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Originally Posted by jmecklenborg
Germany and England were heavily bombed - France, Italy, etc. were not.
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I never said anything about bombing. I said the continent was devastated. To differing degrees, after 5 years of war, it is safe to say that Europe was both physically, economically and humanitarianly devastated.
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The Enola Gay bombed Hiroshima, the Bockscar bombed Nagasaki and has been housed at the USAF museum in Dayton, OH for many years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bockscar. It was there when I was a kid, with a description plaque no different than any other displayed airplane, years before the big controversy over the Enola Gay being put on display at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.
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I stand corrected. I'm not a military historian or a military history enthusiast and honestly don't see how a certain Air Force plane dropped a certain A-bomb on a certain Japanese city changes the point I was making.
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As soon as the B-29 was functional in 1944, all major Japanese cities were quickly and completely destroyed by conventional U.S. bombing. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively small but were among the few left untouched by summer of 1945. Kyoto was spared for cultural reasons.
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I admittedly did not know the extent of conventional aerial bombardment of Japan before we dropped the Bombs. I think the knowledge of that with the average person is murkier than their understanding of European bombing since documentation of it was less available to Western media than the European theater. Even if taken into consideration, the fact remains that Japan did not see mainland ground warfare like central Europe and thus all of the damage was due to aerial bombing. I think I touched a nerve here, like I was trying to misrepresent history or something. I don't think any of these facts change the overall take on why postwar Japan and Europe modernized and expanded rail and transit, while also constructing a modern superhighway network, while the US went the route of mostly auto infrastructure at the expense of rail and transit investment all while watching what was once the worlds greatest rail network wither on the vine.