Rationally, the United States might have halted its ground operations against Japan in 1944 once the Marianas had been secured. From its air bases, the USAAF’s Superfortress bombers could reduce the enemy’s homeland to ashes. Together with naval blockade, which crippled Japanese industry and above all oil supplies, irresistible air bombardment made eventual Japanese capitulation inevitable. America’s last bloody island campaigns of 1944–45, like the belated British advance into Burma, did little to advance the outcome of the war. But this is a perspective accessible only to posterity.
