It was a little more sophisticated than that; it was not intended as a symbolic gesture. A lot of people fail to appreciate that the kamikaze attacks were actually relatively effective. The Japanese plans for resisting an American invasion were designed so that suicidal attacks would inflict the most damage possible against the landing forces. The American planners failed to realize how serious the threat was; they assumed intelligence of diminishing Japanese attacks indicated the Japanese were running low on supplies. While this was true to an extent, the Japanese were also stockpiling equipment for the anticipated invasion. The plans anticipated that they would destroy at least half of the invasion force as it landed. After the war, when Americans had an opportunity to see what was there, they had to concede that probably would have happened.
I remember reading somewhere that American battle plans for the invasion of the homeland didn’t include the landing divisions after a week or so because it was assumed those divisions wouldn’t exist anymore. So I think the American’s did understand the fight they were going to go through.
633squadron:
A poor choice of words on my part; I should rather say a “large and convincing supply.”
The two bombs were indeed dropped on the dates you quoted. After that, LeMay could not expect another bomb to arrive at Tinian until August 15, which meant that he couldn’t drop it before the 17th at the earliest (the bombs were delivered disassembled). Then after that, early September.
That’s steady, all right, but not large or convincing. By late fall, the US could hope to have enough bombs to do multiple drops in one day or one per day over several days. Until then, they could drop one every two weeks.
Sure the US could hope to have enough bombs, but the reality was far, far different.
The US wouldn’t have had enough bombs to do multiple drops in one day or even one every two weeks. More like one a month, and that’s if they were very lucky.
The U.S. could, however, conduct firebombings at will.
These were as destructive as atomic bombings, if not more so.
mr. moto ,
That certainly is true, but the fact is that the US was running out of targets in Japan to drop plain old bombs on, let alone firebomb.