1. The indiscriminate American bombing campaign against mainland Japan resulted in catastrophic civilian casualties and suffering
Whilst Allied air raids on the Japanese home islands were untenable for the majority of the Second World War and limited to small-scale missions such as the Doolittle Raid of April 1942, by mid-1944, with the deployment of the B-29 Superfortress, the strategic bombing campaign begun in earnest; the campaign expanded considerably from February 1945, after the Mariana Islands became available as a launch base for said bombing operations. Designed to soften up mainland Japan for the planned ground invasion, scheduled to begin October 1945, between January 1944 and August 1945 the U.S. dropped 157,000 tons of bombs on Japanese cities.
Whilst responsible for the successful annihilation of Japanese industrial output, crippling an already diminished armament production, the bombing campaign was also responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. An estimated 300,000-900,000 civilians were killed in U.S. bombing raids on Japanese mainland cities, a figure including the nuclear bombings which this author believes should be regarded as a separate issue to the wider bombing campaign. Moreover, the use of incendiaries, such as napalm, resulted in catastrophic and lasting damage to the targeted cities, with approximately 40 percent of the urban areas of the 66 cities subjected to Allied bombing destroyed and resulting in 15 million Japanese homeless from a population of 70 million.
Worthy of particular mention as a singular atrocity, the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945, far surpasses the more infamous bombing of Dresden a month prior. Dropping napalm combined with petroleum jelly, the raid resulted in the destruction of more than 40 square kilometers of the capital city and the deaths of more than 100,000 civilians; some of these victims were literally melted by the resultant inferno, with General LeMay later remarking that had the Allies lost the war he would have been charged with war crimes for authorizing the operation.