re: 70 Years Ago Today, the U.S. Army Air Corps Made Tokyo Howl

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The personal accounts in the movie talking about how the Japanese had run out of ammo but were still coming at them with knives and even throwing rocks at them.
The film of civilians committing suicide rather than surrender. Incredible movie for sure.

Always been a little bit of a WWII buff, but I learned so much more yesterday

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Many people today don't understand their mindset and how difficult things could have been.

my uncle flew those things, his crew was an alternate for dropping "the bomb"

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Fire tornadoes.

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Like Dresden.

The fires would have been easily seen from space.

The lesson here was - don't piss off America before the baby boomers showed up. THAT America would break a foot off in your arse. While they were steadily trying to invent a brand new type of weapon to burn/radiate your arse, they'd do it the old fashioned way in the meantime.

I'm serious - do NOT attack the USA, circa 1941. Not unless you like a whole lot of fire.

Very true. My gf was a marine and started his combat experience on Guadalcanal on his way through the pacific. He hated the Japanese until the day he died and only 5 or 6 guys in his original unit came home unscathed. Luckily he was among them but it was so bad he only spoke about the entire ordeal on one occasion before he died. Contrast that to relatives serving in France who tended to look at WWII in Europe in a different more romanticized way and revisited battle sites through out their later years.

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The Pacific Theater was simply brutal compared to Europe IMO.

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Actually the fighting in the ETO was far more bloody. Here is a compare & contrast of the 10 highest casualty rates on the ETO, MTO and PTO....

US Divisions in the ETO (Europe Theater of Operation) and MTO (Mediterranean Theater of Operation) (Note: All ETO & MTO divisions were from the US Army.)
3rd Inf Div: 25,977 casualties
9th Inf Div: 23,277 casualties
4th Inf Div: 22,660 casualties
45th Inf Div: 20,993 casualties
1st Inf: Div: 20,659 casualties
29th Inf Div: 20,620 casualties
36th Inf Div: 19,466 casualties
90th Inf Div: 19,200 casualties
30th Inf Div: 18,466 casualties
80th Inf Div: 17,087 casualties


US Divisions in the PTO (Pacific Theater of Operation) (Both US Army & US Marine)
1st Marine Div: 18,430 casualties
4th Marine Div: 17,740 casualties
2nd Marine Div: 12,770 casualties
3rd Marine Div: 10,416 casualties
5th Marine Div: 9,573 casualties
7th Inf Div (US Army): 9,212 casualties
96th Inf Div (US Army): 8,812 casualties
77th Inf Div (US Army): 7,461 casualties
32nd Inf Div (US Army): 7,268 casualties
24th Inf Div (US Army): 7,021 casualties

Note that the 1st Marine Division which suffered by a wide margin the highest casualty rate of all divisions in the PTO, would only rank 10th on the ETO & MTO list.

Interesting, the US Army infantry divisions in the PTO tended to have far higher total days in combat than their Marine counterparts but suffered lighter casualties. This indicates that for the most part, with a few notable exceptions, the battles the Marines fought in the PTO tended to be very bloody but short affairs.

US Army divisions in the ETO & MTO likewise tended to have higher total days in combat than their Marine counterparts and comparable number of days in combat as Army divisions in the PTO. However, the far higher casualty rates the US Army divisions suffered in the ETO & MTO comparative to both the Army & Marine divisions in the PTO shows that the combat in the ETO was more of a sustained meat grinder.

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You just ruined Hardcore History for me.

Good information but I think a lot of reasons the pacific was considered especially brutal was the lack of surrender by Japanese, treatment of pow, and tactics. Japanese surrenders were very rare until later stages of the war with the battle at Iwo Jima having essentially no able bodied Japanese surrender. Many sources document American servicemen taking Japanese body parts as souvenirs. Numerous accounts exist of the Japanese banzai charges and other tactics that weren't seen on the western front in Europe. There were Japanese cannabilism charges at chichi Jima and many captured allied airmen were executed. Pow survival rates are another statistic which show differences in theaters. There certainly were cases of some pow killings on the western front as in all war but it was generally recognized as a fight that mostly adhered to western war protocol at the time.

My dad served in new guinea