Greatest Strategic Air Missions

"Matt Wiser" wrote in message
news:412a26b3$1@bg2....

It took a double-whammy of the A-bomb and Ivan crossing into Manchuria and
Korea to end the war. The A-bomb alone might not have been enough.
Anything
that prevents OLYMPIC and CORONET from having to be executed had to be
done.
Period. The Japanese Cabinet was meeting to discuss Hiroshima and the
Soviet
invasion when word reached them of the Nagasaki strike. Next day Hirohito
decides that enough is enough. 14 Aug is the attempted putsch that fails
and the Surrender announcement comes on the 15th. Next probable nuclear
strike
date was on 18 Aug with Kokura as the primary. Bomb #3 was about to leave
Los Alamos on 10 Aug when a hold order arrived. Two bombs and a million
and
a half Russians in the space of four days forced Japan's surrender. End of
story and of war.

Overly simplistic, at least those last two sentences. A hell of a lot more
than that went into the Japanese surrender equation. The tightening sea
blockade, effective inshore mining by B-29's, the creeping effects of the
B-29 raids against industrial and urban areas, the gaining of bases at Iwo
Jima and Okinawa that now moved even more landbased airpower into range of
Kyushu and Honshu, the isolation of large troop garrisons in far-flung and
by then bypassed areas, the fact that they no longer had any navy to speak
of outside kamikaze attack light combatants being horded, along with their
remaining aircraft, to counter the feared invasion of Kyushu, and of course
that feared homeland invasion itself (and the fact that the more reasonable
Japanese leaders by then realized that "Ketsu-Go" was invariably doomed to
failure when that invasion did come)...all of these factors contributed to
the Japanese surrender. The first atomic bomb was an attention getter, the
Soviet invasion was the closure of their forlorn negotiated surrender hopes,
and the second bomb was the final closer.

Brooks

snip