Didn't forget it. Just skipped it. It was somewhere about 100.000 right? So above Nagasaki. Probably the only allied bomb-raid to have done so, unless that the claims of 130.000 dead at Dresden would be right.
So...what I did:
I just brought up Japanese mass-butcherings that topped a nuclear attack casualty. I could have brought up other parameters to the equation, such as casualties at IWO and Okinawa, but it makes it more complicated.
Bottom line, IMHO, is that the casualty rate and atrocities at the hand of the Japanese was known by the USA, and therefore would be attempted to be stopped at any cost. And if the cost is on the other side...then?
Tokyo did not break the Japanese, despite being a bigger inferno than Dresden or Nagasaki.
Hiroshima didn't either, - the military council decided to carry on at war after Nagasaki. The Japs had actually been warned with propoganda (Flyers and radio) that the Americans had a terrific weapon of mass destruction, but yet after flattening a city, there was not a surrender.
Nagasaki showed that the USA could easily plonk Japan back to the stone age with just one finger. One aircraft, one bomb, and BAM, one city. The leaders of Japan realized, yet the vote for surrender was not a total agreement. But the emperor stepped in....
So. Dresden, and even Hambug should basically have brought up surrender terms on to the receiving end. But as is the case, with such regimes as held the reins, that doesn't work.
(Actually, had the Hamburg Inferno been repeated shortly like once or twice, Germany might have buckled, - source from a highly ranked person in the innermost circle).
Japan was the same.
So, what rests in my mind is that a regime like the Axis had at the wheel, can push forward terrible things and do not buckle untill they meet their superior. And FYI in my mind, the second world war is probably the saddest part of human history.
Chain reaction: We must pay the honours to the slain and learn from it.
