Started By
Message

re: Why wasn't Peleliu and other islands bypassed?

Posted on 7/17/21 at 1:49 pm to
Posted by TigerstuckinMS
Member since Nov 2005
33687 posts
Posted on 7/17/21 at 1:49 pm to
Don't discount the desire for retribution against the Japanese at every turn possible. There was, to some extent, a desire to be PUNITIVE for what happened at Pearl Harbor. That desire probably led us into taking islands at the time that history suggests weren't strategically important enough to warrant what we spent to take them.This wasn't a cold, mechanical war of numbers against some faceless enemy. The Pacific campaign was, in part, a war of payback and there was some real hatred for the Japanese and a desire to make them suffer at every chance possible.

Hell, look at what LeMay did to the home islands once he got within striking distance. If you ever wonder why Japan is such an ultra modern society, it's because a large number of cities were just burned to the ground when LeMay got there and heaped scorched Earth warfare on Japan. They're modern because most of the old cities literally did not exist after 1945. Look at Tokyo before and after LeMay. He was methodically firebombing every city he could and had he not been expressly forbidden by his superiors to bomb certain cities, there would have been no untouched cities left to drop nukes on. LeMay would've burnt them to the ground before the bomb was ready and we wouldn't have had any pristine cities left that would be able to give a before/after comparison to show the world the utter devastation our new weapon could inflict on a city.

To some extent, LeMay definitely wanted to make the Japanese PAY for what they'd done. Later in the war, the Japanese were decentralizing materiel production by spreading the machines out in their cities instead of putting them in a single factory. So, there might be a shed on your block where there is a machine just making screws all day and night. A couple of blocks over, the machine making the nuts for the screws might be in another shed. You pair that with the heavy use of paper and wood for building materials and you get LeMay's incendiary bombing campaign that effectively met all his goals, military and personal.
This post was edited on 7/17/21 at 2:06 pm
Posted by Jim Rockford
Member since May 2011
98554 posts
Posted on 7/17/21 at 5:25 pm to
quote:

To some extent, LeMay definitely wanted to make the Japanese PAY for what they'd done. Later in the war, the Japanese were decentralizing materiel production by spreading the machines out in their cities instead of putting them in a single factory. So, there might be a shed on your block where there is a machine just making screws all day and night. A couple of blocks over, the machine making the nuts for the screws might be in another shed. You pair that with the heavy use of paper and wood for building materials and you get LeMay's incendiary bombing campaign that effectively met all his goals, military and personal.


"I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.”

Paradoxically he became a fan of Japanese culture during the occupation. He's responsible in large measure for popularizing martial arts in the US by encouraging GIs to study them.
This post was edited on 7/17/21 at 5:27 pm
Posted by Arbengal
Louisiana
Member since Sep 2008
3030 posts
Posted on 7/17/21 at 11:50 pm to
Just absolutely nailed it. This is a very accurate assessment of the facts. Very well stated
first pageprev pagePage 1 of 1Next pagelast page
refresh

Back to top
logoFollow TigerDroppings for LSU Football News
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to get the latest updates on LSU Football and Recruiting.

FacebookTwitterInstagram