The World War Two bomber that cost more than the atomic bomb
bbc.com
bbc.com
I personally would consider the total cost of dropping two atomic bombs much higher, for hopefully obvious reasons.
EDIT: Although, per the article, I might have been wrong about that:
> The loss of life was shocking. The B-29 raid on Tokyo on the night of 9 March 1945 is thought to have killed as many as 100,000 people, making it more destructive than either of the atomic bombs that were to follow.
Fascinating bit of history though, thank you for sharing.
> On 3 July, the Joint Chiefs of Staff placed (Hiroshima) off limits to bombers, along with Kokura, Niigata and Kyoto
Nagasaki was not explicitly saved, but was just a difficult target to hit:
> Nagasaki had been spared from firebombing because its geography made it difficult to locate at night with AN/APQ-13 radar.
> Unlike the other target cities, Nagasaki had not been placed off limits to bombers by the Joint Chiefs of Staff's 3 July directive, and was bombed on a small scale five times.
Anyone with better sources could please fill out the Wikipedia article some more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
No one knew if any of this would actually work. The trinity test wouldn’t be for almost two more weeks on the 15th.
Saving Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be proving grounds for the scale of destruction is horrifying. However, all war is a series of horrifying and unnecessary events. Pointing out that some of them near the end were also horrifying is just not a very compelling criticism. It's not out of character for what happened during the rest of the war.
There were 76,000-84,000 allied casualties and 105,000-110,000 Japanese. The civilian death toll was 40,000-150,000.
Claiming that lives were saved by bombing cities with nuclear weapons is always going to be a hard one to prove and morally dubious, but it might also be correct. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa
After the first dropping, the War Cabinet met on August 9th and concluded in the morning that the US probably did not have the resources to build more than one bomb, and it was decided to keep fighting.
Then in the early afternoon they learned of the second dropping. After further debate the War Cabinet voted 3-3 on whether to continue fighting.
It took two bombing to get to a tied vote (both of the War Cabinet, and the full cabinet): the Emperor had to be called to break the stalemate. I do not understand how anyone could believe zero bombings would result in a cessation of hostilities.
And even after the decision was made, there were still attempts to prevent surrender:
I suppose there were some coups that succeeded because the plotters controlled the news media.
Yes, but it still shows the mindset (of some) in the military.
And military action against government wasn't a new thing in Japan either:
> Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was assassinated by 11 young naval officers. The following trial and popular support of the Japanese population led to extremely light sentences for the assassins, strengthening the rising power of Japanese militarism and weakening democracy and the rule of law in the Empire of Japan.
I'm not a historian but I've always read that the Japanese government famously did not intend to surrender despite being cornered.
They had some operations scheduled for October 1945—they surrendered 1 month before due to the bombs.
I’m fairly certain that happened after the bombs.
Then they suggested they’d surrender if the poition of the emperor was untouched.
Japanese strategists wanted to be in Manchuria and Korea because of their proximity to imperial Japan, but that was also why they had invaded the Philippines (to defend seaborne lines of communication to their oil supplies in Borneo).
By the time the Soviets invaded, the Japanese had been ejected from much of their outlying empire, yet they had not surrendered, because Japan itself had the capability to fight.
The Soviet invasion of Manchuria did not change that, an invasion of Japan proper could only have come with involvement from the rest of the allies, including the sealift used for the invasions of Normandy and southern France.
The Japanese were already expecting a Soviet attack: the only 'unexpected' thing about what the Soviets did was make a move in Summer 1945 instead of Spring 1946.
But the Japanese knew what was going to happen eventually.
From the Japanese PoV, imagining that they could hold off the US/UK suddenly ceased to matter. Obviously Japanese armies could not stand against Soviet armies. So - "OMG, who could have imagined the Americans inventing a super-super-duper bomb! I guess we'll have to surrender to them" was a face-saving way to avoid a quick & brutal Soviet conquest & occupation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Soviet_invasion_of_Ho...
In comparison, the proposed allied invasion was planned to have 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts. Even that wasn't considered enough:
>...Ken Nichols, the District Engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District, wrote that at the beginning of August 1945, "[p]lanning for the invasion of the main Japanese home islands had reached its final stages, and if the landings actually took place, we might supply about fifteen atomic bombs to support the troops."
Nobody is saying anything different.
>...And several previous Japanese conclusions of "the USSR will not be able to do X" had proven catastrophically wrong. For example …
The Japanese had already moved all of their experienced troops from Manchuria before the invasion. They were surprised that the USSR would break the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, but the defense of the home islands was their main concern at that point.
As your source says:
>...The Soviet entry into this theater of the war and the defeat of the Kwantung Army were significant factors in the Japanese government's decision to surrender unconditionally on 15 August, as it became apparent that the Soviet Union had no intention of acting as a third party in negotiating an end of the war on conditional terms.
The Japanese knew the USSR was not a threat to the main islands and the USSR knew they would likely fail if they tried to invade Hokkaido. The Japanese had hopes that the USSR would be willing to negotiate with the Allies on their behalf, but once the Soviets declared war was, they knew that would not happen.
As in, Kamikazis because ordered, honour in death, or killing yourself with your own sword. Not really a culture of capitulation. Most of their cities were already firebombed, as you elude to, some more than once, yet there was still no surrender.
Without surrender, a country isn't really done. Leave it be, and they'll arm and rebuild, still at war with you. Invade, and your troops die, for a standing army still existed. Japan also had colonies, islands, resources.
And of course without surrender, even if you occupy, now you have insurgents.
It's hard to view the world through the eyes of even 80 years ago.
War weary, endless soldiers lost already, an unsurrendering Japan, and a way to put an end to it...
> Without surrender, a country isn't really done. Leave it be, and they'll arm and rebuild, still at war with you.
So they chose to end it.
There's a fair amount of detail and references in those books if one wishes to dig into it.
(I say they are "history" books as opposed to "activist" books. The latter are not worth reading.)
Some material I've seen claimed that the Japanese leadership didn't know it was a nuclear bomb. The Japanese knew immediately it was nuclear bomb, because they had a nuclear bomb development program themselves.
"Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation."
Japan had no idea how many bombs we had and part of the strategy of using them in quick succession was to give the perception that we hod more than we did. It seems like Tokyo was going to be the next target:
Truman had ordered a halt to atomic bombings on 10 August, upon receiving news that another bomb would be ready for use against Japan in about a week. He told his cabinet that he could not stand the thought of killing "all those kids". By 14 August, however, Truman remarked "sadly" to the British ambassador that "he now had no alternative but to order an atomic bomb dropped on Tokyo", as some of his military staff had been advocating.
Yeah, it was in an activist's writings someone was using as a cite to me. Tells for an activist book:
1. hyperbolic language
2. no discussion of alternative explanations
3. mind reading - "surely so-and-so must have understood that..." and "so-and-so's reason must have been (something nefarious)"
The massive bombing of Japan was a grinding war of attrition that has well-understood limitations and challenges. Military leaders in Japan were perfectly capable of understanding what those campaigns couldn't do, so it came down to a willingness to accept the losses to maintain strategic optionality, which they clearly were.
Most of the limitations of strategic bombing campaigns do not apply to nuclear weapons, which is something the Japanese military leadership also understood, though the scope of capability was uncertain (which also probably helped). If the US switched to nuclear weapons instead of conventional bombing campaigns, which was the risk Japanese military leaders had to consider, it takes most of the strategic optionality off the table at which point there is little to gain by continuing.
And this is also something that could strike their leadership. You can build bunkers against conventional bombs but for nuclear that's a different ball game
One can argue about the increased cost in terms of lives if the bombs weren’t used, but my understanding is that by that time, we’re talking about shortening the war by maybe months, but certainly not years.
(*Worth noting that in the final terms, the Japanese did keep their emperor, but the US was demanding an unconditional surrender as a matter of principle.)
By whom? In actuality, both the US and Japan were planning for a long campaign on the Japanese home islands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall. The Japanese intended to prolong fighting as much as possible to force the US to abandon the invasion because of mounting costs and casualties.
Even the night before the surrender, some among the Japanese military attempted a coup to prevent it and continue the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
Before that The Japanese had started to talk about a cease-fire, but that cease-fire was expected to include ongoing control of China, Korea, and some of the islands they had taken in the war. In other words it wasn’t a surrender, but rather a let us keep these last little bit bits and maybe we won’t kill you. It was delusional to the extreme.
The debate in Washington at this point not if Japan would be invaded or not or would surrender.
Operations downfall and Olympus were planned. They were projecting anywhere from hundreds of thousands to 1 million casualties on the US side. No one bothered to do the calculation on the Japanese side, but the Japanese leadership believed that their path of victory was to make it prohibitively expensive in American lives to take the islands and they didn’t care how many Japanese died. You can take a look at the ratios of Japanese dead to American dead on Iwo Jima, the Philippines to get an idea of the bloodbath that that would’ve been.
Of course, some Americans were seeing that the Japanese were far stronger on the islands and they anticipated. And we’re pushing for a total naval blockade instead. Japan’s economy and agricultural harvest had already collapsed. A total net naval blockade would’ve killed millions.
I strongly suggest the recent book on operation downfall, as well as the recent popular works on the last months of the war from the Japanese point of view.
Furthermore, we have evidence, from the diaries and correspondence of Truman, Stimson and others, that they were concerned about Stalin's territorial intentions, and expressed the hope that the US's demonstration of the atom bomb would curb them. Whether that led to at least a tacit secondary goal, of checking the USSR by leaving no doubt about the US's willingness to use atomic weapons in circumstances it deemed necessary, is an open question debated by historians to this day.
The US manufactured millions of purple hearts in anticipation of an amphibious invasion.
To this day those are the purple hearts used.
Nuclear weapons saved millions of lives.
And the early bombs were merely efficient ways to level a city. 1 B-29 rather than a few hundred. 16 sq miles of Tokyo got burned down in one night, for example.
It's the civilization enders we developed in the 30 years after that woke us up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_17_nuclear_bomb
Mk-17: produced Jul 1954-Nov 1955
No. built: 200
Blast yield: 15 megatonnes of TNT
This is 1000 times the power of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
From 1935 to 1955 you could plot "firepower deliverable by a single aircraft" and see a trend that looks a lot like Moore's Law for mass destruction of life and structures.
Edward Teller thought that it was possible to make bombs a thousand times more powerful than the first generation thermonuclear bombs, but fortunately nobody was willing to commit resources to exploring the concept. Merely testing such a bomb on Earth would have been an act of mass destruction.
"We have considered deeply the general trends of the world and the current situation of the Empire, and We have decided to take extraordinary measures to bring the current state of affairs to an end. We hereby inform Our loyal and devoted subjects."
...
"Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization."
However there were was a major faction that did not want to surrender and had conspired and committed a coup d'état to prevent it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
[citation needed]
This claimed gets brought out every time atomic usage comes up, but are there official US policy documents that date to 1945 that explicitly bring this up as a motivation?
Government decisions and policies, especially in more modern times, runs on memos. If such options were discussed between departments there would be paperwork.
Between May and August 1945, US bombers dropped an average of 34,402 tons/month of bombs on Japan. This would have reached 100,000 tons/month by September, 170,000 tons/month by January 1946, and 200,000 tons/month by March 1946.
It simply didn’t work and the result was a return to area bombing and the massive civilian casualties that resulted in.
Even worse the bombing did almost nothing to lessen enemy output. In fact over the war Germany and Japan managed to constantly increase their output of weapons for various reasons. One being that having a large industrial base pre war meant they could always sift production. Ie at the start you are making bullets in a bullet factory. At the end you are making bullets in what was a sewing machine factory.
We still like to believe accurate weapons make for “clean” conflicts but we never seem able to resist area bombing.
$28 million gets you spin rocket motors that improve accuracy to within 10 meters, and internal and celestial guidance. The yield is variable ("dial-a-yield") (10-340kt) to allow selecting the amount of tritium for the explosion.
The cost for an F-22 is $191 million (2023). A B-2 is $2 billion.
In the first case because of - wait for it - rain. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Andersen_Air_Force_Base...]
That is one expensive photo!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOX-2d9qLec
The B-29 also had ECM detectors and transmitters, so they could block enemy radar signals.
For a sense of what air to air gunnery is like without computer assistance, see the corresponding training film for B-17 gunners. [2].
[1] https://archive.org/details/19584-army-air-forces-gunnery-in...
A few months ago I took an Appleseed rifle skills course. It's amazing what goes inyo "just" hitting a static target from a static position at 25 yards with soft time constraints. It's amazing what goes into hitting a moving target from a moving plane in a few seconds.
"Secret History of Silicon Valley" talks a lot about electronic warfare of ww2.
Not for German standards. Near the end of the war, their schedules were frantic, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_162_Volksjäger#Volk...: “On 8 September 1944, the requirement was issued to industry; bidders were required to submit their basic designs within ten days while quantity production of the aircraft was to commence by 1 January 1945
[…]
During January 1945, the Luftwaffe formed an Erprobungskommando 162 ("Test Unit 162") evaluation group to which the first 46 aircraft were delivered“
I remember reading about even faster development cycles, but cannot find links.
If you read the article it goes into the technical innovation introduced by this aircraft. It was not a slight modification of an existing design, but a total rethink of how a bomber jet could be designed.
They eventually lost out to the former, culminating in horrific napalm raids on Japan that continued even after the atomic bombs were dropped and had more casualties
The "bomber mafia" (they didn't call themselves this) were prewar strategists who thought you could destroy an enemy's ability to fight by hitting his strategic and tactical assets with bombers.
Basically they thought that bombers would be to the next war what artillery was in WWI.
What ended up happening is level bombing wasn't very precise, it was often hard to identify the correct targets, and modern mechanized war machines were more resilient than expected so bombers ended up not being as decisive as expected.
"Area bombing" or "carpet bombing" and the strategy to "dehouse and demoralize the population" were tactics developed during the war when the earlier tactics weren't working.
>Under combat conditions the Norden did not achieve its expected precision, yielding an average CEP in 1943 of 1,200 feet (370 m)[1]
This means that 50% of bombs fell within 1,200 feet of the target, which is an absolutely awful accuracy if you're trying to hit anything specific.
This was further compounded during the campaign against Japan by the heavy reliance of Japanese wartime industry on cottage industries which were dispersed almost randomly within Japanese population centers, rather than being located within specialized industrial districts. From a purely strategic standpoint which is only concerned with destroying the enemy's ability to make war, the most effect way to disrupt these kinds of industry with 1945 technology was essentially to burn every building in the city to the ground. Other options were simply ineffective.
In WW2 you were lucky if you managed to hit a city-sized target, never mind an industrial site.
I do hope wherever you are from that your cities are larger than a few hundred yards.
Even then, I don't think it would be correct to say that the Americans had no other capabilities for targeted attacks. With air superiority you can do strafing at relatively low risk, which is very accurate. And the USA had also developed rockets by this point, which could drastically improve accuracy when compared to unpropelled bombs. They even used these operationally against Japan before the atomic bomb attacks.
The RAF tended to carpet bomb at night, but the USAF wanted to precision bomb by day.
It was nowhere near as precise as today's tech but it vastly improved during the course of the war.
Ultimately it didn't work because the theory didn't work. German manufacturing was not disrupted by precision bombing enough to matter
Masters of the air also touches on this, and some of the disastrous missteps during the raids that led to aircraft loss
Level bombing with dumb bombs was never going to be particularly precise regardless the sophistication of the bombsite because bombs in free fall don't have the momentum of an artillery shell so their trajectory is less dependable.
The norden also had a multitude of parameters that the bombardier had to input quickly and accurately as they were changing during a bombing run under flak barrage.
That being said the real problem with the air war in Germany was target selection. If you want to know more I'd suggest the book The Collapse of the German War Economy
https://uncpress.org/9780807858509/the-collapse-of-the-germa...
During the bombing of Dresden bombs somehow gravitated towards the city center 2km in diameter, while factories and railway hubs on the outskirts weren't damaged at all.
The core of the critique remains on substantive issues.
e.g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Run - that plant was producing a bomber almost every hour
to this day not a lot of countries can produce a full plane in an hour. I don't think the US can
Any European today still wonders why Tesla workers in the US still cannot hold a screwdriver, producing widely worrying results and claiming that the product is a valid car.
The British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) were desperate for new aircraft after the war. They would have bought Lockheed Constellations if they hadn't been pressured into rescuing the British aircraft manufacturing companies from financial obliteration, which had of course narrowly avoided direct obliteration from German bombing. Instead of buying new American aircraft, they converted British bombers like the Avro Lancaster into sub-par airliners and eventually brought the Bristol Britannia into service, which was a fine aircraft, just ten years too late.
The de Havilland Comet eventually made BOAC and British engineering competitive internationally again, but I think it would be improper to not give credit to American workers and designers for being the first to create such advanced aircraft as the Constellation which really did keep the Allied war effort going behind the scenes.
As for the Germans, they had rockets and all kinds of incredible experimental aircraft, but nothing quite like the USA when it came to high-altitude air freight.
A couple decades ago when I was doing my mandatory work experience at school, I spent a week at the Lotus car factory. It’s amusing how much of your point applies to what I saw there at the time, and I feel deeply sorry for whoever ended up buying an Elise with a pedal box assembled by me.
The gun technology, pressured hull, ... all were novel. They didn't know it was possible when they committed to building it.
I never could figure that one out either…
So there are some who buy US made cars, but why they would...
[0]: https://www.acea.auto/fact/fact-sheet-eu-us-vehicle-trade-20...
Ford in Europe wasn't entirely controlled by Detroit at the time it was first produced, though I don’t really know what that means in terms of ownership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Transit
There are no Germans on the board or in executive positions.
(Ownership aside, Opel has been producing cars made in Europe for (mostly) Europeans for AFAIK the entire post-WWII era.)
I wish trades here in New Zealand used them, rather than the ubiquitous and fairly dumb Ford Ranger. Other than towing capacity, I can’t see why Rangers are popular.
On 13 June 2025, I took a picture of a Honda with dealership plate frame from Bellevue Honda in Tallinn. I imagine many of the vehicles in Holland and Germany are owned by US military folks, but they can't all be.
And the Lexus SUV range stops at the RX in Europe, with 3 smaller SUVs under that
And it doesn't look like it will recover again:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas...
Other than that there are some people that have legitimate needs hard to cover with EU made vehicles, for instance larger pickups. Those are often imports, Toyota's, some Dodges, some GMs. Rarely Fords though, I don't remember when I last saw an F150 or an F250 here in NL, in Germany or Poland. The Dodge's are popular with landscaping crews here.
In '24 Tesla did very well here (NL), with close to 8% of the market. For '25 they'll be happy to have half of that. And I expect BYD to achieve parity or even to exceed Tesla for EVs. Ford is at 3.5% and Jeep at 0.5%. So in total, for NL including Tesla the USA represents about 12% of the market and next year more than likely less than 10% and if Trump keeps up his tariff bs it might be far lower than that.
Speaking for the UK at least, it's not like we were really getting US-originated models from Ford: it used to be the Mondeo or Fiesta but now it's the Kuga. Similarly GM (AKA Vauxhall/Opel, now Stellantis) pushed the Corsa/Astra and so on rather than, say, the Chevy Suburban.
A majority of them are made within Europe (if not necessarily the EU, between the UK and Turkey) so should avoid tariffs.
I remember choosing between a Nissan 100NX and a Ford Probe (both about 10 years old) but the latter had way worse fuel economy not being a Europe native model (though it wasn't really a US model either I think). Also the 100NX wasn't really a sports car, it was just a Nissan Sunny compact with a more sporty looking body and T-top. It was a super nice car though.
And even if you are a farmer, an american pick-up seems to be a rare choice around here. If you see something pick-up-like, it's usually more a variant of UniMog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unimog .
And for the "small-time farmer without enough money to buy lots of equipment" (rare nowadays), tractors with tons of included functions were often more practical: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fendt_GT (no english version, sorry). Since Germany is more dense and distances are smaller, low speed is less of an issue I guess, compared to the US. And you can pull real farm equipment, which a pick-up car usually cannot.
And for people that just need to move a lot, having it exposed to the open air is usually a dealbreaker. Panelvans are much more popular for that. Or MPVs with removable seats.
I have seen other countries where they are popular though. Like in Australia where they call it a "Ute". But yes also a long-distance country like you say.
Other parts of Australia do vary
As such things get bigger, get more doors, and veer towards a US size they get called crew cabs, trucks, pickup's, etc.
The wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ute_(vehicle)
Traditionally, the term referred to vehicles built on passenger car chassis and with the cargo tray integrated with the passenger body (coupé utility vehicles).
However, present-day usage of the term "ute" in Australian English and New Zealand English has expanded to include any vehicle with an open cargo area at the rear, which would be called a pickup truck in other countries.
They're all available with 4WD however.
The Ford cars sold in Europe are mostly European-designed and European-built though, seeing an actual US Ford model on the road is quite rare (in Germany at least). And the Ford factory in Koeln is so old (founded in 1925) that I'd say it's not unusual to recognize Ford as a German brand over here.
If you think he really did a Nazi salute, you’ve just drank the media kool aide.
But ultimately the Nazis were a specific brand of fascism. You don't need a Hugo Boss uniform and a lower limb disorder to be a fascist.
You do need to be actively opposed to fair elections and other bedrock progressive values, a cynical exploiter and promoter of race hatred and violence for political ends, and a dedicated corporatist.
The fact that his own chatbot labelled itself MechaHitler after he updated the system prompt is just icing.
This is apparently a picture of the B-29 "Its Hawg's Wild" mentioned in the article before its restoration and flight to the UK: https://i.imgur.com/9e26SKj.jpeg
Taken from this blog which has some pictures of the restoration project: https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2015/08/b-29-its-hawg-wild-...
It's an interesting feeling to stand by a beautiful, poised, marvelously-engineered mass death machine. It doesn't look scary at all, yet that silhouette must have been as terrifying in its prime as the B-2 is now.
B-29 service ceiling was 9710 m.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-29_Superfortress#Spec...
For the Me-262 the service ceiling: 11,450 m
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_262#Specifica...
The B-29 was an absolutely insane technical achievement. But it's also completely crazy to think that as soon as it was in service the Me-262 had made it obsolete. Also the German development of guided surface to air missiles. The US immediately had to build a pressurized jet bomber that would operate in a considerably tougher environment.
The US had began working on what would wind up as the B-52 that would fly 6 years later in 1951.
By that point you'd think that everything would keep changing.
Yet here we are almost 75 years later and the B-52 is still a US combat aircraft that is expected to stay in service until the 2050s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress
The pace of technological development is so crazy.
Yes, but the B-52H still in use are very different from the ones built in 1951.
Yes, but the youngest B-52H was built in 1962.
So much closer to the days of the Wright Flyer than to the present day.
F-35: "Hold my beer."
I understand that the manufacturing and testing was a nightmare, with the need to redesign multiple subsystems.
As far as credible 5th generation strike fighters go, that's a pretty cheap per-squadron price tag. My bigger gripe is with the "Big Bomb Diplomacy" tactics that require such a platform, but we'd end up wanting one either way if a fight with China is in the cards.
I believe that the 100th Bomb Group had the highest casualty rate of any unit in the entire war, on either side (except the Kamikaze squadrons, I expect).
The reason they adopted Kamikaze was that normal air-attacks were suicide but suicide with no results what so ever.
In Kamikaze the pilots had more freedom and often only attacked the outlining ships. And quite often they just bailed out, or faked engine problems and flew back.
In terms of the 'strategic' bombing in Europe, the US was just incredibly arrogant and didn't want to listen to the Brits who had already learned some lessons. The way they employed air-power was outright insane, suicidal and also completely and utterly ineffective.
It took smart people using internal politics to sideline the idiots to turn the strategy around and do something actually useful.
The insanity of the bombing campaign is one, others include the defective torpedoes that plagued the Navy for the first couple of years and killed countless sailors and airmen, and the homicidal policy of shipping in replacements to frontline units that were decimated multiple times.
The big issue with WWI, seemed to be staggeringly incompetent generals. This appears to have been on all sides. Maybe the Americans were better, but that just may be because they didn’t have time to get bogged down. I heard that Pershing refused to follow British and French tactics.
I assume that this was because many generals were trained on Napoleonic-Era tactics, that didn’t do well, against machine guns and semiauto rifles.
While there were some generals that were a bit too resistant to changing strategy when it might have seemed reasonable, the fact of the matter is, is that this was the 1910s.
Everyone was trying to solve the problem of trying to figure out how to fight, and no one could keep up with how fast warfare was changing. Armchair generals watching people die in almost real time from drone footage in Europe did not exist in 1915.
Maybe calling them “incompetent,” isn’t fair, but they made a shitton of terrible strategic and tactical blunders, that resulted in millions of casualties.
Why they made those decisions sounds like exactly what you’re talking about.
Belleau wood is the “chocolate box” of the US army.
> I heard that Pershing refused to follow British and French tactics.
Yeah, “these guys being at it for 4 years don't understand anything, let's show them how to do it” – proceed to get decimated in a couple days.
The reason we have this view of WW1 is that after WW1 in the 20s many normal people in the 20s started writing about the horrors of war and that combined with the strong anti-war sentiment lead to the view we have now. Claiming that generals like Haig was an incompetent butcher. The whole 'lions led by donkeys' myth.
However non of that is actually true. Or not anymore true then in any other war. For example, there is stark contrast to right after the war, where Haig was considered a hero and most soldiers in their post-WW1 writing liked him.
In terms of causality rates, WW1 isn't that special, high intensity combat in modern war isn't that different, from Crimea to WW2. If you have warfare at that level, even if you are successful, you have massive causalities. The Somme for example wasn't that different from the Normandy campaign in WW2.
These generals had to deal with armies of literally million of people and they didn't even have wireless communications. How do you command 500 men in a coordinated attack without communication?
The Americans had to go threw the same learning curve as the others, but they started right away fighting against an enemy that was mostly veterans. Americans could have learned better, but it also has to be said that Pershing by command from the president was not allowed to fully integrate his troupes with that of the French army.
> I assume that this was because many generals were trained on Napoleonic-Era tactics
This is complete and utter nonsense. Please stop spreading these myths. This all just Post-WW1 anti-war politics propaganda.
> against machine guns and semiauto rifles
This is again a myth. Semiauto rifles practically didn't exist in the beginning of WW1. And machine guns had existed for a while and were not that effective.
The big killer on the battle field is the fast shooting artillery. Massive innovations in that had happened in the 30 years before WW1.
And even at the end of the war, only the French fielded a couple dozens thousands of them (sounds like a lot, is not).
They didn’t contemplate the impact of the lines moving out to 1000 yards, machine guns at the company or platoon level and the idea of the entire state as the enemy. Germany ultimately collapsed because their society was sucked dry.
Calling critiques of a conflict that slaughtered 20 million as propaganda is probably one of the more ridiculous statements I’ve read in awhile.
And what happened in 1918 then? I'm pretty sure what happened is exactly that, the German army was defeated in the field and was in full retreat.
> They didn’t understand and didn’t learn the lessons of the us civil war
Americans need to stop bringing up the US Civil War. It was way earlier with way different technology and frankly with mass armies that were essentially untrained and were really behind European armies in many ways.
The Civil War was actually studied quite a bit but the lessen you suggest in them wasn't actually there.
And that this point is false you can see from the Russo-Japanese War where there were defeats in the field and against much superior weapons then what was in the Civil War. This was a far more relevant data-point.
> They didn’t contemplate the impact of the lines moving out to 1000 yards, machine guns at the company or platoon level and the idea of the entire state as the enemy. Germany ultimately collapsed because their society was sucked dry.
They did actually contemplate that. In fact, they spend decades contemplating that.
But its one thing to study something in theory, and its another to execute it in the real world against an enemy who has studied the same things.
Machine guns were very much accounted for in their tactics and operation, and this is cleary evident when you look at some of the early battles, where Germany repeatedly overran French and British position, even when well defend with lots of machine-guns.
In fact, even during full trench warfare, the initial 2-3 trenches were usually taken by the attacker.
They also contemplated having states and whole societies as enemies. The Germans had dealt with that already in the Franco-German War and they were terrified of that happening again. They had prepared ways to deal with that.
But the real world is a harsh teacher and once the initial plans have stalled it becomes an arms race for both sides to innovate and adopt to the new situation that nobody had planned for. But of course, your enemy is doing the same thing. Repeatedly generals believed they had figured something about, only on the next attack to realize that the enemy had already responded.
> Germany ultimately collapsed because their society was sucked dry.
They collapsed because the German army was completely defeated in the field and in retreat into Germany. Had the Germany army stayed strong inside of France, the society might have made it for a while longer.
> Calling critiques of a conflict that slaughtered 20 million as propaganda is probably one of the more ridiculous statements I’ve read in awhile.
So because something is 'bad', anybody can say anything about it as long as its something 'bad'? What kind of logic is that? If I see bad history, I'm going to mention it.
The fact that the war was effectively stalemate for 2ish years also contributed to both the medical issues involved and the psychological impact of combat too.
They did have fairly strong and comprehensive landline field phone networks, wireless wasn't really needed.
Specially as artillery shells destroyed wires. So pulling a phone over a few 100m of no-mans land was not that hard, these places would be shelled when the counter-attack happens.
So yeah, in pure trench war-fare they had comms, but coordinating an ongoing attack is really what you can't do.
> This is complete and utter nonsense. Please stop spreading these myths.
Which seems to be your goal, here.
Have a great day!
What I am saying is the current stand of historical research on the topic. What you are saying is a bunch of stuff we teach to high schoolers that hasn't been updated since the 60s.
And I'm not 'fighting' with you, I just wanted to inform you and people that might be reading this.
If there was a war European WWI leaders had ignored, it was the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. By then, technology had advanced enough that the teachings of the Franco-Prussian War were no longer valid, and defense was again stronger than offense.
There's a theory that Longstreet saw it all coming, too, but was unable to get the point through to Lee. That is, he saw that trench warfare was going to be the future.
But yeah. The European general staffs were modeling all their train timetables on the fast Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
Grant saw that you have to kill everyone or kill their ability to kill, or both. Lee was looking for the illusive decisive victory to create a political end to the war.
In fairness, the Confederates had an incentive to not see this, as an agrarian slave state cannot out produce a nascent industrial state.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/were-british-first-world-war-...