[defrost]

> Nobody expected the United States to specifically target tens of thousands of innocent civilians instead of military targets in a single sweep.

The bald facts are the USofA had already performed overnight raids on 72 cities in Japan and completely levelled them.

The Tokyo firebombing saw tens of thousands of civilian deaths, a similar number to the deaths in Hiroshima.

In Japan at the time bombing raids were expected to strike anywhere and everywhere built up urban | industrial areas existed.

[pigsty]

So 72 cities got burnt down meaning no place is safe. That doesn’t seem like a fair warning and they could’ve avoided the bombing if they want to—that means civilians are being actively targeted and will be massacred no matter where they are.

Japan is a very, very narrow country. “Cities” are basically just a naming convention. Everything from Nagasaki to Tokyo is, frankly, one continuous urban and industrial area. There’s no place that’s more than a brief drive from a dense populated area along that entire corridor.

[brigandish]

You seem to be overlaying a map of Japan now to a map of Japan then. For example, in 1945, Tokyo's population was 7.4 million, whereas it is now several times that. I can't confirm that it takes up a larger area now than it did then but I'd be willing to bet that it does, by quite a way.

[boomboomsubban]

>Everything from Nagasaki to Tokyo is, frankly, one continuous urban and industrial area

I don't know how true that was in 1940. My understanding is that much of that sprawl developed as they rebuilt all the cities that had been bombed.