timers so they would be dropped, go roost somewhere, and hopefully start even wider spread fires. They spent about 2 million dollars on it before it was cancelled because the atomic bomb was showing much better progress. They also accidentally proved it's effectiveness and burned down part of the testing facility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb