The End Of The War

Sixty-nine years ago, a B-29 named Bock’s Car made three attempted target runs on Kokura, Japan, but could not see the intended target well enough due to cloud cover. Running low on fuel, Major Charles W. Sweeney decided to switch to his alternate target.
Here is the before and after:

The thing is, despite all the debate about its ethics, the conventional firebombing of Tokyo six months earlier caused many more deaths.
I tend to fall on the side that argues that the unrestricted and unlimited warfare conducted in the Pacific ironically limited the amount of total death and destruction by sapping both sides of their will to continue and to reach a conclusion most quickly.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki might not have been the sole reasons the Japanese surrendered, but they were a key element in it.