Did the us hit there targets when they bombed the japanese?

Answer 1

Not always, or even often. At first the US tried to bomb Japan as they had been bombing in Europe, from high altitude, using precision bomb sights. Conditions in the Pacific were very different though, with amazingly strong winds at high altitudes. These winds - up to 200 mph - would scatter the bombs and blow the bombs away from the target. And even when direct hits were obtained using high explosive general purpose bombs the damage inflicted was insufficient. Industrial facilities might have the roof of a factory collapsed, but the wreckage could be removed and the machine tools underneath were often unharmed or only slightly damaged. (This was also true in Europe but unknown to Allied commanders until the Strategic Bombing Survey after the war evaluataed the effectiveness of the bombing campaign in destroying German industry). And the Japanese began to disperse their industrial activity, turning it into actual "cottage industry", where workers performed tasks - even machining - in their own homes, multiplying and disguising the number of targets which needed to be hit. All this caused General Curtis LeMay (a veteran of the European bombing campaign) commanding the bombers in the Pacific to make the decision, on his own responsibility, without consulting his superiors, to switch to a campaign of incendiary fire-bombing. Machine guns and gunners were removed from the B-29s, so more bombs could be carried. The bombers now carried clusters of 20 pound incendiary bombs, 50 to a cluster. These came down with little parachutes, and a single one on the roof could burn down a house or a commercial building. LeMay reasoned correctly that starting thousands of fires would overwhelm Japanese fire departments, and that this method would be particularly effective against Japanese housing, made mostly of paper and wood. This would kill or render homeless the workers and destroy the dispersed "cottage industry". Instead of coming over in large groups, the bombers came individually, at all altitudes, from all directions, all night long, trying only to hit large cities. In effect, this was a switch to "area bombing" by night, as practiced by the British Royal Air Force in Europe, and disparaged and rejected as ineffective and brutal by the US air forces in Europe, but perhaps the only solution to making an effective bombing campaign against Japan with the technology then available. These fire raids did destroy many square miles of dozens of Japanese cities, and killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese. Several times "fire storms" were created, where the individual blazes merged into one huge conflagration, which caused hurricane force winds as the fires sucked in oxygen, uprooting trees and suffocating those not burned to death, and creating temperatures sufficient to boil rivers and burn asphalt streets. During the Tokyo fire raids of March, 1945, more people were killed in a single night than in both atomic attacks combined.