Reddit reviews The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945

Read James D. Hornfischer's books:

Neptune's Inferno - About Guadalcanal

The Fleet at Flood Tide - The Pacific campaign later in the war. I'm currently reading this.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors - About Taffey 3 and battle off Samar

> In WWII Germany, the US engaged in indiscriminate bombing of Dresden

In WWII, all strategic bombing was "indiscriminate," thanks. If the Germans wanted to be precision bombed, why did they put up AA? No pilot will fly down to the deck if you put up tons of that stuff.

Also, you left out the United Kingdom, thanks.

I will never tire of pointing out that the Allied strategic bombing campaign happened for two reasons:

1. The British refused to invade France even by 1943, and
   
2. Stalin was screaming for a second front.
   
   Putting aside Stalin's guilt over the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he had a point. Clearing North Africa and the Mediterranean Sea in 1942 was undoubtedly a good idea, since Britain could ship to and from the BMI theater, which relieved American forces in the Pacific. You could make a case for taking Sicily to box in Italy (which should never have been invaded), as well.
   
   Churchill had a good idea about using the Ljubljana Gap to invade Mitteleuropa without having to muck all across France but, sadly, no one took him up on it. An Allied invasion into Trieste and environs in 1943 would have meant Operation Tidal Wave, against the Ploiești oil fields, would have had a round trip ~2000 km shorter than from their actual base in the Mandate of Palestine. That would have crippled Germany.
   
   > to clear a route for the red army to invade.
   
   The Battle of Berlin began before the Battle of Dresden. Dresden was a shipping hub to the Wehrmacht and SS, not the path to Berlin.
   
   As for indiscriminate civilian casualties, I was unaware that Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Ernest J. King, no one's idea of a soft touch, had visited Saipan until I read Hornfischer:
   
   > “Saipan was filled with horror, but it was during these securing days that we came upon the worst of the nightmares,” Robert Graf wrote. The Fourth Marine Division history records that “Mothers and fathers stabbed, strangled, or shot their screaming children, hurled them into the sea and leapt in after them, all in view of Marines on top of the cliffs. Surrender pleas were largely in vain. Many who wished to do so were prevented by Japanese soldiers.” — Hornfischer, James, The Fleet at Flood Tide, ch 24.
   
   "A true man would rather be the shattered jewel (gyokusai), ashamed to be the intact tile."
   
   > What the top commanders saw at Marpi Point shocked them. Preserved on the rocks below the cliffs was “the crowning horror of Japanese lunacy,” King would write: the bodies of hundreds of civilians, “egged on by the military, [who] had cast themselves from the cliffs…in an orgy of self-destruction.” They drove south to Garapan, past the cliffs where Saito and Nagumo had taken their lives. Two realities were made clear to the U.S. Navy brain trust: A great victory was at hand in the Central Pacific, and far worse lay ahead. — ch 25.
   
   Then:
   
   > Likewise, the American firebombing of Tokyo fit many definitions of indiscriminate.
   
   The B-29 was immune to Japanese AA, but being so high put the bombers into the jet stream, making bombing even more imprecise over Japan than over Germany. LeMay then made the decision to switch the B-29s to incendiaries, using, as horrible as it sounds, the cities to burn down the factories:
   
   > Curtis LeMay would continue the high-altitude precision raids for another forty-nine days, to no better result. At that point he resolved to change dramatically the nature of the effort. A firebombing campaign just might be the fix. LeMay was about to change the way the XXI Bomber Command waged war. — ch 29.
   
   LeMay ordered leaflets dropped over 5-6 cities, noting that one of them would be flattened by the USAAF soon, in an attempt to eliminate civilian casualties without giving the Japanese military a target.