Read an interesting article...

... but now I can't find it again!

It seems that today is the anniversary of the first of the Tokyo firebombing raids. 279 B-29s dropped 1500 tons of incendiary munitions on Tokyo today in 1945, and destroyed 25% of the city and its infrastructure, and killed as many as 100,000 people along the way (estimates vary, and no consensus on what that number really is exists even today).

The article was British, and I think it was in the Guardian Online, but I just can't find it again (although I'll keep looking). It was very good, and made a real, rational attempt to weigh the justification of that huge an impact on civilian casualties against the benefits to the overall war effort... and the justification was there.

The bombing killed more people than the atomic bombs did (initially, anyway), but more importantly, they crippled the ability of the Japanese to effectively govern and communicate from the capital for the remainder of the war. It was an effective counter-point to the argument that the US had only a very limited number of atomic weapons in its arsenal (which was very true) and that the failure of even one of these bombs to detonate would have given the Imperial Army the means to continue the war even after an invasion of the home islands was mounted. In other words, Japan could have been (and would have been) destroyed... with or without the atomic bomb.

I simply do not see that anyone can argue with the fact that it was THIS certainty that prompted the remnants of the civilian government of Japan (i.e. the Emperor) to surrender to Allied forces in August of 1945. The facts were demonstrated... conventionally and through nuclear means... and the leaders of the country recognized the inevitable. I do not deny that the cost of this effort was high... soul-crushingly high... but it had to be paid to see the sacrifices already made bear fruit. Even as late as the spring of 1945, the Japanese needed to see that we had both the "means and the metal" to win the war on the home islands... and it wasn't only the Japanese High Command that needed to see that, it was the people on the street, too.

I sometimes think that modern liberals try to make the association that justifying the Tokyo raids means it would justify the same measures today... but that truly is an "apples to oranges" comparison. The entire Japanese nation was focused on fighting (if not winning) the war with America... there was no tribal divisions that could have been exploited by the West, there was no sectarian fighting, no religious debates that kept the Japanese from forming a unified effort. There ARE those things in our current struggle (any one of them, actually), including Afghanistan. Nothing about our current global crisis with radical Islam compares with WWII... either good or bad... and no equivocation on the topic can be allowed if real understanding is to be had.