The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 5 | Issue 5 | May 02, 2007

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A Forgotten Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destructionof Japanese Cities & the American Way of War from WorldWar II to Iraq

Mark Selden

A Forgotten Holocaust: US BombingStrategy, the Destruction of JapaneseCities and the American Way of Warfrom World War II to Iraq [*]

Mark Selden

World War II was a landmark in thedevelopment and deployment oftechnologies of mass destructionassociated with air power, notably theB-29 bomber, napalm and the atomicbomb. An estimated 50 to 70 millionpeople lay dead in its wake. In a sharpreversal of the pattern of World War Iand of most earlier wars, a substantialm a j o r i t y o f t h e d e a d w e r enoncombatants. [1] The air war, whichreached peak intensity with the areabombing, including atomic bombing, ofmajor European and Japanese cities in itsfinal year, had a devastating impact onnoncombatant populations.

What is the logic and what have been theconsequences—for its victims, forsubsequent global patterns of warfareand for international law—of newtechnologies of mass destruction andtheir application associated with the riseof air power and bombing technology inWorld War II and after? Above all, how

have these experiences shaped theAmerican way of war over six decades inwhich the United States has been a majoractor in important wars? The issues haveparticular salience in an epoch whosecentral international discourse centers onterror and the War on Terror, one inw h i c h t h e t e r r o r i n f l i c t e d o nnoncombatants by the major powers isfrequently neglected.

Strategic Bombing and InternationalLaw

Bombs had been dropped from the air asearly as 1849 on Venice (from balloons)and 1911 in Libya (from planes).

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A nineteenth century balloon

Major European powers attempted to usethem in newly founded air forces duringWorld War I. If the impact on theoutcomes was marginal, the advance ofair power alerted all nations to thepotential significance of airpower infuture wars. [2] A series of internationalconferences at the Hague beginning in1899 set out principles for limiting airwar and securing the protection ofnoncombatants from bombing and otherattacks. The 1923 Hague conferencecrafted a sixty-two article “Rules of AerialWarfare,” which prohibited “Aerialbombardment for the purpose ofterrorizing the civilian population, ofdestroying or damaging private propertynot of a military character, or of injuringnon-combatants.” It specifically limitedbombardment to military objectives,prohibited “indiscriminate bombardmentof the civilian population,” and heldviolators liable to pay compensation. [3]Securing consensus and enforcing limits,

however, proved extraordinarily elusivethen and since.

Throughout the long twentieth century,and particularly during and in theimmediate aftermath of World War II, theinexorable advance of weaponstechnology went hand in hand withinternational efforts to place limits onkilling and barbarism associated withwar , part icu lar ly the k i l l ing o fnoncombatants in s t ra teg ic orindiscriminate bombing raids. [4] Thisarticle considers the interplay of thedevelopment of powerful weapons anddelivery systems associated with bombingand attempts to create internationalstandards to curb the uses of bombingagainst noncombatants, with particularreference to the United States.

The strategic and ethical implications ofthe nuclear bombing of Hiroshima andNagasaki have generated a vastcontentious literature, as have Germanand Japanese war crimes and atrocities.By contrast, the US destruction of morethan sixty Japanese cities prior toHiroshima has been slighted both in thescholarly literatures in English andJapanese and in popular consciousness inboth Japan and the US. It has beenovershadowed by the atomic bombingand by heroic narratives of Americanconduct in the “Good War”, an outcomenot unrelated to the emergence of the USas a superpower. [5] Arguably, however,the central technological, strategic andethical breakthroughs that would leavetheir stamp on subsequent wars occurredin area bombing of noncombatants priorto the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and

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Nagasaki. A.C. Grayling explains thedifferent responses to firebombing andatomic bombing this way: “. . . the frissonof dread created by the thought of whatatomic weaponry can do affects thosewho contemplate it more than those whoactually suffer from it; for whether it isan atom bomb rather than tons of highexplosives and incendiaries that does thedamage, not a jot of suffering is added toits victims that the burned and buried,the dismembered and blinded, the dyingand bereaved of Dresden or Hamburg didnot feel.” [6]

If others, notably Germany, England andJapan led the way in area bombing, thetargeting for destruction of entire citieswith conventional weapons emerged in1944-45 as the centerpiece of USwarfare. It was an approach thatcombined technological predominancewith minimization of US casualties inways that would become the hallmark ofthe American way of war in campaignsfrom Korea and Indochina to the Gulf andIraq Wars and, indeed define thetrajectory of major wars since the 1940s.The result would be the decimation ofnoncombatant populat ions andextraordinary “kill ratios” favoring theUS military. Yet for the US, victory wouldprove extraordinary elusive. This is oneimportant reason why, six decades on,World War II retains its aura forAmericans as the “Good War”, and whyAmericans have yet to effectively come togrips with questions of ethics andinternational law associated with theirarea bombing of Germany and Japan.

The twentieth century was notable for

the contradiction between internationala t tempts to p lace l imi ts on thedestructiveness of war and to holdnations and their military leadersresponsible for violations of internationallaws of war (Nuremberg and TokyoTribunals and successive Genevaconventions, particularly the 1949convention protecting civilians andPOWs) and the systematic violation ofthose principles by the major powers. [7]For example, while the Nuremberg andTokyo Tribunals clearly articulated theprinciple of universality, the Tribunals,both held in cit ies that had beenobliterated by Allied bombing, famouslyshielded the victorious powers, above allthe US, from responsibility for warcrimes and crimes against humanity.Telford Taylor, chief counsel for warcrimes prosecution at Nuremberg, madethe point with specific reference to thebombing of cities a quarter century later:[8]

Since both sides had playedthe terrible game of urbandestruction—the Allies farmore successfully—therewas no basis for criminalcharges against Germans orJapanese, and in fact nosuch charges were brought .. . . Aerial bombardment hadbeen used so extensivelyand ruthlessly on the Alliedside as well as the Axis sidethat neither at Nurembergnor Tokyo was the issuemade a part of the trials.

From 1932 to the early years of WorldWar I I the United States was an

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outspoken critic of city bombing, notablybut not exclusively German and Japanesebombing. President Franklin Rooseveltappealed to the warring nations in 1939on the first day of World War II “under nocircumstances [to] undertake thebombardment from the air of civilianpopulations or of unfortified cities.” [9]Britain, France and Germany agreed tolimit bombing to strictly militaryobjectives, but in May 1940 Germanbombardment of Rotterdam exacted40,000 civilian lives and forced the Dutchsurrender. Up to this point, bombing ofcities had been isolated, sporadic and forthe most part confined to the axispowers. Then in August 1940, afterGerman bombers bombed London,Churchill ordered an attack on Berlin.The steady escalation of bombingtargeting cities and their noncombatantpopulations followed. [10]

Strategic Bombing of Europe

After entering the war following PearlHarbor, the US continued to claim themoral high ground by abjuring civilianbombing. This stance was consistent withthe prevailing view in the Air Force highcommand that the most efficient bombingstrategies were those that pinpointeddestruction of enemy forces andinstallations, factories, and railroads, notthose designed to terrorize or killnoncombatants. Nevertheless, the UScollaborated with indiscriminate bombingat Casablanca in 1943, when a US-Britishdivision of labor emerged in which theBritish conducted the indiscriminatebombing of cities and the US sought todestroy military and industrial targets.

[11] In the final years of the war, MaxHastings observed that Churchill and hisbomber commander Arthur Harris set outto concentrate “all available forces forthe progressive, systematic destruction ofthe urban areas of the Reich, city blockby city block, factory by factory, until theenemy became a nation of troglodytes,scratching in the ruins.” [12] Britishstrategists were convinced that thedestruction of cities by night areabombing attacks would break the moraleof German civilians while crippling warproduction. From 1942 with the bombingof Lubeck followed by Cologne, Hamburgand others, Harris pursued this strategy.The perfection of onslaught from the air,or what should be understood as terrorbombing, is better understood, however,as a British-American joint venture.

Hamburg seen from 18,000 feet on July 28, 1943

Throughout 1942-44, as the air war inEurope swung ineluctably toward areabombing, the US Air Force proclaimed itsadherence to precision bombing.However, this approach failed not only to

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force surrender on either Germany orJapan, but even to inflict significantdamage on their war-making capacity.With German artillery and interceptorstaking a heavy toll on US planes,pressure mounted for a strategic shift ata time of growing sophistication,numbers and range of US aircraft, andthe invention of napalm and theperfection of radar. Ironically, whileradar could have paved the way for areaffirmation of tactical bombing, nowmade feasible at night, in the context ofthe endgame of the war what transpiredwas the massive assault on cities andtheir urban populations.

On February 13-14, 1945 British bomberswith US planes following up destroyedDresden, a historic cultural center withno significant military industry or bases.By conservative estimate, 35,000 peoplewere incinerated in a single raid led by.[13] The American writer Kurt Vonnegut,then a young POW in Dresden, pennedthe classic account: [14]

They burnt the whole damntown down . . . . Every day wewalked into the city and duginto basements and shelters toget the corpses out , as asanitary measure. When wewent into them, a typicalshelter, an ordinary basementusually, looked like a streetcarf u l l o f p e o p l e w h o ’ dsimultaneously had heartfailure. Just people sitting therein their chairs, all dead. A firestorm is an amazing thing. Itdoesn’t occur in nature. It’s fedby the tornadoes that occur in

the midst of it and there isn’t adamned thing to breathe.

“Along with the Nazi exterminationcamps, the killing of Soviet and Americanprisoners, and other enemy atrocities,”Ronald Schaffer observes, “Dresdenbecame one of the moral causes célèbresof World War II.” [15] Although far worsewas in the offing in Japan, Dresdenprovoked the last significant publicdiscussion of the bombing of women andchildren to take place during World WarII, and the city became synonymous withterror bombing by the US and Britain.Coming in the wake of both the Hamburgand Munich bombings, the Britishgovernment faced sharp questioning inparliament. [16] In the United States,debate was largely provoked not by thedestruction wrought by the raids, but byan Associated Press report widelypublished in the US and Britain statingexplicitly that “the Allied air commandershave made the long-awaited decision toadopt deliberate terror bombing of thegreat German population centers as aruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’sdoom.” American officials quickly actedto neutralize the report by pointing to thewidely publicized great cathedral ofCologne, left standing after US bombingas a symbol of American humanity, andby reiterating US adherence to principlesrestricting attacks to military targets.Secretary of War Henry Stimson statedthat “Our policy never has been to inflictterror bombing on civilian populations,”claiming that Dresden, as a majortransportation hub, was of militarysignificance. [17] In fact, US public

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discussion, not to speak of protest, wasminimal; in Britain there was moreimpassioned discussion, but with thesme l l o f v i c to ry i n the a i r , thegovernment easily quieted the storm. Thebombing continued. Strategic bombinghad passed its sternest test in the realmof public reaction in Britain and theUnited States.

Dresden. Bodies found beneath wreckage

Strategic Bombing of Japan

But it was in the Pacific theatre, andspecifically in Japan, that the full brunt ofair power would be felt. Between 1932and 1945, Japan had bombed Shanghai,Nanjing, Chongqing and other cities,testing chemical weapons in Ningbo andthroughout Zhejiang province. [18] In theearly months of 1945, the United Statesshifted its attention to the Pacific as itgained the capacity to attack Japan fromnewly captured bases in Tinian andGuam. While the US continued toproclaim adherence to tactical bombing,tests of firebombing options againstJapanese homes throughout 1943-44demonstrated that M-69 bombs werehighly effective against the densely

packed wooden structures of Japanesecities. [19] In the final six months of thewar, the US threw the full weight of itsair power into campaigns to burn wholeJapanese cities to the ground andterrorize, incapacitate and kill theirlargely defenseless residents in an effortto force surrender.

As Michael Sherry and Cary Karacashave pointed out for the US and Japanrespectively, prophecy preceded practicein the destruction of Japanese cities, andwell before US planners undertookstrategic bombing. Thus Sherry observesthat “Walt Disney imagined an orgiasticdestruction of Japan by air in his 1943animated feature Victory Through AirPower (based on Alexander P. DeSeversky’s 1942 book),” while Karacasnotes that the best-selling Japanesewriter Unna Juzo, beginning in his early1930s “air-defense novels”, anticipatedthe destruction of Tokyo by bombing. [20]Both reached mass audiences in the USand Japan, in important sensesanticipating the events to follow.

Curtis LeMay was appointed commanderof the 21s t Bomber Command in thePacific on January 20, 1945. Capture ofthe Marianas, including Guam, Tinianand Saipan in summer 1944 had placedJapanese cities within effective range ofthe B-29 “Superfortress” bombers, whileJapan’s depleted air and naval power leftit virtually defenseless against sustainedair attack.

LeMay was the primary architect, astrategic innovator, and most quotablespokesman for US policies of putting

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enemy cities, and later villages andforests, to the torch from Japan to Koreato Vietnam. In this, he was emblematic ofthe American way of war that emergedfrom World War II. Viewed from anotherangle, however, he was but a link in achain of command that had begun toconduct area bombing in Europe. Thatchain of command extended upwardthrough the Joint Chiefs to the presidentwho authorized what would become thecenterpiece of US warfare. [22]

The US resumed bombing of Japan after atwo-year lull following the 1942 Doolittleraids in fall 1944. The goal of thebombing assault that destroyed Japan’smajor cities in the period between Mayand August 1945, the US StrategicBombing Survey explained, was “either tobring overwhelming pressure on her tosurrender, or to reduce her capability ofresisting invasion. . . . [by destroying] thebasic economic and social fabric of thecountry.” [23] A proposal by the Chief ofStaff of the Twentieth Air Force to targetthe imperial palace was rejected, but inthe wake of successive failures toeliminate such key strategic targets asJapan’s Nakajima Aircraft Factory west ofTokyo, the area bombing of Japanesecities was approved. [24]

The full fury of firebombing and napalmwas unleashed on the night of March9-10, 1945 when LeMay sent 334 B-29slow over Tokyo from the Marianas. Theirmission was to reduce the city to rubble,kill its citizens, and instill terror in thesurvivors, with jellied gasoline andnapalm that would create a sea of flames.Stripped of their guns to make more

room for bombs, and flying at altitudesaveraging 7,000 feet to evade detection,the bombers, which had been designedfor high-altitude precision attacks,carried two kinds of incendiaries: M47s,100-pound oil gel bombs, 182 peraircraft, each capable of starting a majorfire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 per aircraft inaddition to a few high explosives to deterfirefighters. [25] The attack on an areathat the US Strategic Bombing Surveyestimated to be 84.7 percent residentialsucceeded beyond the wildest dreams ofair force planners. Whipped by fiercewinds, flames detonated by the bombsleaped across a fifteen square mile areaof Tokyo generating immense firestormsthat engulfed and killed scores ofthousands of residents.

Tokyo bombing along the Sumida River

In contrast with Vonnegut’s “waxmuseum” description of Dresden victims,accounts from inside the inferno thatengulfed Tokyo chronicle scenes of uttercarnage. We have come to measure theefficacy of bombing by throw weights and

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kill ratios, eliding the perspectives oftheir victims. But what of those who feltthe wrath of the bombs?

Police cameraman Ishikawa Koyodescribed the streets of Tokyo as “riversof fire . . . flaming pieces of furnitureexploding in the heat, while the peoplethemselves blazed like ‘matchsticks’ astheir wood and paper homes exploded inflames. Under the wind and the giganticbreath of the fire, immense incandescentvortices rose in a number of places,swirling, flattening, sucking whole blocksof houses into their maelstrom of fire.”

Father Flaujac, a French cleric,compared the firebombing to the Tokyoearthquake twenty-two years earlier, anevent whose massive destruction,another form of prophecy, had alertedboth Japanese science fiction writers andsome of the original planners of theTokyo holocaust: [26]

In September 1923, during thegreat earthquake, I saw Tokyoburning for 5 days. I saw in Honjoa heap of 33,000 corpses ofpeople who burned or suffocateda t t h e b e g i n n i n g o f t h ebombardment . . . After the firstquake there were 20-odd centersof fire, enough to destroy thec a p i t a l . H o w c o u l d t h econflagration be stopped whenincendiary bombs in the dozensof thousands now dropped overthe four corners of the districtand with Japanese houses whichare only match boxes? . . . Wherecould one fly? The fire waseverywhere.

Nature reinforced man's handiwork inthe form of akakaze, the red wind thatswept with hurricane force across theTokyo plain and propelled firestormsacross the city with terrifying speed andintensity. The wind drove temperaturesup to eighteen hundred degreesFahrenheit, creating superheated vaporsthat advanced ahead of the flames, killingor incapacitating their victims. "Themechanisms of death were so multipleand simultaneous—oxygen deficiency andcarbon monoxide poisoning, radiant heatand direct flames, debris and thet r a m p l i n g f e e t o f s t a m p e d i n gcrowds—that causes of death were laterhard to ascertain . . .” [27]

The Strategic Bombing Survey, whoseformation a few months earlier providedan important signal of Roosevelt’ssupport for strategic bombing, provided atechnical description of the firestorm andits effects on Tokyo:

The chief characteristic of theconflagration . . . was the presenceof a fire front, an extended wall offire moving to leeward, preceded bya mass of pre-heated, turbid,burning vapors . . . . The 28-mile-per-hour wind, measured a milefrom the fire, increased to anestimated 55 miles at the perimeter,and probably more within. Anextended fire swept over 15 squaremiles in 6 hours . . . . The area of thefire was nearly 100 percent burned;no structure or its contents escapeddamage.

The survey concluded—plausibly, butonly for events prior to August 6,

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1945—that

“probably more persons lost their lives byfire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than atany time in the history of man. Peopledied from extreme heat, from oxygendeficiency, from carbon monoxideasphyxiation, from being trampledbeneath the feet of stampeding crowds,and from drowning. The largest number ofvictims were the most vulnerable: women,children and the elderly.”

How many people died on the night ofMarch 9-10 in what flight commanderGen. Thomas Power termed “the greatestsingle disaster incurred by any enemy inmilitary history?” The Strategic BombingSurvey estimated that 87,793 people diedin the raid, 40,918 were injured, and1,008,005 people lost their homes.Robert Rhodes, estimating the dead atmore than 100,000 men, women andchildren, suggested that probably amillion more were injured and anothermillion were left homeless. The TokyoFire Department estimated 97,000 killedand 125,000 wounded. The Tokyo Policeoffered a figure of 124,711 killed andwounded and 286,358 building andhomes destroyed. The figure of roughly100,000 deaths, provided by Japaneseand American authorities, both of whommay have had reasons of their own forminimizing the death toll, seems to mearguably low in light of populationdensity, wind conditions, and survivors’accounts. [28] With an average of103,000 inhabitants per square mile andpeak levels as high as 135,000 per squaremile, the highest density of any industrialcity in the world, and with firefighting

measures ludicrously inadequate to thetask, 15.8 square miles of Tokyo weredestroyed on a night when fierce windswhipped the flames and walls of fireblocked tens of thousands fleeing fortheir lives. An estimated 1.5 millionpeople lived in the burned out areas.Given a near total inability to fight firesof the magnitude produced by the bombs,it is possible to imagine that casualtiesmay have been several times higher thanthe figures presented on both sides of theconflict. The single effective Japanesegovernment measure taken to reduce theslaughter of US bombing was the 1944evacuation to the countryside of 400,000children from major cities, 225, 000 ofthem from Tokyo. [29]

Following the attack, LeMay, never oneto mince words, said that he wantedTokyo “burned down—wiped right off themap” to “shorten the war.” Tokyo didburn. Subsequent raids brought thedevastated area of Tokyo to more than 56square miles, provoking the flight ofmillions of refugees.

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Curtis LeMay in the 1940s

No previous or subsequent conventionalbombing raid ever came close togenerat ing the tol l in death anddestruction of the great Tokyo raid ofMarch 9-10. The airborne assault onTokyo and other Japanese cities groundon relentlessly. According to Japanesepolice statistics, the 65 raids on Tokyobetween December 6, 1944 and August13, 1945 resulted in 137,582 casualties,787,145 homes and buildings destroyed,and 2,625,279 people displaced. [30]Following the Tokyo raid of March 9-10,the f i rebombing was ex tendednationwide. In the ten-day periodbeginning on March 9, 9,373 tons of

bombs destroyed 31 square miles ofTokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe. Overall,bombing strikes destroyed 40 percent ofthe 66 Japanese cities targeted, with totaltonnage dropped on Japan increasingfrom 13,800 tons in March to 42,700 tonsin July. [31] If the bombing of Dresdenproduced a ripple of public debate inEurope, no discernible wave of revulsion,not to speak of protest, took place in theUS or Europe in the wake of the fargreater destruction of Japanese cities andthe slaughter of civilian populations on ascale that had no parallel in the history ofbombing.

In July, US planes blanketed the fewremaining Japanese cities that had beenspared firebombing with an “Appeal tothe People.” “As you know,” it read,“America which stands for humanity,does not wish to injure the innocentpeople, so you had better evacuate thesecities.” Half the leafleted cities werefirebombed within days of the warning.US planes ruled the skies. Overall, by onecalculation, the US f irebombingcampaign destroyed 180 square miles of67 cities, killed more than 300,000people and injured an additional 400,000,figures that exclude the atomic bombingof Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [32]

Between January and July 1945, the USfirebombed and destroyed all but fiveJapanese cities, deliberately sparingKyoto, the ancient imperial capital, andfour others. The extent of the destructionwas impressive ranging from 50 to 60%of the urban area destroyed in citiesincluding Kobe, Yokohama and Tokyo, to60 to 88% in seventeen cities, to 98.6% in

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the case of Toyama. [33] In the end, theAtomic Bomb Selection Committee choseHiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, andNagasaki as the pristine targets todisplay the awesome power of the atomicbomb to Japan and the world in the eventthat would both bring to a spectacularend the costliest war in human historyand send a powerful message to theSoviet Union.

Michael Sherry has compellinglydescribed the triumph of technologicalfanaticism as the hallmark of the air warthat quintessentially shaped theAmerican way of fighting and heavilystamped remembrances of the War everafter:

The shared mentality of thefanatics of air war was theirdedication to assembling andperfecting their methods ofdestruction, and . . . doing soovershadowed the originalp u r p o s e s j u s t i f y i n gdestruction . . . .The lack of aproclaimed intent to destroy,the sense of being driven byt h e t w i n d e m a n d s o fbureaucracy and technology,distinguished America’stechnological fanaticism fromits enemies’ ideologicalfanaticism.

Technological fanaticism served toconceal the larger purposes of powerboth from military planners and thepublic. This suggestive formulation,however, conceals core ideologicalpatterns at the heart of Americanstrategic thought. Wartime technological

fanaticism in my view is best understoodas a means of operationalizing nationalgoals. Taken for granted were thelegitimacy and benevolence of Americanglobal power and a perception of theJapanese as both uniquely brutal andinherently inferior. Technology washarnessed to the driving force ofAmerican nationalism, which repeatedlycame to the fore in times of war, and wasfashioned under wartime conditions,beginning with the conquest of thePhilippines in 1898 and running throughsuccessive wars and police actions inLatin America and Asia that spanned thelong twentieth century. In other words,technological fanaticism is inseparablefrom American nat ional ism andconceptions of a benevolent American-dominated global order. In contrast toBritish, Japanese and other nationalismsassociated with expansive powers, theAmerican approach to the postwar orderlay not in a vision centered on theacquisition of colonies but in a globalnetwork of military bases and naval andair power that only in recent years hasbegun to be understood as the Americanway of empire. [34]

Throughout the spring and summer of1945 the US air war in Japan reached anintensity that is still perhaps unrivaled inthe magnitude of human slaughter. [35]That moment was a product of thec o m b i n a t i o n o f t e c h n o l o g i c a lbreakthroughs, American nationalism,and the erosion of moral and politicalscruples pertaining to the killing ofcivilians, perhaps intensified by theracism that crystallized in the Pacific

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theatre. [36]

The targeting for destruction of entirepopulations, whether indigenous peoples,religious infidels, or others deemedinferior or evil, may be as old as humanhistory, but the forms it takes are as newas the latest technologies of destructionand strategic innovation, of which airpower, firebombing and nuclear weaponsare particularly notable. [37] The mostimportant way in which World War IIshaped the moral and technological tenorof mass destruction was the erosion inthe course o f war o f the s t igmaassociated with the systematic targetingof civilian populations from the air, andelimination of the constraints, which forsome years had restrained certain airpowers from area bombing. What wasnew was both the scale of killing madepossible by the new technologies and theroutinization of mass killing or stateterrorism. If area bombing remainedcontroversial throughout much of WorldWar II, something to be concealed ordenied by its practitioners, by the end ofthe conflagration it would become theacknowledged centerpiece of warmaking, emblematic above all of theAmerican way of war even as the natureof the targets and the weapons weretransformed by new technologies andconfronted new forms of resistance.Indeed, for six decades the US (and thosefighting under its umbrella) has beenvirtually alone in fighting wars and policeactions notable for their reliance onairpower in general and the deliberatetargeting for destruction of civilians, andthe infrastructure that makes possible

their survival, in particular. Certainly inthis epoch no others have bombed on ascale approaching that of the US. The USwould conceal the deliberate annihilationof noncombatants with the figleaf thatSahr Conway-Lanz describes as the mythof collateral damage, that is the claim,however systematic the bombing, thatthe intent was elimination of militaryt a r g e t s , n o t t h e s l a u g h t e r o fnoncombatants.

Concerted efforts to protect civiliansfrom the ravages of war reached a peakin the aftermath of World War II in thefounding of the United Nations, Germanand Japanese War Crimes Tribunals, andthe 1949 Geneva Accords and its 1977Protocol. The Nuremberg Indictmentdefined “crimes against humanity” as“murder, extermination, enslavement,deportation, and other inhumane actscommit ted against any c iv i l ianpopulation, before or during the war,”language that resonated powerfully withthe area bombing campaigns not only ofJapan and Germany but of Britain and theUS. [38] These efforts appear to havedone little to stay the hand of power.Indeed, while the atomic bomb wouldleave a deep imprint on the collectiveconsciousness of the twentieth century,memory of the area bombings andfirebombing of major cit ies soondisappeared from the consciousness of allbut the victims.

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Prime Minister Tojo Hideki at Tokyo Trial

The ability to destroy an entire city andannihilate its population in a singlebombing campaign was not only far more“efficient” and less costly for the attackerthan previous methods of warfare, it alsosanitized slaughter. Air power distancedexecutioners from victims, transformingthe visual and tactile experience ofkilling. The bombardier never lookssquarely into the eyes of the victim, nordoes the act of destruction have thephysical immediacy for the perpetrator ofdecapitation by sword or even shootingwith a machine gun. This may beparticularly important when the principaltargets are women, children and theelderly.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima andNagasaki was the pinnacle of the processof annihilation of civilian populations inthe pursuit of military victory. WhilePresident Truman claimed that theHiroshima bomb targeted a naval base,the decision to detonate the bomb in theskies above Hiroshima and Nagasaki wastaken to maximize the killing of theirinhabitants and the destruction of the

built environment. It was also calculatedto demonstrate to the Japanesegovernment and peop le , to theauthorities in the Soviet Union and otherpotential challengers of Americanpreeminence, and to the people of theworld, the omnipotence of Americanpower and the certain destruction thatwould be visited on any who defied theUnited States. The debate over the use ofthe atomic bomb at Hiroshima andNagasaki has reverberated throughoutthe postwar era, centered on the killingof noncombatants and on its significancein ending World War II and shaping thesubsequent US-Soviet conflict thatdefined postwar geopolitics. [39] In asense, however, the very focus of thatdebate on the atomic bomb, and later onthe development of the hydrogen bomb,may have contributed to the silencing ofthe no less pressing issues associatedwith the killing of noncombatants withever more powerful ‘conventional’weapons.

The US did not drop atomic bombs againin the six decades since the end of WorldWar II, although it repeatedly threatenedtheir use in Korea, in Vietnam andelsewhere . But i t incorporatedannihilation of noncombatants in thebombing programs that have beenintegral to the successive “conventionalwars” that it has waged subsequently.With area bombing at the core of itsstrategic agenda, US attacks on citiesand noncombatants would run the gamutfrom firebombing, napalming, clusterbombing, and atomic bombing to the useof chemical defoliants and depleted

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uranium weapons and bunker busterbombs in an ever expanding circle ofdestruction. [40] Indiscriminate bombingof noncombatants has been responsiblefor the most massive destruction and lossof life throughout this epoch, even whilethe US staunchly maintains that it doesnot deliberately kill civilians, therebyhewing to Conway-Lanz’s collateraldamage principle to protect it not onlyfrom political criticism in the US, but alsofrom international criticisms.

World War II remains unrivaled in theannals of war by important measuressuch as the number of people killed andthe scale of mass destruction. In thatwar, it was not the bombing of cities butNazi genocide against Jews, Catholics,Romany, homosexuals and otherGermans as well as Poles, the Germaninvasion of the Soviet Union, andJ a p a n e s e s l a u g h t e r o f A s i a nnoncombatants that exacted the heaviestprice in human lives. Each of theseexamples had its unique character andhistorical and ideological origins. Allrested on dehumanizing assumptionsconcerning the “other” and producedlarge-scale slaughter of noncombatantpopulations. Japan’s China war producednotable cases of atrocities that, then andlater, captured world attention. Theyincluded the Nanjing Massacre, thebombings of Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankou,Chongqing and other c i t ies , theenslavement of the comfort women, andthe vivisection experiments andbiowarfare bombs of Unit 731. Less notedthen and since were the systematicbarbarities perpetrated against resistant

villagers, though this produced thelargest number of the estimated ten tothirty million Chinese who lost their livesin the war, a number that far surpassesthe half million or more Japanesenoncombatants who died at the hands ofUS bombing, and may have exceededSov ie t l o s ses t o Naz i i nvas ionconventionally estimated at 20 millionlives. [41] In that and subsequent wars itwould be the signature barbarities suchas the Nanjing Massacre, the BataanDeath March, and the massacres atNogunri and My Lai rather than thequotidian events that defined thesystematic daily and hourly killing, whichhave attracted sustained attention,sparked bitter controversy, and shapedhistorical memory.

Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi's NanjingMassacre Mural

The war dead in Europe alone in WorldWar II, including the Soviet Union, havebeen estimated in the range of 30 to 40million, fifty percent more than the toll inWorld War I. To this we must add 25 to35 million Asian victims in the fifteen-year resistance war in China (1931-45),approximately three million Japanese,and millions more in Southeast Asia.Among the important instances of the

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killing of noncombatants in World War II,the US destruction of Japanese cities isperhaps l eas t known and l eas tcontroversial. In contrast to the fierceand continuing debate over the atomicbombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, theNazi extermination of Jews and others,and the far smaller-scale allied bombingsof Dresden and Hamburg, and suchJapanese atrocities as the NanjingMassacre and the vivisection experimentsof Unit 731, the US firebombing ofJapanese cities has virtually disappearedfrom international and even Americanand Japanese historical memory of thewar.

In World War I, ninety percent of thefatalities directly attributable to the warwere mil itary, nearly al l of themEuropeans and Americans. Mostestimates place World War II casualtiesin Europe in the range of 50-60 percentnoncombatants. In the case of Asia, whenwar-induced famine casualties areincluded, the noncombatant death tollwas almost certainly substantially higherin both absolute and percentage terms.[42] The United States, its homelandu n t o u c h e d b y w a r , s u f f e r e dapproximately 100,000 deaths in theentire Asian theater, a figure lower thanthat for the single Tokyo air raid ofMarch 10, 1945, and well below thedeath toll at Hiroshima or in the Battle ofOkinawa. Japan's three million war dead,while thirty times the number of USdead, was still only a small fraction of thetoll suffered by the Chinese who resistedthe Japanese military juggernaut. Theseare numbers of relative casualties that

the US, by fighting no war on its own soilsince the Civil War, and by adaptingstrategies that maximize its technologicaland economic strength and minimize itsown casualties, would replicate to evengreater numerical advantage insubsequent wars.

World War II remains indelibly engravedin American memory as the “Good War”and in important respects it was. Inconfronting the war machines of NaziGermany and Imperial Japan, the UnitedStates played a large role in defeatingaggressors and opening the way for awave of decolonization that swept theglobe in subsequent decades. It was alsoa war that catapulted the United Statesto global supremacy and established theinstitutional foundations for the globalprojection of American power in anetwork of military bases and unrivaledtechnological supremacy.

For most Americans, in retrospect WorldWar II seemed a “Good War” in anothersense: the US entered and exited the warbuoyed by absolute moral certainty borneof a mission to punish aggression in theform of a genocidal Nazi fascism andJapanese imperial ism run amok.Moreover, Americans remember thegenerosity of US aid not only to war tornallies, but to rebuild the societies offormer adversaries, Germany and Japan.Such an interpretation masks the extentto which Americans shared with theiradversaries an abiding nationalism andexpansionist urges. In contrast to earlierterritorial empires, this took the form ofnew regional and global structuresfacilitating the exercise of American

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power. The victory, which propelled theUS to a hegemonic position which carriedauthority to condemn and punish warcrimes committed by defeated nations,r e m a i n s a m a j o r o b s t a c l e t o athoroughgoing reassessment of thewartime conduct of the US in general,and issues of mass destruction carriedout by its forces in particular.

World War II, building on and extendingatavistic impulses deeply rooted in earliercivilizations and combining them withmore destructive technologies, producednew forms of human depravity. Germanand Japanese crimes have long beensubjected to international criticism fromthe war crimes tribunals of the 1940s tothe present. [43] At Nuremberg andsubsequent trials, more than 1,800Germans were convicted of war crimesand 294 were executed. At the TokyoTrials, 28 were indicted and seven weresentenced to death. At subsequent A andB class trials conducted by the alliedpowers between 1945 and 1951, 5,700Japanese, Koreans and Taiwanese wereindicted. 984 were initially sentenced todeath (the sentences of 50 of these werecommuted); 475 received life sentences,and 2,944 received limited prison terms.The result of military defeat, occupation,and war crimes tribunals has beenprotracted and profound reflection andself-criticism by significant groups withinb o t h c o u n t r i e s . I n t h e c a s e o fGermany—but not yet Japan—there hasbeen meaningful official recognition ofthe criminal conduct of genocidal andother barbaric policies as well asappropriate restitution to victims in the

form of public apology and substantialofficial reparations. For its part, theJapanese state continues to reject officialreparations claims to such war victims asKorean and Chinese forced laborers andthe military comfort women (sexualslaves), while the war remains a fiercelycontested intellectual-political issue asdemonstrated by the decades longconflicts over textbook treatments ofcolonialism and war, the Yasukuni shrine(the symbol of emperor-centerednationalism, empire and war), themilitary comfort women, and the NanjingMassacre controversies. [44]

In contrast to these responses to the warin Germany and Japan, and even to theongoing debate in the US about the usesof the atomic bomb, there has beenvirtually no awareness of, not to speak ofcritical reflection on, the US bombing ofJapanese civilians in the months prior toHiroshima. The systematic bombing ofJapanese noncombatants in the course ofthe destruction of Japanese cities must beadded to a list of the horrific legacies ofthe war that includes Nazi genocide anda host of Japanese war crimes againstAsian peoples. Only by engaging theissues, and above all the impact of thisapproach to the massive killing ofnoncombatants that has been central toall subsequent US wars, can Americansbegin to approach the Nuremberg idealthat holds victors as well as vanquishedto the same standards with respect tocrimes against humanity, or the standardof the 1949 Geneva Accord whichrequires the protection of civilians intime of war. This is the principle of

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universality enshrined at Nuremberg andviolated in practice by the US and othersbeginning with the 1946 trials, whichdeclared US immunity from prosecutionfor war crimes.

In his opening address to the tribunal,Chief Prosecutor for the United States,Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counselfor the United States, spoke eloquently,and memorably, on the principle ofuniversality. “If certain acts of violationof treaties are crimes,” he said, “they arecrimes whether the United States doesthem or whether Germany does them,and we are not prepared to lay down arule of criminal conduct against otherswhich we would not be willing to haveinvoked against us....We must neverforget that the record on which we judgethese defendants is the record on whichhistory will judge us tomorrow. To passthese defendants a poisoned chalice is toput it to our own lips as well.” [45]

Every US president from Roosevelt toGeorge W. Bush has endorsed in practicean approach to warfare that targetsentire populations for annihilation, onethat eliminates all vestiges of distinctionbetween combatant and noncombatant,with deadly consequences. The awesomepower of the atomic bomb has obscuredthe fact that this strategy came of age inthe firebombing of Tokyo and became thecenterpiece of US war making from thattime forward.

That poisoned chalice was put toAmerican lips in the 1945 trials and allthe more so in subsequent wars. SahrConway-Lanz rightly points to the deep

divisions among Americans seeking tostrike an appropriate balance betweencombat and atrocity, and between warand genocide. [46] But with absoluteAmerican preponderance of technologicalpower and the threat of enemies fromCommunists to terrorists magnified bygovernment and the media, in practice,there were few restraints on theannihilation of noncombatants in thesuccession of US wars that have exactedsuch a heavy toll in lives. American self-conceptions of benevolence and justicehave remained fixed not on the reality ofthe killing of noncombatants but on thecombination of American intentions incombat and generosity in chartingpostwar recovery in all wars since 1945.

Epilogue: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq andthe Uses of Airpower to TargetNoncombatants

The centrality of the wholesale killing ofnoncombatants through the myriad usesof air power runs like a red line from thebombings of 1944-45 through the Koreanand Indochinese wars to the Gulf,Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In the courseof six decades since the firebombing andatomic bombing of Japan, while importantcontinuities are observable, such as thefirebombing and napalming of cities,new, more powerful and versatile aircraftand weapons would be deployed in thecourse of successive American warsfought predominantly in Asia.

General Curtis LeMay, the primaryarchitect of the firebombing and atomicbombing strategy applied to Japan in1945 played a comparable role in Korea

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and Vietnam. Never one to pull punches,or to minimize the claimed impact ofbombing, LeMay recalled of Korea:

We slipped a note kind of underthe door into the Pentagon andsaid , “Look, le t us go upthere…and burn down five ofthe biggest towns in NorthKorea – and they’re not very big– and that ought to stop it.”Well, the answer to that wasfour or five screams – “You’llkill a lot of non-combatants,”and “It’s too horrible.” Yet overa period three years or so…weburned down every town inNorth Korea and South Korea,too… Now, over a period ofthree years this is palatable, butto kill a few people to stop thisfrom happening – a lot of peoplecan’t stomach it.” [47]

In the course of three years, US/UNforces in Korea flew 1,040,708 sortiesand dropped 386,037 tons of bombs and32,357 tons of napalm. Counting all typesof air borne ordnance, including rocketsand machine-gun ammunition, the totaltonnage comes to 698,000 tons. MarilynYoung estimates the death toll in Korea,most of it noncombatants, at two to fourmillion, and in the South alone, morethan five million people had beendisplaced, according to UN estimates.[48]

One striking feature of these wars has been theextension of bombing from a predominantlyurban phenomenon to the uses of airpowerdirected against rural areas of Korea andVietnam, leading the United States to breachanother of international principles that had

sought to curtail indiscriminate attacks onnoncombatants. Beginning in Korea, USbombing was extended from cities to thecountryside with devastating effects. In whatBruce Cumings has called the “final act of thisbarbaric air war,” in spring 1953 North Korea’smain irrigation dams were destroyed shortlyafter the rice had been transplanted. [49]

Here we consider one particularlyimportant element of American bombingof Vietnam. Franklin Roosevelt, in 1943issued a statement that long stood as theclearest expression of US policy on theuse of chemical and biological weapons.In response to reports of Axis plans touse poison gases, Roosevelt warned that“use of such weapons has been outlawedby the general opinion of civilizedmankind. This country has not used them,and I hope that we never wi l l becompe l l ed to use them. I s ta tecategorically that we shall under nocircumstances resort to the use of suchweapons unless they are first used by ourenemies . ” [50 ] Th i s pr inc ip le ,incorporated in US Army Field Manual27-10, Law of Land Warfare, issued in1954, affirmed the principle of no firstuse of gas warfare and bacteriologicalwarfare. By 1956, that provision haddisappeared, replaced by the assertionthat the US was party to no treaty inforce “that prohibits or restricts the usein warfare of toxic or nontoxic gases, orsmoke or incendiary materials or ofbacteriological warfare.” US CBWresearch and procurement efforts, thatbegan in the early 1950s and culminatedin the Kennedy administration in theearly 1960s, resulted in the use ofchemical and biological weapons both

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against Vietnamese forces and nature,speci f ical ly extending from thedestruction of forest cover to thedestruction of crops. As Seymour Hershdocuments, the US CBW program inVietnam “gradually escalated from theuse of leaf-killing defoliants to rice-killingherbicides and nausea-producing gases.”[51] How widespread were US gasattacks in Vietnam? A 1967 Japanesestudy of US anticrop and defoliationattacks prepared by the head of theAgronomy Section of the Japan ScienceCouncil concluded that more than 3.8million acres of arable land in SouthVietnam was ruined and more than 1,000peasants and 13,000 livestock werekilled. [52] In the face of US militaryclaims that the gases were benign, Dr.P h a m D u c N a m t o l d J a p a n e s einvestigators that a three-day attack nearDa Nang from February 25 to 27, 1966had poisoned both livestock and people,some of whom died. “Pregnant womengave birth to still-born or prematurechildren. Most of the affected cattle diedfrom serious diarrhea, and river fishfloated on the surface of the water bellyup, soon after the chemicals werespread.” [53]

Before turning to Iraq, it is worthrecalling President Nixon’s comments onthe bombing of Cambodia as preserved inthe Kissinger tapes released in May 2004.In a burst of anger on Dec. 9, 1970, whenNixon railed over what he saw as the AirForce’s lackluster bombing campaign inCambodia. Kissinger responded: “The AirForce is designed to fight an air battleagainst the Soviet Union. They are not

designed for this war.” Nixon thenexploded: “I want them to hit everything.I want them to use the big planes, thesmall planes, everything they can thatwill help out there, and let’s start givingthem a little shock.” Here was an earlywarning signal of the “Shock and Awe”strategy of a generation later. Kissingerrelayed the order: “A massive bombingcampaign in Cambodia. Anything thatflies on anything that moves.” [54] In thecourse of the Vietnam War the USembraced chemical and biologicalweapons of mass destruction as integralparts of its arsenal.

Another story of indiscriminate bombingin Cambodia came to light thirty six yearsafter the events. The new evidence makesclear that Cambodia was bombed farmore heavily than was previously known,and that, unbeknownst to the Americanpublic or the world, it began not withNixon in 1970 but on October 4, 1965.During a fall 2000 visit to Vietnam,President Clinton made available detailedAir Force records to help the Vietnamese,Cambodian and Laotian governments touncover the remains of two thousandmissing American soldiers. The recordsprovided specific data on place and scaleof bombing. The incomplete data revealthat October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973,the United States dropped far moreordnance on Cambodia than waspreviously believed: 2,756,941 tons’worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on113,716 sites. The consequences go farbeyond the dead, the injured, and thecontinued dangers of unexplodedordinance. As Taylor Owen and Ben

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Kiernan argue persuasively, “Civiliancasualties in Cambodia drove an enragedpopulace into the arms of an insurgencythat had enjoyed relatively little supportuntil the bombing began, setting inmotion the expansion of the Vietnam Wardeeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge,and ultimately the Cambodian genocide.”[55]

It is notable, by contrast to the precedingsix decades of American warfare, that thecentrality of the image of airpower andthe bomb as the summa of destructivemight, has shifted dramatically in theIraq War: Americans remember WorldWar II above al l as the crowningachievement of air power, symbolizedand mythologized by the atomic bombingof Hiroshima and Nagasaki; theyremember the era o f US-Sov ie tconfrontation above all as one of nuclearstandoff; and they remember both Koreaand Vietnam in no small part throughimages of American predominance in theair, as in the bombing of Hanoi and NorthVietnam as well as the defoliation usingAgent Orange, air power. But, as MichaelSherry observes, air power has largelyreceded from consciousness in the wakeof the collapse of the Soviet Union andthe shift in target from the othersuperpower to faceless terroristsassociated with Al-Quaida and Islamicmilitants. Sherry concludes that a seachange has occurred, a shift fromprophecy to memory in which air powerdeclines in American consciousness:“Bombers attacking Baghdad, B-52s overBelgrade, Russian planes hitting Grozny,

rulers bombing their own peoples--thescale of those operations (howeverdevastating for the locals) and the factthat they involved such unequal forcesdid not stir Americans’ apocalyptic fearsand fantasies.” Where air power didappear in American consciousness, hefinds, “American bombing came acrosson U.S. television screens more as afascinating video game than as adevas ta t ing ons laught . ” Moreimportantly, he concludes, because of theattack on New York’s Twin Towers andthe Pentagon on 9/11, and because of thehorrific images that it conjured, incontrast to the heroic images of airpower in World War II, the prophecyassociated with it “did not seem to lastlong or run deep.” [56]

In thinking about the Iraq War andcontemporary American consciousness, Iwould like to suggest an alternativescenario. First, I believe that 9/11 andthe Twin Towers in flames remains theiconic image of our times in Americanconsciousness. It is the central mobilizingimage for US war making and the primalimpulse that drives American fears of thefuture. Second, as Seymour Hersh andothers have observed, the US military,while continuing to pursue massivebombing of Iraqi neighborhoods, aboveall in the destruction of Falluja but evenin Baghdad, has chosen to throw a cloakof silence over the air war. The majormedia have faithfully honored officialdicta in this as in so many other ways.[57] Finally, among the George W. Bushadministration’s major initiatives havebeen the efforts to seize control of space

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as the centerpiece of global dominationin an era that is slated to replace thebomber as the primary delivery weaponof mass destruction. [58] Air powerremains among the major causes ofdeath, destruction, dislocation anddivision in contemporary Iraq in a warthat had taken approximately 655,000lives by the summer of 2006 in the mostauthoritative study to date, that of TheLancet) and created more than twomillion refugees abroad and an equalnumber displaced internally (one in sevenIraqis are displaced). Largely unreportedin the US mainstream press, and invisiblein US television news and reportage, thisis the central reality that confronts theIraq people. US strategy has producedthe explosive social divisions thatpromise to lead to permanent warfare inIraq and throughout the region. Despitethe unchallenged air supremacy that theUS has wielded in Iraq since 1991 andespecially since 2003, there is no end insight to US warfare and civil war in Iraqand throughout the region. [59]

Falluja under US bombardment, 2004

We have shown the decisive impact of thefinal year of World War II in setting inplace the preeminence of strategicbombing as quintessential to the US wayof war, one that would characterizesubsequent major wars that havewreaked yet greater devastation onnoncombatant populations. Yet for all thepower unleashed by US bombers, for allthe millions of victims, in the six decadessince 1945, victory against successive,predominantly Asian foes, has provedextraordinary elusive for the UnitedStates.

This article was written for Japan Focus.Posted on May 2, 2007.

Mark Selden is a research associate at the EastAsia Program, Cornell University, and acoordinator of Japan Focus. His recent booksinclude War and State Terrorism. The UnitedStates, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the LongTwentieth Century.

Notes

* The author thanks Noam Chomsky, BruceCumings, John Dower, Laura Hein, GavanMcCormack, and Michael Sherry for criticalcomments, sources and suggestions. The termholocaust used in the title draws on its originalmeaning. The Oxford English Dictionaryprovides th is def in i t ion: “Completeconsumption by fire; complete destruction,especially of a large number of persons; a greatslaughter or massacre.”

[1] Estimates vary, especially in thePacific theatre. See, for example, JohnEllis, World War II - A statistical survey(New York: Facts on File, 1993); John W.Dower, War Without Mercy (New York:Pantheon Books, 1986), pp. 294-300; in

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Roger Chickering, Stig Forster and BerndGreiner, eds., A World at Total War:Global Conflict and the Politics ofDestruction 1937-1945 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2005) p. 3,Chickering and Forster estimate militarydeaths at 15 million and civilian deaths atmore than 45 million; Wikipedia offers awide-ranging discussion of numbers ands o u r c e s(https://apjjf.org/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties).

[2] Lee Kennett, A History of StrategicBombing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,1982), pp. 9-38; Sven Lindqvist, A History ofBombing (New York: New Press, 2000), pp.31-42.

[3] “General Report of the Commission ofJurists at the Hague,” American Journal ofInternational Law, XVII (October 1923),Supplement, pp. 250-51.

[4] A valuable synthesis of the literature on warand the noncombatant is Sahr Conway-Lanz,Collateral Damage: Americans, NoncombatantImmunity, and Atrocity After World War II(London: Routledge, 2006). A. C. Grayling,Among the Dead Cities. The History and MoralLegacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians inGermany and Japan (New York: Walker &Company, 2006), subjects the British andAmerican choice of area bombing in World WarII in Germany and Japan to rigorous scrutinyfrom the perspectives of morality, internationallaw, and effectiveness. The terms areabombing, strategic bombing and indiscriminatebombing refer to the wholesale destruction oflarge areas of cities, frequently with theannihilation of the civilian population. Bycontrast tactical bombing is directed todiscrete military and/or military-industrialtargets such as military bases and airfields,bridges, and munitions factories. In practice,given technical limitations, bombs directed at

military targets frequently exacted heavycivilian tolls. I address the issues of stateterrorism and the targeting of civilians byJapan and the United States in Mark Seldenand Alvin So, eds., War and State Terrorism:The United States, Japan and the Asia Pacific inthe Long Twentieth Century (Lanham: Rowmanand Littlefield, 2004).

[5] A small number of works have drawnattention to US war atrocities, typicallycentering on the torture, killing anddesecration of captured Japanesesoldiers. These include Peter Schrijvers,The GI War Against Japan. AmericanSoldiers in Asia and the Pacific DuringWorld War II (New York: NYU Press,2002) and John Dower, War WithoutMercy: Race and Power in the PacificWar (New York: Pantheon, 1986). TheWartime Journals of Charles Lindbergh(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1970) is seminal in disclosing atrocitiescommitted against Japanese POWs. Tworecent works closely assess the bombingof noncombatants and the ravaging ofnature and society as a result of strategicbombing that has been ignored in muchof the literature. A. C. Grayling, Amongt h e D e a d C i t i e s , p r o v i d e s athoroughgoing assessment of US andBritish strategic bombing (includingatomic bombing) through the lenses ofethics and international law. Grayling’spremise is that Allied bombing which“deliberately targeted German andJapanese civilian populations” and“claimed the lives of 800,000 civilianwomen, children and men,” “is nowherenear equivalent in scale of moral atrocityto the Holocaust of European Jewry, orthe death and destruction all over the

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world for which Nazi and Japaneseaggression was collectively responsible,”a figure that he places at 25 million dead.He nevertheless concludes that the USand British killing of noncombatants “didin fact involve the commission of wrongs”on a very large scale. Pp 5-6; 276-77.Michael Bess, in Choices Under Fire.Moral Dimensions of World War II (NewYork: Knopf, 2006), pp. 88-110, in ac h a p t e r o n “ B o m b i n g C i v i l i a nPopulations,” asks this question: “did thistaint the victory with an indelible stain ofinnocent blood?” After reviewing bothstrategic and ethical issues, he concludes“There can be no excuse, in the end, forthe practices of large-scale area bombingand firebombing of cities; these wereatrocities, pure and simple. They wereatrocities because the Anglo-Americanscould definitely have won the war withoutresorting to them.” It is necessary, in myview, to go further to inquire whetherthese would have constituted atrocities incircumstances in which the bombing,presumably including atomic bombing,were necessary for securing US victory.

[6] Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 90-91.Grayling goes on to note the differentexperiences of survivors of the two types ofbombing, particularly as a result of radiationsymptoms from the atomic bomb.

[7] Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, providesa useful overview of international efforts toprotect noncombatants throughout history andparticularly since World War II. See alsoTimothy L. H. McCormack and Helen Durham,“Aerial Bombardment of Civilians: The CurrentInternational Legal Framework,” forthcoming.

[8] The question of universality has been thecenterpiece of Noam Chomsky’s critique of the

conduct of the powers, above all the UnitedStates, from his earliest political writings to thepresent. See, for example, the introduction toAmerican Power and the New Mandarins (NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1966), pp. 4-5;Hegemony or Survival. America’s Quest forGlobal Dominance (New York: MetropolitanBooks, 2003), pp, 2-13, 20-23; Failed States.The Abuse of Power and the Assault onDemocracy (New York: Metropolitan Books,2006), pp. 3-4 and passim. The Taylor quote isfrom his Nuremberg and Vietnam: an AmericanTragedy, cited in Chomsky, Failed States, p. 83.John Dower offers trenchant comments on thescales of justice in Embracing Defeat, pp.451-74; Richard H. Minear, Victors’ Justice:The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1971).

[9] Quoted in Lindqvist, A History ofBombing, p. 81. The US debate over thebombing of cities is detailed in MichaelSherry, The Rise of American Air Power:The Creation of Armageddon (NewHaven, Yale University Press, 1987), pp.23-28, pp. 57-59. Ronald Schaffer, Wingsof Judgment: American Bombing in WorldWar II (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1985), pp. 20-30, I08-9. Gen. BillyMitchell's contradictory message, whichbecame Air Force doctrine in 1926, wasthat air attack "was a method of imposingwill by terrorizing the whole population .. . while conserving life and property tothe greatest extent." Quoted in Sherry, p.30. See also Conway-Lanz, CollateralDamage, p. 10.

[10] Tami Davis Biddle, “Air Power,” in MichaelHoward, George J. Andreopoulos, and Mark R.Shulman, The Laws of War. Constraints onWarfare in the Western World (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 151-52.Gordon Wright, The Ordeal of Total War1939-1945 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968),

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p. 26.

[11] On Casablanca bombing see Charles B.Macdonald, World War II: The War AgainstGermany and Italy, (Army Historical Series,Office of the Chief of Military History), chapter2 2(http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/books/amh/AMH-22.htm).

The first major British success came atHamburg in 1943 when firebombing destroyedlarge parts of the city and took 44,000 lives.Grayling traces British and German shift fromtactical to strategic bombing in the early yearsof the war, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 31-76.

[12] Max Hastings, Bomber Command: TheMyth and Reality of the Strategic BombingOffensive (New York: Dial Press, 1979), p. 139.

[13] Sherry, Air Power, p. 260. With much U.S.bombing already relying on radar, thedistinction between tactical and strategicbombing had long been violated in practice.The top brass, from George Marshall to AirForce chief Henry Arnold to DwightEisenhower, had all earlier given tacit approvalfor area bombing, yet no orders from on highspelled out a new bombing strategy.

[14] Interview quoted in Richard Rhodes,The Making of the Atomic Bomb (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 593.

[15] Schaffer, Wings, p. 97; see alsoSherry, Air Power, pp. 260-63. Graylingmakes a compelling case for the failure ofarea bombing of Germany to achieve itsobjective of breaking morale and causingheavy destruction of cities and military-related industries, thereby forcingsurrender, Among the Dead Cities, pp.106-07. Robert Pape made a similarargument for Japan, stressing otherfactors including naval blockade, threat

of invasion, and the Soviet entry into thewar as having far greater significancethan the fire bombing. Bombing to Win:Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1996). Theextensive American debate over Japan’ssurrender has paid little attention to thefirebombing, concentrating on the threeissues of the atomic bombs, the Russianentry into the war, and US terms withrespect to Emperor Hirohito.

[16] The most eloquent criticism was thewriting of Vera Brittain. Grayling, Among theDead Cities, pp. 180-86. In the midst of theDresden debate, On March 28, 1945, Churchillissued a minute questioning the area-bombingstrategy and raising the question of whethertactical bombing of key objectives was notmore effective. The minute was withdrawnfollowing air force protests. Charles Websterand Noble Frankland, The Strategic AirOffensive Against Germany 1939-45 ( London:HMSO, 1961), p. 112.

[17] E. Bartlett Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo,(New York: Fine, 1991), p. 145.

[18] Tsuneishi Keiichi, “Unit 731 and theJapanese Imperial Army’s Biological WarwareProgram,” from Hata Ikuhiko and SaseMasanori, eds., Sekai Senso Hanzai Jiten(Encyclopedia of World War Crimes), (Tokyo:Bungei Shunju, 2002), tr. John Junkerman,J a p a n F o c u s , N o v 2 0 , 2 0 0 5japanfocus.org/products/details/2194.

[19] Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo, pp. 31-32, 41-44,5 2 , 7 1 - 7 4 . F o r t h e O c t o b e r 1 9 4 4recommendations of the Committee ofOperations Analysts of the Air Force for areabombing, see pp. 83-88.

[20] Michael Sherry, “The United Statesand Strategic Bombing: From Prophecy

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to Memory,” forthcoming; Cary Karacas,“ Imagining Air Raids on Tokyo,1930-1945,” paper presented at theAssociation for Asian Studies annualmeeting, Boston, March 23, 2007, pp.2-5. Sherry traces other prophecies ofnuclear bombing back to H.G. Wells 1913novel The World Set Free. Sherry makesclear that prophecy has the capacity tospeak forcefully not only to proponentsbut also to energize opponents of theenvisaged future.

[21] Sherry, Air Power, pp. 272-73, 404-05.

[22] Cf. Stewart Udall’s discussion ofresponsibility for the US shift to area bombing,centering on President Roosevelt, Secretary ofWar Henry Stimson, and Air Force SecretaryRobert Lovet t , and the d i f f icu l ty o fdocumenting responsibility for the policy shift.Sherry and Schaffer provide the mostexhaustive study of the shift in U.S. bombingpolicy.

[23] United States Strategic BombingSurvey, Summary Report (Pacific War)(Washington: US GPO, 1946), Vol 1, p.16.

[24] Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo, pp.102-03, 108-14, 134-38 . The limitedsuccess of repeated efforts to destroy theNakajima Factory and other aircraftfactories paved the way for the areabombing strategy.

[25] Rhodes, Atomic Bomb, pp. 596-97; WesleyFrank Craven and James Lea Gate, The Pacific:Matterhorn to Nagasaki June 1944 to August1945. Vol. 5, The Army Air Forces in World WarII (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953;1983 Office of Air Force History imprint) pp.609-13; Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo, p. 146-50.The low-flying planes, which could save fuel,

carry more bombs and better target their sites,were vulnerable to attack by f ighter-interceptors. However, US attacks in mid-February destroyed most o f the 530interceptors protecting the Kanto region.Karacas, “Imagining Air Raids on Tokyo,” p. 27.In Japan in spring and summer 1945, as invirtually all subsequent bombing campaignsconducted over the next six decades, the USruled the sky with virtually no enemy capacityto destroy its bombers.

[26] “Tokyo Under Bombardment, 1941-1945,”Bethanie Institute Bulletin No. 5, translation inGeneral Headquarters Far East Command,Military Intelligence Section, War in Asia andthe Pacific Vol. 12, Defense of the Homelandand End of the War, ed., Donald Detwiler andCharles Burdick (New York, 1980); see alsoKaracas on the imaginative link between theTokyo earthquake and the bombing in the UnnaJuzo novel.

[27] Sherry, Air Power, p. 276. A detailedphotographic record, including images ofscores of the dead, some burnt to a crisp anddistorted beyond recognition, others apparentlyserene in death, and of acres of the cityflattened as if by an immense tornado, is foundin Ishikawa Koyo, Tokyo daikushu no zenkiroku(Complete Record of the Great Tokyo AirAttack) (Tokyo, 1992); Tokyo kushu o kirokusuru kai ed., Tokyo daikushu no kiroku (Recordof the Great Tokyo Air Attack) (Tokyo:Sanseido, 1982), and Dokyumento: Tokyodaikushu (Document: The Great Tokyo AirAttack) (Tokyo: Yukeisha, 1968).

[28] The Survey’s killed-to-injured ratio ofbetter than two to one was far higher than mostestimates for the atomic bombing of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki where killed and wounded wereapproximately equal. If accurate, it is indicativeof the immense difficulty in escaping for thosenear the center of the Tokyo firestorm on thatwindswept night. The Survey’s kill ratio has,however, been challenged by Japanese

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researchers who found much higher kill ratiosat Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly whenone includes those who died of bomb injuriesmonths and years later. In my view, the SBSestimates both exaggerate the killed to injuredratio and understate the numbers killed in theTokyo raid. The Committee for the Compilationof Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomicbombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshimaand Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and SocialEffects of the Atomic Bombing (New York:Basic Books, 1991), pp. 420-21; Cf. U.S.Strategic Bombing Survey, Field ReportCovering Air Raid Protection and AlliedSubjects Tokyo (n.p. 1946), pp. 3, 79. Incontrast to the atomic bombing of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki, which for fifty years have beenthe subject of intense research by Japanese,Americans and others, the most significantrecords of the Tokyo attack are those compiledat the time by Japanese police and firedepartments. In the absence of the mystique ofthe atomic bomb and the ongoing national andglobal focus on that event, there was nocompelling reason to continue to monitor theresults of firebombing attacks on Japanesecities following surrender. And neither the USmilitary nor the Japanese government producedsignificant records of the destruction duringthe occupation. The U.S. Strategic BombingSurvey study of Effects of Air Attack on UrbanComplex Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama (n.p.1947), p. 8, observes that Japanese policeestimates of 93,076 killed and 72,840 injured inTokyo air raids make no mention of thenumbers of people missing. Surely, too, manyclassified as injured died subsequently of theirwounds. In contrast to the monitoring of atomicbomb deaths over the subsequent six decades,the Tokyo casualty figures at best recorddeaths and injuries within days of the bombingat a time when the capacity of the Tokyomilitary and police to compile records had beenoverwhelmed. Many more certainly died in thefollowing weeks and months. The bombing ofTokyo and other Japanese cities has attractedlittle scholarly attention either in Japan (with

the exception of local museums and localstudies of the bombing of particular cities) orinternationally.

[29] Karacas, “Imagining Air Raids,” p. 22.

[30] Dokyumento. Tokyo daikushu, pp. 168-73.

[31] John W. Dower, “Sensational Rumors,Seditious Graffiti, and the Nightmares of theThought Police,” in Japan in War and Peace(New York: The New Press, 1993), p. 117.United States Strategic Bombing Survey,Summary Report, Vol I, pp. 16-20.

[32] Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, p. 1.

[33] Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo, pp.337-38.

[34] Two excellent complementary accounts ofimportant dimensions of the geopolitics andpolitical economy of contemporary US empireare Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire.Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of theRepublic (New York: Metropolitan Books,2004), and Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

[35] The numbers killed, specifically thenumbers of noncombatants killed, in theKorean, Vietnam and Iraq wars were greater,but each of those wars extended over manyyears.

[36] Mark Selden, “American Nationalism andAsian Wars,” (in progress).

[37] Cf. Dower’s nuanced historical perspectiveon war and racism in American thought andpraxis in War Without Mercy: Race and Powerin the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books,1986). In Year 501: The Conquest Continues(Boston: South End Press, 1993) and manyother works, Noam Chomsky emphasizes thecontinuities in Western ideologies thatundergird practices leading to the annihilationof entire populations in the course of colonial

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and expansionist wars over half a millenniumand more.

[38] Geoffrey Best, War and Law Since1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) pp.180-81.

[39] See for example Robert Jay Lifton andGreg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America. FiftyYears of Denial. (New York: Grossett/Putnam,1945), Parts II-IV; Conway-Lanz, CollateralDamage, pp. 13-16.

[40] Bombing would also be extendedfrom cities to the countryside, as in theAgent Orange defoliation attacks thatdestroyed the forest cover and poisonedresidents of sprayed areas of Vietnam.

[41] I have explored issues of Japan’s Chinawar and the Chinese resistance in China inRevolution: The Yenan Way Revisited (Armonk:M.E. Sharpe, 1995), and in Edward Friedman,Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden, ChineseVillage, Socialist State (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1991). An insightfuldiscussion of Japanese war crimes in thePaci f ic , locat ing the issues within acomparative context of atrocities committed bythe US, Germany, and other powers, is YukiTanaka’s Hidden Horrors: Japanese Crimes inWorld War II. Takashi Yoshida, The Making ofthe “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory inJapan, China and the United States (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2006) examines theunderstanding of the Nanjing Massacre in eachcountry. Daqing Yang surveys the contentiousChinese and Japanese literature on the rape ofNanjing in “A Sino-Japanese Controversy: TheNanjing Atrocity as History,” Sino-JapaneseStudies, (November 1990), pp. 14-35. Foradditional studies of Japanese war atrocitiesand the search for justice for victims, seearticles by Utsumi Aiko, William Underwood,Yoshiko Nozaki, Gavan McCormack, TessaMorris-Suzuki, Yuki Tanaka, Mark Selden and

others at Japan Focus, http://japanfocus.org.

[42] R.J.R. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz andHiroshima. History Writing and the SecondWorld War 1945-1990 (London: Routledge,1993). Wide discrepancies remain with respectto World War II casualties and deaths, notablyin Asia. Cf. John Dower’s compilation anddiscussion of the basic data, War WithoutMercy, pp. 295-300, and “Race, Language andWar in Two Cultures,” in Japan in War andPeace, p. 257.

[43] Dower, Embracing Defeat, pp. 443-47;Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, pp. 16-17.

[44] Mark Selden, “Nationalism,Historical Memory and ContemporaryConflicts in the Asia Pacific: the YasukuniPhenomenon, Japan, and the UnitedS t a t e s(https://apjjf.org/japanfocus.org/products/details/2204)”; Takahashi Tetsuya, "TheNational Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine"in Naoko Shimazu, ed., Nationalisms inJapan (London: Routledge, 2006), pp.155-80; Caroline Rose, “The Battle forHearts and Minds. Patriotic education inJapan in the 1990s and beyond,” inShimazu, pp. 131-54. The Japanesegovernment has apologized to themilitary comfort women (jugun ianfu),most notably in the 1993 statement ofCabinet Secretary Kono Yohei. But incontrast to Germany’s extensive state-financed reparations to Nazi victims, theJapanese government dodged itsresponsibility by establishing a “privatefund” to provide reparations of 200,000yen to surviving comfort women. For thisreason, strong opposition to the program,particularly in South Korea and Taiwanled the majority of survivors to reject the

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compensation.

[45] Quoted in Noam Chomsky, “War onT e r r o r , ”(http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20060118.pdf) Amnesty International Lecture,Trinity College, January 18, 2006.

[46] Collateral Damage, pp. 18-19.Conway-Lanz traces major US debatessince 1945 centered on noncombatantdeaths to show that the question ofintention, not the scale of noncombatantdeaths caused by American actions,repeatedly trumped counter arguments inpolicy debates over atomic and hydrogenbombs and the targeting of cities andvillages for destruction.

[47] General Curtis LeMay, Oral History, 1966,cited in Mari lyn Young, “Total War”,conference paper, 2006.

[48] Young, “Total War.”

[49] Bruce Cumings, Origins of the Korean War(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1990) v.2, p. 755.

[50] Seymour M. Hersh, Chemical andBiological Warfare. America’s Hidden Arsenal,(New York: Anchor Books,1969), p. 18.

[51] Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare,pp. 28-32. See also Ronald B. Frankum Jr., LikeRolling Thunder. The Air War in Vietnam,1964-1975 (Lanham, MD: Rowman &Littlefield, 2005), pp. 88-92.

[52] Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare,pp. 131-33. Hersh notes that the $60 millionworth of defoliants and herbicides in the 1967Pentagon budget would have been sufficient todefoliate 3.6 million acres if all were usedoptimally.

[53] Hersh, Chemical and BiologicalWarfare, pp. 134, 156-57. Canadian Dr.Alje Vennema described the symptoms ofgas victims at Quang Ngai hospital wherehe worked in 1967, including twochildren and one adult who died.

[54] Elizabeth Becker, “Kissinger TapesDescribe Crises, War and Stark Photos ofAbuse,” The New York Times, May 27, 2004.

[55] “Bombs Over Cambodia: New Lighton US Indiscriminate Bombing,” Walrus,December 7, 2006.

[56] Michael Sherry, The United States andStrategic Bombing: From Prophecy toMemory,” forthcoming.

[57] Seymour Hersh, “Up in the AirWhere is the Iraq war headed next?” TheNew Yorker, Dec 5, 2005; Dahr Jamail,“ L i v i n g U n d e r t h e B o m b s ,(http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2166)” TomDispatch, February 2,2005; Michael Schwartz, “A Formula forSlaughter. The American Rules ofE n g a g e m e n t f r o m t h e A i r(http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=48180),” TomDispatch, January14, 2005.

[58] Tom Barry, “The Militarization ofSpace and U.S. Global Dominance: theC h i n a C o n n e c t i o n ”(https://apjjf.org/../../../products/details/2287) Japan Focus. December 6, 2006.

[59] Anthony Arnove, “Four Years Later...And Counting. Billboarding the IraqiD i s a s t e r(http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=176493)”, TomDispatch, March

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18, 2007. Seymour Hersh, “TheRedirection. Is the Administration’s newpolicy benefiting our enemies in the waron terrorism?” The New Yorker March 3,2007. Michael Schwartz, “Baghdad

Surges into Hell. First Results from theP r e s i d e n t ’ s O f f e n s i v e ”(http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=165183sad), Tom Dispatch,February 12, 2007.

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