then for no apparent reason- boom

I remember seeing how entire neighborhoods in the UK and Germany were evacuated... all these years later... when a bomb was discovered and needed to be removed. Clearly, they can still pack a dangerous punch!

Every year a farmer in Germany or France or Belgium ends up churning up a 500 pound bomb. The Germans tend to find them whenever they are doing construction. The air campaign against Japan was not as long as the one in Europe so there will be less of these incidents in Japan. Sadly this is the byproduct of war.

And then there were two atomic bombs.

Yes the fire bombing of Tokyo in March of 1945 killed more people than the combined death toll from the two atomic bombs did. However the air campaign against Japan was largely conventional in terms of using the standard 500 pound bombs.

Last edited Wed Oct 2, 2024, 11:24 PM - Edit history (1)

There was a rationale for the merciless bombing of residential areas of a Japanese city. The war effort was sustained by thousands of small machine shops throughout the residential areas of the city that were under contract with large corporations. Where I lived in tokyo in there 70s and 80s there were still numerous small metal-working, printing, and machine shops under contract to the large corporations working 18 hours a day when a large order came in. When business was good, they were paid on time. When it wasn't, they had to wait to be paid at the mercy of the corporations that paid them.

Bombing airports and ports is pretty much war 101.

Old unexploded bombs from WWI and WWII still turn up in London and in French farmlands

Someone calling it “a war crime” is foolish, except insofar as wars themselves may be thought of as crimes.

Somehow I'm a little impressed.

it didn't work when it was supposed to. But yeah, I guess it's impressive in a way