lecture 18, "the dark years: vichy france"
john merriman
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the fall of France, and collaboration
1936, again, possibly a time when Hitler could have been stopped in the Rhineland.
all of this has to be seen, in France, in the context of World War I and its legacy--there was a strong feeling, Wilson, etc., that wars were bad things done by evil people (and this was implicit in the resolution of the Treaty of Versailles, of course)
no one wanted another war, but Hitler had been agitating for one from the outset.
there was a feeling that another war would be unthinkable, in France. have to remember the tremendously traumatizing effects of WWI.
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Hitler had of course been building military capacity in Germany, re-arming the nation, etc. Hitler's advisors had been expecting a war to begin, though, in 1940/1941--as we all know, the war actually begins on the 1st of September, 1939, when Hitler invades Poland (he takes power in 1933).
militarily, why does France fall so rapidly?
their respective troop strengths were relatively equal at the time of the invasion of France in May 1940. in tanks, the allies actually had superiority, though German tanks were lighter and faster (and they were used in divisions, which gave them an advantage).
Germans had a clear superiority in fighter power (and they had tried them out in Spain, don't forget)
how had the British and French been planning? they believed that it would be another war of attrition--a long, drawn-out battle in which a strong, defensive line would be critical.
the Germans, by contrast, believed in rapid attack--the "blitzkrieg"
the French are assuming that the forests in N. France and E. Belgium will be physical impediments to the German invasion, but did not prove to be this. 10 tank divisions pour through the forests and they simply waste these French tanks. in four days they're way inside France. the German High Command thought it would take 9 days--and it took 4!
Hitler does make one mistake, prof argues, which is he refuels, allowing the evacuation of French and British troops at Dunkirk.
you have refugees, and German fighter planes picking them off as they fled.
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a new French government, then, collaborates with the Germans--Vichy France is born. (France is divided in two zones; the "collaborationist" government has its capital in Vichy.)
involves people who actively assist the Nazis in achieving their goals, acting on their aspirations. by the end of 1943/1944, if you were a French collaborator and you find graffiti with the word "K" on your door, you were toast--because it meant that the Maquis (or the resistance) was confident enough to make that kind of threat.
again, it's not only France--in Belgium, for example, the right-wing Flemish were more likely to collaborate, and it remains a tension. in Budapest, way you see a goulish shoe-memorial to Jews and Communists gunned down by Hungarian collaborators.
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the historiography and history of collaboration is fascinating, prof is saying.
there's a myth of universal resistance, perpetuated by people who had actively collaborated and also by Charles De Gaulle (he needed people to forget the Communist resistance, and lead the French people to identify with his person and leadership--part of the mantle he'd assume.)
there was a movie from 1953-1954 about the Jews arrested in Paris in 1942--taken away, put in a transit camp north of Paris. in the film you see French guards--so what they do is they photoshop it, effectively.
three series of crucial events have jolted this myth, prof is arguing:
(1) the film called "the sorrow and the pity", which is 4.5 hrs long. what the producer does is he goes to one single town and he looked at what happened there in collaboration--some of the best documentary scenes about intentional forgetting, etc,--where teachers forget about their Jewish friends/colleagues. it was only shown in one theatre. made for French TV, but not shown until 1981/1982. why? because it told the awful truth, which was that lots of people believed better Hitler than Blum.
(2) "vichy france," by bob paxton in 1972. it cut through the intentional forgetting to look squarely at collaboration--bob paxton, actually, didn't have the right to french archival documents (the 50 year rule, and a "troublemaker"). but when this book came out, it had a very powerful effect. here was a great historian saying it "wasn't like what you learned in school."
(3) the trials--as collaboration came to be something that people wanted to know about--then people with bad histories were tracked down. one of the first was Touvier, who was involved in the torture of resisters, deportations of jews/communists. he was hidden by right-wing groups (bounced from monastery to monastery). but finally tracked down and tried. at this trial, Paxton became an "expert witness." and there was a trial of Barbi, as well, who had tortured people in Lyons. and then there was Maurice Papon, a functionary who signed the death-certificates of hundreds and hundreds of Jews. he went on to a very successful career in the fourth and fifth republic. and they caught up with this very very old man, and there was the question of whether he ought to be tried (in 1998, 1999 -- at one point he escapes, and they find him at a fine restraunt in Switzerland; he insists, "I was a good bureaucrat.") he used the "shield argument"--that if it wasn't for me(/we), thing would have been even worse. he was found guilty, and sent to jail.
"the Vichy syndrome."
so, from having no official memory of Vichy--only bits that had to do with the resistance--France underwent this re-evaluation of its relationship to the regime. and that was important for people who had lost their family members, for Jews (some 75,000 Jews never returned to France after Vichy). the big round-up in June 1942, for example, was not done by the Germans, but by the French police. one of the worst institutions of all was the milice (the militia), created in January 1943, to get tough on the Jews, the communists, the resistance.
remember, the militia's tactics required very personal forms of betrayal--people sending letters to the police, etc. (in the days after war, almost 10,000 collaborators were executed)
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voting left superimposed on a map of de-christianization and there would be remarkable similarities, as prof said before. that is not true of collaborationists--this is not regional, or from one social class (this is the case in Belgium, though.) of course you're more apt to have people from the middle-classes collaborate, but it's difficult to generalize (you have working-class collaboration).
what about religion? the role of the Pope in all of this, professor is saying, is nauseating. the Pope knew, but did nothing. zero. the Catholic Church hierarchy was generally very collaborationist.
Roosevelt and these people knew (they knew before they did anything, prof reminds us), but their dilemma is trickier (can you bomb death camps? train tracks?)
the Church got what it wanted, during Vichy France--no divorce, two people executed for abortion. (though he is also insisting that it is not this open and shut)
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now, what did the people who collaborated want? a couple of themes
(1) argument made by Petain after the war. by collaborating with the Germans, you were saving the French State. but, as Paxton says, "they may have been saving the French state, but they were destroying the French nation."
(2) the xenophobia that characterized the French right, before the occupation, was obviously a prevalent theme during the collaborationists. no Italians, no Spanish (especially no Marxists).
(3) anti-semitism--the French Vichy regime (it's only in November of 1942 that the Germans occupy the Vichy zone, because the resistance is mobilizing) puts in laws depriving Jews of rights that the Germans didn't even ask them to do. in some ways even harsher than the infamous Nuremberg laws of the Reich.
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Petain, for the fascists, will be an answer for:
(1) the "decadence" and "feuding France" of pre-Vichy France
(2) the restoration of the earthly power of the Church. restoration of the soul of France; the old, Catholic/Christian values. a return to the "moral order"--when things are passed down from the "moral orders."
(3) nationalism, of a new sort--away from the legacy of the French revolution, towards a nationalism of patriotism and values. and, of course, with this comes an exclusionary ethic.
(4) authority--not the dirtiness of "democracy"; authority flows from the top, down.
(5) peasantism. "true France," not the France of Jews, striking workers, communism, etc., virtue is found in the soil (Joan of Arc is a peasant girl, remember--she becomes a symbol of all this). cities are places where Jews and workers hang out. the true France is the France of peasants on the soil.
(6) corporatism--they've read about Mussolini and Italian fascism, making the argument that workers and bosses have the same interests. and you can resolve these conflicts in the idea of the Nation--strong, marching, plutonic warriors
Showing posts with label world war 2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label world war 2. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Well, they’re connected, because, you see, one of the great dangers of an economic crisis is it can lead to war. I remember Hitler coming to power very well. There were six million unemployed in Germany, and Hitler said it’s all due to the Jews and the communists and the trade unions. “Give me power,” said Hitler, “and I will give you jobs.” And he did. Half the unemployed, he put in the arms factories. The other half, he put in the German army. And we had another bloody war. And the two European wars from 1914 to 1945, in thirty-one years, cost 105 million lives, were lost in two wars, and that was not unpredicted with the grave economic crisis in the 1930s.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
air power and the american empire:
World War II was a landmark in the development and deployment of technologies of mass destruction associated with air power, notably the B-29 bomber, napalm and the atomic bomb. An estimated 50 to 70 million people lay dead in its wake. In a sharp reversal of the pattern of World War I and of most earlier wars, a substantial majority of the dead were noncombatants. [1] The air war, which reached peak intensity with the area bombing, including atomic bombing, of major European and Japanese cities in its final year, had a devastating impact on noncombatant populations.
(...) Bombs had been dropped from the air as early as 1849 on Venice (from balloons) and 1911 in Libya (from planes).
(...) A series of international conferences at the Hague beginning in 1899 set out principles for limiting air war and securing the protection of noncombatants from bombing and other attacks. The 1923 Hague conference crafted a sixty-two article "Rules of Aerial Warfare," which prohibited "Aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military character, or of injuring non-combatants." It specifically limited bombardment to military objectives, prohibited "indiscriminate bombardment of the civilian population," and held violators liable to pay compensation. [3] Securing consensus and enforcing limits, however, proved extraordinarily elusive then and since.
(...) The strategic and ethical implications of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have generated a vast contentious literature, as have German and Japanese war crimes and atrocities. By contrast, the US destruction of more than sixty Japanese cities prior to Hiroshima has been slighted both in the scholarly literatures in English and Japanese and in popular consciousness in both Japan and the US. It has been overshadowed by the atomic bombing and by heroic narratives of American conduct in the "Good War", an outcome not unrelated to the emergence of the US as a superpower. [5] Arguably, however, the central technological, strategic and ethical breakthroughs that would leave their stamp on subsequent wars occurred in area bombing of noncombatants prior to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A.C. Grayling explains the different responses to firebombing and atomic bombing this way: ". . . the frisson of dread created by the thought of what atomic weaponry can do affects those who contemplate it more than those who actually suffer from it; for whether it is an atom bomb rather than tons of high explosives and incendiaries that does the damage, not a jot of suffering is added to its victims that the burned and buried, the dismembered and blinded, the dying and bereaved of Dresden or Hamburg did not feel." [6]
(...) If others, notably Germany, England and Japan led the way in area bombing, the targeting for destruction of entire cities with conventional weapons emerged in 1944-45 as the centerpiece of US warfare. It was an approach that combined technological predominance with minimization of US casualties in ways that would become the hallmark of the American way of war in campaigns from Korea and Indochina to the Gulf and Iraq Wars and, indeed define the trajectory of major wars since the 1940s. The result would be the decimation of noncombatant populations and extraordinary "kill ratios" favoring the US military. Yet for the US, victory would prove extraordinary elusive. This is one important reason why, six decades on, World War II retains its aura for Americans as the "Good War", and why Americans have yet to effectively come to grips with questions of ethics and international law associated with their area bombing of Germany and Japan.
(...) The twentieth century was notable for the contradiction between international attempts to place limits on the destructiveness of war and to hold nations and their military leaders responsible for violations of international laws of war (Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals and successive Geneva conventions, particularly the 1949 convention protecting civilians and POWs) and the systematic violation of those principles by the major powers. [7] For example, while the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals clearly articulated the principle of universality, the Tribunals, both held in cities that had been obliterated by Allied bombing, famously shielded the victorious powers, above all the US, from responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Telford Taylor, chief counsel for war crimes prosecution at Nuremberg, made the point with specific reference to the bombing of cities a quarter century later:
(...) From 1932 to the early years of World War II the United States was an outspoken critic of city bombing, notably but not exclusively German and Japanese bombing. President Franklin Roosevelt appealed to the warring nations in 1939 on the first day of World War II "under no circumstances [to] undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities." [9] Britain, France and Germany agreed to limit bombing to strictly military objectives, but in May 1940 German bombardment of Rotterdam exacted 40,000 civilian lives and forced the Dutch surrender. Up to this point, bombing of cities had been isolated, sporadic and for the most part confined to the axis powers. Then in August 1940, after German bombers bombed London, Churchill ordered an attack on Berlin. The steady escalation of bombing targeting cities and their noncombatant populations followed. [10]
(...) After entering the war following Pearl Harbor, the US continued to claim the moral high ground by abjuring civilian bombing. This stance was consistent with the prevailing view in the Air Force high command that the most efficient bombing strategies were those that pinpointed destruction of enemy forces and installations, factories, and railroads, not those designed to terrorize or kill noncombatants. Nevertheless, the US collaborated with indiscriminate bombing at Casablanca in 1943, when a US-British division of labor emerged in which the British conducted the indiscriminate bombing of cities and the US sought to destroy military and industrial targets. [11] In the final years of the war, Max Hastings observed that Churchill and his bomber commander Arthur Harris set out to concentrate "all available forces for the progressive, systematic destruction of the urban areas of the Reich, city block by city block, factory by factory, until the enemy became a nation of troglodytes, scratching in the ruins." [12] (...) From 1942 with the bombing of Lubeck followed by Cologne, Hamburg and others, Harris pursued this strategy. The perfection of onslaught from the air, or what should be understood as terror bombing, is better understood, however, as a British-American joint venture.
(...) With German artillery and interceptors taking a heavy toll on US planes, pressure mounted for a strategic shift at a time of growing sophistication, numbers and range of US aircraft, and the invention of napalm and the perfection of radar. Ironically, while radar could have paved the way for a reaffirmation of tactical bombing, now made feasible at night, in the context of the endgame of the war what transpired was the massive assault on cities and their urban populations
(...) On February 13-14, 1945 British bombers with US planes following up destroyed Dresden, a historic cultural center with no significant military industry or bases. By conservative estimate, 35,000 people were incinerated in a single raid led by. [13] The American writer Kurt Vonnegut, then a young POW in Dresden, penned the classic account: [14]
(...) Although far worse was in the offing in Japan, Dresden provoked the last significant public discussion of the bombing of women and children to take place during World War II, and the city became synonymous with terror bombing by the US and Britain. Coming in the wake of both the Hamburg and Munich bombings, the British government faced sharp questioning in parliament. [16] In the United States, debate was largely provoked not by the destruction wrought by the raids, but by an Associated Press report widely published in the US and Britain stating explicitly that "the Allied air commanders have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of the great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler's doom." American officials quickly acted to neutralize the report by pointing to the widely publicized great cathedral of Cologne, left standing after US bombing as a symbol of American humanity, and by reiterating US adherence to principles restricting attacks to military targets. Secretary of War Henry Stimson stated that "Our policy never has been to inflict terror bombing on civilian populations," claiming that Dresden, as a major transportation hub, was of military significance. [17] In fact, US public discussion, not to speak of protest, was minimal; in Britain there was more impassioned discussion, but with the smell of victory in the air, the government easily quieted the storm. The bombing continued. Strategic bombing had passed its sternest test in the realm of public reaction in Britain and the United States.
(...) it was in the Pacific theatre, and specifically in Japan, that the full brunt of air power would be felt. Between 1932 and 1945, Japan had bombed Shanghai, Nanjing, Chongqing and other cities, testing chemical weapons in Ningbo and throughout Zhejiang province. [18] In the early months of 1945, the United States shifted its attention to the Pacific as it gained the capacity to attack Japan from newly captured bases in Tinian and Guam. While the US continued to proclaim adherence to tactical bombing, tests of firebombing options against Japanese homes throughout 1943-44 demonstrated that M-69 bombs were highly effective against the densely packed wooden structures of Japanese cities. [19] In the final six months of the war, the US threw the full weight of its air power into campaigns to burn whole Japanese cities to the ground and terrorize, incapacitate and kill their largely defenseless residents in an effort to force surrender.
(...) The goal of the bombing assault that destroyed Japan's major cities in the period between May and August 1945, the US Strategic Bombing Survey explained, was "either to bring overwhelming pressure on her to surrender, or to reduce her capability of resisting invasion. . . . [by destroying] the basic economic and social fabric of the country." [23] A proposal by the Chief of Staff of the Twentieth Air Force to target the imperial palace was rejected, but in the wake of successive failures to eliminate such key strategic targets as Japan's Nakajima Aircraft Factory west of Tokyo, the area bombing of Japanese cities was approved. [24]
(...) The full fury of firebombing and napalm was unleashed on the night of March 9-10, 1945 when LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from the Marianas. Their mission was to reduce the city to rubble, kill its citizens, and instill terror in the survivors, with jellied gasoline and napalm that would create a sea of flames. Stripped of their guns to make more room for bombs, and flying at altitudes averaging 7,000 feet to evade detection, the bombers, which had been designed for high-altitude precision attacks, carried two kinds of incendiaries: M47s, 100-pound oil gel bombs, 182 per aircraft, each capable of starting a major fire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 per aircraft in addition to a few high explosives to deter firefighters. [25] The attack on an area that the US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated to be 84.7 percent residential succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of air force planners. Whipped by fierce winds, flames detonated by the bombs leaped across a fifteen square mile area of Tokyo generating immense firestorms that engulfed and killed scores of thousands of residents.
(...) Police cameraman Ishikawa Koyo described the streets of Tokyo as "rivers of fire . . . flaming pieces of furniture exploding in the heat, while the people themselves blazed like 'matchsticks' as their wood and paper homes exploded in flames. Under the wind and the gigantic breath of the fire, immense incandescent vortices rose in a number of places, swirling, flattening, sucking whole blocks of houses into their maelstrom of fire."
(...) Nature reinforced man's handiwork in the form of akakaze, the red wind that swept with hurricane force across the Tokyo plain and propelled firestorms across the city with terrifying speed and intensity. The wind drove temperatures up to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, creating superheated vapors that advanced ahead of the flames, killing or incapacitating their victims. "The mechanisms of death were so multiple and simultaneous -- oxygen deficiency and carbon monoxide poisoning, radiant heat and direct flames, debris and the trampling feet of stampeding crowds -- that causes of death were later hard to ascertain . . ." [27]
(...) The survey concluded -- plausibly, but only for events prior to August 6, 1945 -- that "probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man. People died from extreme heat, from oxygen deficiency, from carbon monoxide asphyxiation, from being trampled beneath the feet of stampeding crowds, and from drowning. The largest number of victims were the most vulnerable: women, children and the elderly."
(...) How many people died on the night of March 9-10 in what flight commander Gen. Thomas Power termed "the greatest single disaster incurred by any enemy in military history?" The Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that 87,793 people died in the raid, 40,918 were injured, and 1,008,005 people lost their homes. Robert Rhodes, estimating the dead at more than 100,000 men, women and children, suggested that probably a million more were injured and another million were left homeless. The Tokyo Fire Department estimated 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded. The Tokyo Police offered a figure of 124,711 killed and wounded and 286,358 building and homes destroyed. The figure of roughly 100,000 deaths, provided by Japanese and American authorities, both of whom may have had reasons of their own for minimizing the death toll, seems to me arguably low in light of population density, wind conditions, and survivors' accounts. [28] With an average of 103,000 inhabitants per square mile and peak levels as high as 135,000 per square mile, the highest density of any industrial city in the world, and with firefighting measures ludicrously inadequate to the task, 15.8 square miles of Tokyo were destroyed on a night when fierce winds whipped the flames and walls of fire blocked tens of thousands fleeing for their lives. An estimated 1.5 million people lived in the burned out areas. Given a near total inability to fight fires of the magnitude produced by the bombs, it is possible to imagine that casualties may have been several times higher than the figures presented on both sides of the conflict. The single effective Japanese government measure taken to reduce the slaughter of US bombing was the 1944 evacuation to the countryside of 400,000 children from major cities, 225, 000 of them from Tokyo. [29]
(...) No previous or subsequent conventional bombing raid ever came close to generating the toll in death and destruction of the great Tokyo raid of March 9-10. The airborne assault on Tokyo and other Japanese cities ground on relentlessly. According to Japanese police statistics, the 65 raids on Tokyo between December 6, 1944 and August 13, 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 firebombing was extended nationwide. In the ten-day period beginning on March 9, 9,373 tons of bombs destroyed 31 square miles of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe. Overall, bombing strikes destroyed 40 percent of the 66 Japanese cities targeted, with total tonnage dropped on Japan increasing from 13,800 tons in March to 42,700 tons in July. [31] If the bombing of Dresden produced a ripple of public debate in Europe, no discernible wave of revulsion, not to speak of protest, took place in the US or Europe in the wake of the far greater destruction of Japanese cities and the slaughter of civilian populations on a scale that had no parallel in the history of bombing.
(...) US planes ruled the skies. Overall, by one calculation, the US firebombing campaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67 cities, killed more than 300,000 people and injured an additional 400,000, figures that exclude the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [32]
(...) Between January and July 1945, the US firebombed and destroyed all but five Japanese cities, deliberately sparing Kyoto, the ancient imperial capital, and four others. The extent of the destruction was impressive ranging from 50 to 60% of the urban area destroyed in cities including Kobe, Yokohama and Tokyo, to 60 to 88% in seventeen cities, to 98.6% in the case of Toyama. [33] In the end, the Atomic Bomb Selection Committee chose Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki as the pristine targets to display the awesome power of the atomic bomb to Japan and the world in the event that would both bring to a spectacular end the costliest war in human history and send a powerful message to the Soviet Union.
(...) Michael Sherry has compellingly described the triumph of technological fanaticism as the hallmark of the air war that quintessentially shaped the American way of fighting and heavily stamped remembrances of the War ever after: "The shared mentality of the fanatics of air war was their dedication to assembling and perfecting their methods of destruction, and . . . doing so overshadowed the original purposes justifying destruction . . . .The lack of a proclaimed intent to destroy, the sense of being driven by the twin demands of bureaucracy and technology, distinguished America's technological fanaticism from its enemies' ideological fanaticism."
(...) Wartime technological fanaticism in my view is best understood as a means of operationalizing national goals. Taken for granted were the legitimacy and benevolence of American global power and a perception of the Japanese as both uniquely brutal and inherently inferior. Technology was harnessed to the driving force of American nationalism, which repeatedly came to the fore in times of war, and was fashioned under wartime conditions, beginning with the conquest of the Philippines in 1898 and running through successive wars and police actions in Latin America and Asia that spanned the long twentieth century. In other words, technological fanaticism is inseparable from American nationalism and conceptions of a benevolent American-dominated global order. In contrast to British, Japanese and other nationalisms associated with expansive powers, the American approach to the postwar order lay not in a vision centered on the acquisition of colonies but in a global network of military bases and naval and air power that only in recent years has begun to be understood as the American way of empire.
(...)Throughout the spring and summer of 1945 the US air war in Japan reached an intensity that is still perhaps unrivaled in the magnitude of human slaughter. [35] That moment was a product of the combination of technological breakthroughs, American nationalism, and the erosion of moral and political scruples pertaining to the killing of civilians, perhaps intensified by the racism that crystallized in the Pacific theatre. [36]
(...) The most important way in which World War II shaped the moral and technological tenor of mass destruction was the erosion in the course of war of the stigma associated with the systematic targeting of civilian populations from the air, and elimination of the constraints, which for some years had restrained certain air powers from area bombing. What was new was both the scale of killing made possible by the new technologies and the routinization of mass killing or state terrorism. If area bombing remained controversial throughout much of World War II, something to be concealed or denied by its practitioners, by the end of the conflagration it would become the acknowledged centerpiece of war making, emblematic above all of the American way of war even as the nature of the targets and the weapons were transformed by new technologies and confronted new forms of resistance. Indeed, for six decades the US (and those fighting under its umbrella) has been virtually alone in fighting wars and police actions notable for their reliance on airpower in general and the deliberate targeting for destruction of civilians, and the infrastructure that makes possible their survival, in particular. Certainly in this epoch no others have bombed on a scale approaching that of the US. The US would conceal the deliberate annihilation of noncombatants with the figleaf that Sahr Conway-Lanz describes as the myth of collateral damage, that is the claim, however systematic the bombing, that the intent was elimination of military targets, not the slaughter of noncombatants.
(...) The Nuremberg Indictment defined "crimes against humanity" as "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war," language that resonated powerfully with the area bombing campaigns not only of Japan and Germany but of Britain and the US. [38] These efforts appear to have done little to stay the hand of power. Indeed, while the atomic bomb would leave a deep imprint on the collective consciousness of the twentieth century, memory of the area bombings and firebombing of major cities soon disappeared from the consciousness of all but the victims.
(...) The ability to destroy an entire city and annihilate its population in a single bombing campaign was not only far more "efficient" and less costly for the attacker than previous methods of warfare, it also sanitized slaughter. Air power distanced executioners from victims, transforming the visual and tactile experience of killing. The bombardier never looks squarely into the eyes of the victim, nor does the act of destruction have the physical immediacy for the perpetrator of decapitation by sword or even shooting with a machine gun. This may be particularly important when the principal targets are women, children and the elderly.
(...) While President Truman claimed that the Hiroshima bomb targeted a naval base, the decision to detonate the bomb in the skies above Hiroshima and Nagasaki was taken to maximize the killing of their inhabitants and the destruction of the built environment. It was also calculated to demonstrate to the Japanese government and people, to the authorities in the Soviet Union and other potential challengers of American preeminence, and to the people of the world, the omnipotence of American power and the certain destruction that would be visited on any who defied the United States. The debate over the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has reverberated throughout the postwar era, centered on the killing of noncombatants and on its significance in ending World War II and shaping the subsequent US-Soviet conflict that defined postwar geopolitics. [39] In a sense, however, the very focus of that debate on the atomic bomb, and later on the development of the hydrogen bomb, may have contributed to the silencing of the no less pressing issues associated with the killing of noncombatants with ever more powerful 'conventional' weapons.
(...) The US did not drop atomic bombs again in the six decades since the end of World War II, although it repeatedly threatened their use in Korea, in Vietnam and elsewhere. But it incorporated annihilation of noncombatants in the bombing programs that have been integral to the successive "conventional wars" that it has waged subsequently. With area bombing at the core of its strategic agenda, US attacks on cities and noncombatants would run the gamut from firebombing, napalming, cluster bombing, and atomic bombing to the use of chemical defoliants and depleted uranium weapons and bunker buster bombs in an ever expanding circle of destruction. [40] Indiscriminate bombing of noncombatants has been responsible for the most massive destruction and loss of life throughout this epoch, even while the US staunchly maintains that it does not deliberately kill civilians, thereby hewing to Conway-Lanz's collateral damage principle to protect it not only from political criticism in the US, but also from international criticisms.
(...) In that war, it was not the bombing of cities but Nazi genocide against Jews, Catholics, Romany, homosexuals and other Germans as well as Poles, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and Japanese slaughter of Asian noncombatants that exacted the heaviest price in human lives. Each of these examples had its unique character and historical and ideological origins. All rested on dehumanizing assumptions concerning the "other" and produced large-scale slaughter of noncombatant populations. Japan's China war produced notable cases of atrocities that, then and later, captured world attention. They included the Nanjing Massacre, the bombings of Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankou, Chongqing and other cities, the enslavement of the comfort women, and the vivisection experiments and biowarfare bombs of Unit 731. Less noted then and since were the systematic barbarities perpetrated against resistant villagers, though this produced the largest number of the estimated ten to thirty million Chinese who lost their lives in the war, a number that far surpasses the half million or more Japanese noncombatants who died at the hands of US bombing, and may have exceeded Soviet losses to Nazi invasion conventionally estimated at 20 million lives. [41] In that and subsequent wars it would be the signature barbarities such as the Nanjing Massacre, the Bataan Death March, and the massacres at Nogunri and My Lai rather than the quotidian events that defined the systematic daily and hourly killing, which have attracted sustained attention, sparked bitter controversy, and shaped historical memory.
(...) The war dead in Europe alone in World War II, including the Soviet Union, have been estimated in the range of 30 to 40 million, fifty percent more than the toll in World War I. To this we must add 25 to 35 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 killing of noncombatants in World War II, the US destruction of Japanese cities is perhaps least known and least controversial. In contrast to the fierce and continuing debate over the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nazi extermination of Jews and others, and the far smaller-scale allied bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, and such Japanese atrocities as the Nanjing Massacre and the vivisection experiments of Unit 731, the US firebombing of Japanese cities has virtually disappeared from international and even American and Japanese historical memory of the war.
(...) In World War I, ninety percent of the fatalities directly attributable to the war were military, nearly all of them Europeans and Americans. Most estimates place World War II casualties in Europe in the range of 50-60 percent noncombatants. In the case of Asia, when war-induced famine casualties are included, the noncombatant death toll was almost certainly substantially higher in both absolute and percentage terms. [42] The United States, its homeland untouched by war, suffered approximately 100,000 deaths in the entire Asian theater, a figure lower than that for the single Tokyo air raid of March 10, 1945, and well below the death toll at Hiroshima or in the Battle of Okinawa. Japan's three million war dead, while thirty times the number of US dead, was still only a small fraction of the toll suffered by the Chinese who resisted the Japanese military juggernaut. These are numbers of relative casualties that the US, by fighting no war on its own soil since the Civil War, and by adapting strategies that maximize its technological and economic strength and minimize its own casualties, would replicate to even greater numerical advantage in subsequent wars.
(...) World War II remains indelibly engraved in American memory as the "Good War" and in important respects it was. In confronting the war machines of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the United States played a large role in defeating aggressors and opening the way for a wave of decolonization that swept the globe in subsequent decades. It was also a war that catapulted the United States to global supremacy and established the institutional foundations for the global projection of American power in a network of military bases and unrivaled technological supremacy.
(...) For most Americans, in retrospect World War II seemed a "Good War" in another sense: the US entered and exited the war buoyed by absolute moral certainty borne of a mission to punish aggression in the form of a genocidal Nazi fascism and Japanese imperialism run amok. Moreover, Americans remember the generosity of US aid not only to war torn allies, but to rebuild the societies of former adversaries, Germany and Japan. Such an interpretation masks the extent to which Americans shared with their adversaries an abiding nationalism and expansionist urges. In contrast to earlier territorial empires, this took the form of new regional and global structures facilitating the exercise of American power. The victory, which propelled the US to a hegemonic position which carried authority to condemn and punish war crimes committed by defeated nations, remains a major obstacle to a thoroughgoing reassessment of the wartime conduct of the US in general, and issues of mass destruction carried out by its forces in particular.
(...) At Nuremberg and subsequent trials, more than 1,800 Germans were convicted of war crimes and 294 were executed. At the Tokyo Trials, 28 were indicted and seven were sentenced to death. At subsequent A and B class trials conducted by the allied powers between 1945 and 1951, 5,700 Japanese, Koreans and Taiwanese were indicted. 984 were initially sentenced to death (the sentences of 50 of these were commuted); 475 received life sentences, and 2,944 received limited prison terms. The result of military defeat, occupation, and war crimes tribunals has been protracted and profound reflection and self-criticism by significant groups within both countries. In the case of Germany -- but not yet Japan -- there has been meaningful official recognition of the criminal conduct of genocidal and other barbaric policies as well as appropriate restitution to victims in the form of public apology and substantial official reparations. For its part, the Japanese state continues to reject official reparations claims to such war victims as Korean and Chinese forced laborers and the military comfort women (sexual slaves), while the war remains a fiercely contested intellectual-political issue as demonstrated by the decades long conflicts over textbook treatments of colonialism and war, the Yasukuni shrine (the symbol of emperor-centered nationalism, empire and war), the military comfort women, and the Nanjing Massacre controversies. [44]
(...) In contrast to these responses to the war in Germany and Japan, and even to the ongoing debate in the US about the uses of the atomic bomb, there has been virtually no awareness of, not to speak of critical reflection on, the US bombing of Japanese civilians in the months prior to Hiroshima. The systematic bombing of Japanese noncombatants in the course of the destruction of Japanese cities must be added to a list of the horrific legacies of the war that includes Nazi genocide and a host of Japanese war crimes against Asian peoples. Only by engaging the issues, and above all the impact of this approach to the massive killing of noncombatants that has been central to all subsequent US wars, can Americans begin to approach the Nuremberg ideal that holds victors as well as vanquished to the same standards with respect to crimes against humanity, or the standard of the 1949 Geneva Accord which requires the protection of civilians in time of war. This is the principle of universality enshrined at Nuremberg and violated in practice by the US and others beginning with the 1946 trials, which declared US immunity from prosecution for war crimes.
(...) American self-conceptions of benevolence and justice have remained fixed not on the reality of the killing of noncombatants but on the combination of American intentions in combat and generosity in charting postwar recovery in all wars since 1945.
(...) The centrality of the wholesale killing of noncombatants through the myriad uses of air power runs like a red line from the bombings of 1944-45 through the Korean and Indochinese wars to the Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In the course of six decades since the firebombing and atomic bombing of Japan, while important continuities are observable, such as the firebombing and napalming of cities, new, more powerful and versatile aircraft and weapons would be deployed in the course of successive American wars fought predominantly in Asia.
(...) LeMay recalled of Korea:
(...) In the course of three years, US/UN forces in Korea flew 1,040,708 sorties and dropped 386,037 tons of bombs and 32,357 tons of napalm. Counting all types of air borne ordnance, including rockets and machine-gun ammunition, the total tonnage comes to 698,000 tons. Marilyn Young estimates the death toll in Korea, most of it noncombatants, at two to four million, and in the South alone, more than five million people had been displaced, according to UN estimates. [48]
(...) Beginning in Korea, US bombing was extended from cities to the countryside with devastating effects. In what Bruce Cumings has called the "final act of this barbaric air war," in spring 1953 North Korea's main irrigation dams were destroyed shortly after the rice had been transplanted. [49]
(...) In response to reports of Axis plans to use poison gases, Roosevelt warned that "use of such weapons has been outlawed by the general opinion of civilized mankind. This country has not used them, and I hope that we never will be compelled to use them. I state categorically that we shall under no circumstances resort to the use of such weapons unless they are first used by our enemies." [50] This principle, incorporated in US Army Field Manual 27-10, Law of Land Warfare, issued in 1954, affirmed the principle of no first use of gas warfare and bacteriological warfare. By 1956, that provision had disappeared, replaced by the assertion that the US was party to no treaty in force "that prohibits or restricts the use in warfare of toxic or nontoxic gases, or smoke or incendiary materials or of bacteriological warfare." US CBW research and procurement efforts, that began in the early 1950s and culminated in the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, resulted in the use of chemical and biological weapons both against Vietnamese forces and nature, specifically extending from the destruction of forest cover to the destruction of crops. As Seymour Hersh documents, the US CBW program in Vietnam "gradually escalated from the use of leaf-killing defoliants to rice-killing herbicides and nausea-producing gases." [51] How widespread were US gas attacks in Vietnam? A 1967 Japanese study of US anticrop and defoliation attacks prepared by the head of the Agronomy Section of the Japan Science Council concluded that more than 3.8 million acres of arable land in South Vietnam was ruined and more than 1,000 peasants and 13,000 livestock were killed. [52] In the face of US military claims that the gases were benign, Dr. Pham Duc Nam told Japanese investigators that a three-day attack near Da Nang from February 25 to 27, 1966 had poisoned both livestock and people, some of whom died. "Pregnant women gave birth to still-born or premature children. Most of the affected cattle died from serious diarrhea, and river fish floated on the surface of the water belly up, soon after the chemicals were spread." [53]
(...) Before turning to Iraq, it is worth recalling President Nixon's comments on the bombing of Cambodia as preserved in the Kissinger tapes released in May 2004. In a burst of anger on Dec. 9, 1970, when Nixon railed over what he saw as the Air Force's lackluster bombing campaign in Cambodia. Kissinger responded: "The Air Force is designed to fight an air battle against the Soviet Union. They are not designed for this war." Nixon then exploded: "I want them to hit everything. I want them to use the big planes, the small planes, everything they can that will help out there, and let's start giving them a little shock." Here was an early warning signal of the "Shock and Awe" strategy of a generation later. Kissinger relayed the order: "A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves." [54] In the course of the Vietnam War the US embraced chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction as integral parts of its arsenal.
(...) The new evidence makes clear that Cambodia was bombed far more heavily than was previously known, and that, unbeknownst to the American public or the world, it began not with Nixon in 1970 but on October 4, 1965. During a fall 2000 visit to Vietnam, President Clinton made available detailed Air Force records to help the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian governments to uncover the remains of two thousand missing American soldiers. The records provided specific data on place and scale of bombing. The incomplete data reveal that October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons' worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. The consequences go far beyond the dead, the injured, and the continued dangers of unexploded ordinance. As Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan argue persuasively, "Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d'état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide." [55]
(...) Second, as Seymour Hersh and others have observed, the US military, while continuing to pursue massive bombing of Iraqi neighborhoods, above all in the destruction of Falluja but even in Baghdad, has chosen to throw a cloak of silence over the air war. The major media have faithfully honored official dicta in this as in so many other ways. [57] Finally, among the George W. Bush administration's major initiatives have been the efforts to seize control of space as the centerpiece of global domination in an era that is slated to replace the bomber as the primary delivery weapon of mass destruction. [58] Air power remains among the major causes of death, destruction, dislocation and division in contemporary Iraq in a war that had taken approximately 655,000 lives by the summer of 2006 in the most authoritative study to date, that of The Lancet) and created more than two million refugees abroad and an equal number displaced internally (one in seven Iraqis are displaced). Largely unreported in the US mainstream press, and invisible in US television news and reportage, this is the central reality that confronts the Iraq people. US strategy has produced the explosive social divisions that promise to lead to permanent warfare in Iraq and throughout the region. Despite the unchallenged air supremacy that the US has wielded in Iraq since 1991 and especially since 2003, there is no end in sight to US warfare and civil war in Iraq and throughout the region. [59]
(...) We have shown the decisive impact of the final year of World War II in setting in place the preeminence of strategic bombing as quintessential to the US way of war, one that would characterize subsequent major wars that have wreaked yet greater devastation on noncombatant populations. Yet for all the power unleashed by US bombers, for all the millions of victims, in the six decades since 1945, victory against successive, predominantly Asian foes, has proved extraordinary elusive for the United States.
World War II was a landmark in the development and deployment of technologies of mass destruction associated with air power, notably the B-29 bomber, napalm and the atomic bomb. An estimated 50 to 70 million people lay dead in its wake. In a sharp reversal of the pattern of World War I and of most earlier wars, a substantial majority of the dead were noncombatants. [1] The air war, which reached peak intensity with the area bombing, including atomic bombing, of major European and Japanese cities in its final year, had a devastating impact on noncombatant populations.
(...) Bombs had been dropped from the air as early as 1849 on Venice (from balloons) and 1911 in Libya (from planes).
(...) A series of international conferences at the Hague beginning in 1899 set out principles for limiting air war and securing the protection of noncombatants from bombing and other attacks. The 1923 Hague conference crafted a sixty-two article "Rules of Aerial Warfare," which prohibited "Aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military character, or of injuring non-combatants." It specifically limited bombardment to military objectives, prohibited "indiscriminate bombardment of the civilian population," and held violators liable to pay compensation. [3] Securing consensus and enforcing limits, however, proved extraordinarily elusive then and since.
(...) The strategic and ethical implications of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have generated a vast contentious literature, as have German and Japanese war crimes and atrocities. By contrast, the US destruction of more than sixty Japanese cities prior to Hiroshima has been slighted both in the scholarly literatures in English and Japanese and in popular consciousness in both Japan and the US. It has been overshadowed by the atomic bombing and by heroic narratives of American conduct in the "Good War", an outcome not unrelated to the emergence of the US as a superpower. [5] Arguably, however, the central technological, strategic and ethical breakthroughs that would leave their stamp on subsequent wars occurred in area bombing of noncombatants prior to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A.C. Grayling explains the different responses to firebombing and atomic bombing this way: ". . . the frisson of dread created by the thought of what atomic weaponry can do affects those who contemplate it more than those who actually suffer from it; for whether it is an atom bomb rather than tons of high explosives and incendiaries that does the damage, not a jot of suffering is added to its victims that the burned and buried, the dismembered and blinded, the dying and bereaved of Dresden or Hamburg did not feel." [6]
(...) If others, notably Germany, England and Japan led the way in area bombing, the targeting for destruction of entire cities with conventional weapons emerged in 1944-45 as the centerpiece of US warfare. It was an approach that combined technological predominance with minimization of US casualties in ways that would become the hallmark of the American way of war in campaigns from Korea and Indochina to the Gulf and Iraq Wars and, indeed define the trajectory of major wars since the 1940s. The result would be the decimation of noncombatant populations and extraordinary "kill ratios" favoring the US military. Yet for the US, victory would prove extraordinary elusive. This is one important reason why, six decades on, World War II retains its aura for Americans as the "Good War", and why Americans have yet to effectively come to grips with questions of ethics and international law associated with their area bombing of Germany and Japan.
(...) The twentieth century was notable for the contradiction between international attempts to place limits on the destructiveness of war and to hold nations and their military leaders responsible for violations of international laws of war (Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals and successive Geneva conventions, particularly the 1949 convention protecting civilians and POWs) and the systematic violation of those principles by the major powers. [7] For example, while the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals clearly articulated the principle of universality, the Tribunals, both held in cities that had been obliterated by Allied bombing, famously shielded the victorious powers, above all the US, from responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Telford Taylor, chief counsel for war crimes prosecution at Nuremberg, made the point with specific reference to the bombing of cities a quarter century later:
"Since both sides had played the terrible game of urban destruction -- the Allies far more successfully -- there was no basis for criminal charges against Germans or Japanese, and in fact no such charges were brought . . . . Aerial bombardment had been used so extensively and ruthlessly on the Allied side as well as the Axis side that neither at Nuremberg nor Tokyo was the issue made a part of the trials."
(...) From 1932 to the early years of World War II the United States was an outspoken critic of city bombing, notably but not exclusively German and Japanese bombing. President Franklin Roosevelt appealed to the warring nations in 1939 on the first day of World War II "under no circumstances [to] undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities." [9] Britain, France and Germany agreed to limit bombing to strictly military objectives, but in May 1940 German bombardment of Rotterdam exacted 40,000 civilian lives and forced the Dutch surrender. Up to this point, bombing of cities had been isolated, sporadic and for the most part confined to the axis powers. Then in August 1940, after German bombers bombed London, Churchill ordered an attack on Berlin. The steady escalation of bombing targeting cities and their noncombatant populations followed. [10]
(...) After entering the war following Pearl Harbor, the US continued to claim the moral high ground by abjuring civilian bombing. This stance was consistent with the prevailing view in the Air Force high command that the most efficient bombing strategies were those that pinpointed destruction of enemy forces and installations, factories, and railroads, not those designed to terrorize or kill noncombatants. Nevertheless, the US collaborated with indiscriminate bombing at Casablanca in 1943, when a US-British division of labor emerged in which the British conducted the indiscriminate bombing of cities and the US sought to destroy military and industrial targets. [11] In the final years of the war, Max Hastings observed that Churchill and his bomber commander Arthur Harris set out to concentrate "all available forces for the progressive, systematic destruction of the urban areas of the Reich, city block by city block, factory by factory, until the enemy became a nation of troglodytes, scratching in the ruins." [12] (...) From 1942 with the bombing of Lubeck followed by Cologne, Hamburg and others, Harris pursued this strategy. The perfection of onslaught from the air, or what should be understood as terror bombing, is better understood, however, as a British-American joint venture.
(...) With German artillery and interceptors taking a heavy toll on US planes, pressure mounted for a strategic shift at a time of growing sophistication, numbers and range of US aircraft, and the invention of napalm and the perfection of radar. Ironically, while radar could have paved the way for a reaffirmation of tactical bombing, now made feasible at night, in the context of the endgame of the war what transpired was the massive assault on cities and their urban populations
(...) On February 13-14, 1945 British bombers with US planes following up destroyed Dresden, a historic cultural center with no significant military industry or bases. By conservative estimate, 35,000 people were incinerated in a single raid led by. [13] The American writer Kurt Vonnegut, then a young POW in Dresden, penned the classic account: [14]
"They burnt the whole damn town down . . . . Every day we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who'd simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A fire storm is an amazing thing. It doesn't occur in nature. It's fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn't a damned thing to breathe."
(...) Although far worse was in the offing in Japan, Dresden provoked the last significant public discussion of the bombing of women and children to take place during World War II, and the city became synonymous with terror bombing by the US and Britain. Coming in the wake of both the Hamburg and Munich bombings, the British government faced sharp questioning in parliament. [16] In the United States, debate was largely provoked not by the destruction wrought by the raids, but by an Associated Press report widely published in the US and Britain stating explicitly that "the Allied air commanders have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of the great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler's doom." American officials quickly acted to neutralize the report by pointing to the widely publicized great cathedral of Cologne, left standing after US bombing as a symbol of American humanity, and by reiterating US adherence to principles restricting attacks to military targets. Secretary of War Henry Stimson stated that "Our policy never has been to inflict terror bombing on civilian populations," claiming that Dresden, as a major transportation hub, was of military significance. [17] In fact, US public discussion, not to speak of protest, was minimal; in Britain there was more impassioned discussion, but with the smell of victory in the air, the government easily quieted the storm. The bombing continued. Strategic bombing had passed its sternest test in the realm of public reaction in Britain and the United States.
(...) it was in the Pacific theatre, and specifically in Japan, that the full brunt of air power would be felt. Between 1932 and 1945, Japan had bombed Shanghai, Nanjing, Chongqing and other cities, testing chemical weapons in Ningbo and throughout Zhejiang province. [18] In the early months of 1945, the United States shifted its attention to the Pacific as it gained the capacity to attack Japan from newly captured bases in Tinian and Guam. While the US continued to proclaim adherence to tactical bombing, tests of firebombing options against Japanese homes throughout 1943-44 demonstrated that M-69 bombs were highly effective against the densely packed wooden structures of Japanese cities. [19] In the final six months of the war, the US threw the full weight of its air power into campaigns to burn whole Japanese cities to the ground and terrorize, incapacitate and kill their largely defenseless residents in an effort to force surrender.
(...) The goal of the bombing assault that destroyed Japan's major cities in the period between May and August 1945, the US Strategic Bombing Survey explained, was "either to bring overwhelming pressure on her to surrender, or to reduce her capability of resisting invasion. . . . [by destroying] the basic economic and social fabric of the country." [23] A proposal by the Chief of Staff of the Twentieth Air Force to target the imperial palace was rejected, but in the wake of successive failures to eliminate such key strategic targets as Japan's Nakajima Aircraft Factory west of Tokyo, the area bombing of Japanese cities was approved. [24]
(...) The full fury of firebombing and napalm was unleashed on the night of March 9-10, 1945 when LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from the Marianas. Their mission was to reduce the city to rubble, kill its citizens, and instill terror in the survivors, with jellied gasoline and napalm that would create a sea of flames. Stripped of their guns to make more room for bombs, and flying at altitudes averaging 7,000 feet to evade detection, the bombers, which had been designed for high-altitude precision attacks, carried two kinds of incendiaries: M47s, 100-pound oil gel bombs, 182 per aircraft, each capable of starting a major fire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 per aircraft in addition to a few high explosives to deter firefighters. [25] The attack on an area that the US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated to be 84.7 percent residential succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of air force planners. Whipped by fierce winds, flames detonated by the bombs leaped across a fifteen square mile area of Tokyo generating immense firestorms that engulfed and killed scores of thousands of residents.
(...) Police cameraman Ishikawa Koyo described the streets of Tokyo as "rivers of fire . . . flaming pieces of furniture exploding in the heat, while the people themselves blazed like 'matchsticks' as their wood and paper homes exploded in flames. Under the wind and the gigantic breath of the fire, immense incandescent vortices rose in a number of places, swirling, flattening, sucking whole blocks of houses into their maelstrom of fire."
(...) Nature reinforced man's handiwork in the form of akakaze, the red wind that swept with hurricane force across the Tokyo plain and propelled firestorms across the city with terrifying speed and intensity. The wind drove temperatures up to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, creating superheated vapors that advanced ahead of the flames, killing or incapacitating their victims. "The mechanisms of death were so multiple and simultaneous -- oxygen deficiency and carbon monoxide poisoning, radiant heat and direct flames, debris and the trampling feet of stampeding crowds -- that causes of death were later hard to ascertain . . ." [27]
(...) The survey concluded -- plausibly, but only for events prior to August 6, 1945 -- that "probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man. People died from extreme heat, from oxygen deficiency, from carbon monoxide asphyxiation, from being trampled beneath the feet of stampeding crowds, and from drowning. The largest number of victims were the most vulnerable: women, children and the elderly."
(...) How many people died on the night of March 9-10 in what flight commander Gen. Thomas Power termed "the greatest single disaster incurred by any enemy in military history?" The Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that 87,793 people died in the raid, 40,918 were injured, and 1,008,005 people lost their homes. Robert Rhodes, estimating the dead at more than 100,000 men, women and children, suggested that probably a million more were injured and another million were left homeless. The Tokyo Fire Department estimated 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded. The Tokyo Police offered a figure of 124,711 killed and wounded and 286,358 building and homes destroyed. The figure of roughly 100,000 deaths, provided by Japanese and American authorities, both of whom may have had reasons of their own for minimizing the death toll, seems to me arguably low in light of population density, wind conditions, and survivors' accounts. [28] With an average of 103,000 inhabitants per square mile and peak levels as high as 135,000 per square mile, the highest density of any industrial city in the world, and with firefighting measures ludicrously inadequate to the task, 15.8 square miles of Tokyo were destroyed on a night when fierce winds whipped the flames and walls of fire blocked tens of thousands fleeing for their lives. An estimated 1.5 million people lived in the burned out areas. Given a near total inability to fight fires of the magnitude produced by the bombs, it is possible to imagine that casualties may have been several times higher than the figures presented on both sides of the conflict. The single effective Japanese government measure taken to reduce the slaughter of US bombing was the 1944 evacuation to the countryside of 400,000 children from major cities, 225, 000 of them from Tokyo. [29]
(...) No previous or subsequent conventional bombing raid ever came close to generating the toll in death and destruction of the great Tokyo raid of March 9-10. The airborne assault on Tokyo and other Japanese cities ground on relentlessly. According to Japanese police statistics, the 65 raids on Tokyo between December 6, 1944 and August 13, 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 firebombing was extended nationwide. In the ten-day period beginning on March 9, 9,373 tons of bombs destroyed 31 square miles of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe. Overall, bombing strikes destroyed 40 percent of the 66 Japanese cities targeted, with total tonnage dropped on Japan increasing from 13,800 tons in March to 42,700 tons in July. [31] If the bombing of Dresden produced a ripple of public debate in Europe, no discernible wave of revulsion, not to speak of protest, took place in the US or Europe in the wake of the far greater destruction of Japanese cities and the slaughter of civilian populations on a scale that had no parallel in the history of bombing.
(...) US planes ruled the skies. Overall, by one calculation, the US firebombing campaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67 cities, killed more than 300,000 people and injured an additional 400,000, figures that exclude the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [32]
(...) Between January and July 1945, the US firebombed and destroyed all but five Japanese cities, deliberately sparing Kyoto, the ancient imperial capital, and four others. The extent of the destruction was impressive ranging from 50 to 60% of the urban area destroyed in cities including Kobe, Yokohama and Tokyo, to 60 to 88% in seventeen cities, to 98.6% in the case of Toyama. [33] In the end, the Atomic Bomb Selection Committee chose Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki as the pristine targets to display the awesome power of the atomic bomb to Japan and the world in the event that would both bring to a spectacular end the costliest war in human history and send a powerful message to the Soviet Union.
(...) Michael Sherry has compellingly described the triumph of technological fanaticism as the hallmark of the air war that quintessentially shaped the American way of fighting and heavily stamped remembrances of the War ever after: "The shared mentality of the fanatics of air war was their dedication to assembling and perfecting their methods of destruction, and . . . doing so overshadowed the original purposes justifying destruction . . . .The lack of a proclaimed intent to destroy, the sense of being driven by the twin demands of bureaucracy and technology, distinguished America's technological fanaticism from its enemies' ideological fanaticism."
(...) Wartime technological fanaticism in my view is best understood as a means of operationalizing national goals. Taken for granted were the legitimacy and benevolence of American global power and a perception of the Japanese as both uniquely brutal and inherently inferior. Technology was harnessed to the driving force of American nationalism, which repeatedly came to the fore in times of war, and was fashioned under wartime conditions, beginning with the conquest of the Philippines in 1898 and running through successive wars and police actions in Latin America and Asia that spanned the long twentieth century. In other words, technological fanaticism is inseparable from American nationalism and conceptions of a benevolent American-dominated global order. In contrast to British, Japanese and other nationalisms associated with expansive powers, the American approach to the postwar order lay not in a vision centered on the acquisition of colonies but in a global network of military bases and naval and air power that only in recent years has begun to be understood as the American way of empire.
(...)Throughout the spring and summer of 1945 the US air war in Japan reached an intensity that is still perhaps unrivaled in the magnitude of human slaughter. [35] That moment was a product of the combination of technological breakthroughs, American nationalism, and the erosion of moral and political scruples pertaining to the killing of civilians, perhaps intensified by the racism that crystallized in the Pacific theatre. [36]
(...) The most important way in which World War II shaped the moral and technological tenor of mass destruction was the erosion in the course of war of the stigma associated with the systematic targeting of civilian populations from the air, and elimination of the constraints, which for some years had restrained certain air powers from area bombing. What was new was both the scale of killing made possible by the new technologies and the routinization of mass killing or state terrorism. If area bombing remained controversial throughout much of World War II, something to be concealed or denied by its practitioners, by the end of the conflagration it would become the acknowledged centerpiece of war making, emblematic above all of the American way of war even as the nature of the targets and the weapons were transformed by new technologies and confronted new forms of resistance. Indeed, for six decades the US (and those fighting under its umbrella) has been virtually alone in fighting wars and police actions notable for their reliance on airpower in general and the deliberate targeting for destruction of civilians, and the infrastructure that makes possible their survival, in particular. Certainly in this epoch no others have bombed on a scale approaching that of the US. The US would conceal the deliberate annihilation of noncombatants with the figleaf that Sahr Conway-Lanz describes as the myth of collateral damage, that is the claim, however systematic the bombing, that the intent was elimination of military targets, not the slaughter of noncombatants.
(...) The Nuremberg Indictment defined "crimes against humanity" as "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war," language that resonated powerfully with the area bombing campaigns not only of Japan and Germany but of Britain and the US. [38] These efforts appear to have done little to stay the hand of power. Indeed, while the atomic bomb would leave a deep imprint on the collective consciousness of the twentieth century, memory of the area bombings and firebombing of major cities soon disappeared from the consciousness of all but the victims.
(...) The ability to destroy an entire city and annihilate its population in a single bombing campaign was not only far more "efficient" and less costly for the attacker than previous methods of warfare, it also sanitized slaughter. Air power distanced executioners from victims, transforming the visual and tactile experience of killing. The bombardier never looks squarely into the eyes of the victim, nor does the act of destruction have the physical immediacy for the perpetrator of decapitation by sword or even shooting with a machine gun. This may be particularly important when the principal targets are women, children and the elderly.
(...) While President Truman claimed that the Hiroshima bomb targeted a naval base, the decision to detonate the bomb in the skies above Hiroshima and Nagasaki was taken to maximize the killing of their inhabitants and the destruction of the built environment. It was also calculated to demonstrate to the Japanese government and people, to the authorities in the Soviet Union and other potential challengers of American preeminence, and to the people of the world, the omnipotence of American power and the certain destruction that would be visited on any who defied the United States. The debate over the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has reverberated throughout the postwar era, centered on the killing of noncombatants and on its significance in ending World War II and shaping the subsequent US-Soviet conflict that defined postwar geopolitics. [39] In a sense, however, the very focus of that debate on the atomic bomb, and later on the development of the hydrogen bomb, may have contributed to the silencing of the no less pressing issues associated with the killing of noncombatants with ever more powerful 'conventional' weapons.
(...) The US did not drop atomic bombs again in the six decades since the end of World War II, although it repeatedly threatened their use in Korea, in Vietnam and elsewhere. But it incorporated annihilation of noncombatants in the bombing programs that have been integral to the successive "conventional wars" that it has waged subsequently. With area bombing at the core of its strategic agenda, US attacks on cities and noncombatants would run the gamut from firebombing, napalming, cluster bombing, and atomic bombing to the use of chemical defoliants and depleted uranium weapons and bunker buster bombs in an ever expanding circle of destruction. [40] Indiscriminate bombing of noncombatants has been responsible for the most massive destruction and loss of life throughout this epoch, even while the US staunchly maintains that it does not deliberately kill civilians, thereby hewing to Conway-Lanz's collateral damage principle to protect it not only from political criticism in the US, but also from international criticisms.
(...) In that war, it was not the bombing of cities but Nazi genocide against Jews, Catholics, Romany, homosexuals and other Germans as well as Poles, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and Japanese slaughter of Asian noncombatants that exacted the heaviest price in human lives. Each of these examples had its unique character and historical and ideological origins. All rested on dehumanizing assumptions concerning the "other" and produced large-scale slaughter of noncombatant populations. Japan's China war produced notable cases of atrocities that, then and later, captured world attention. They included the Nanjing Massacre, the bombings of Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankou, Chongqing and other cities, the enslavement of the comfort women, and the vivisection experiments and biowarfare bombs of Unit 731. Less noted then and since were the systematic barbarities perpetrated against resistant villagers, though this produced the largest number of the estimated ten to thirty million Chinese who lost their lives in the war, a number that far surpasses the half million or more Japanese noncombatants who died at the hands of US bombing, and may have exceeded Soviet losses to Nazi invasion conventionally estimated at 20 million lives. [41] In that and subsequent wars it would be the signature barbarities such as the Nanjing Massacre, the Bataan Death March, and the massacres at Nogunri and My Lai rather than the quotidian events that defined the systematic daily and hourly killing, which have attracted sustained attention, sparked bitter controversy, and shaped historical memory.
(...) The war dead in Europe alone in World War II, including the Soviet Union, have been estimated in the range of 30 to 40 million, fifty percent more than the toll in World War I. To this we must add 25 to 35 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 killing of noncombatants in World War II, the US destruction of Japanese cities is perhaps least known and least controversial. In contrast to the fierce and continuing debate over the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nazi extermination of Jews and others, and the far smaller-scale allied bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, and such Japanese atrocities as the Nanjing Massacre and the vivisection experiments of Unit 731, the US firebombing of Japanese cities has virtually disappeared from international and even American and Japanese historical memory of the war.
(...) In World War I, ninety percent of the fatalities directly attributable to the war were military, nearly all of them Europeans and Americans. Most estimates place World War II casualties in Europe in the range of 50-60 percent noncombatants. In the case of Asia, when war-induced famine casualties are included, the noncombatant death toll was almost certainly substantially higher in both absolute and percentage terms. [42] The United States, its homeland untouched by war, suffered approximately 100,000 deaths in the entire Asian theater, a figure lower than that for the single Tokyo air raid of March 10, 1945, and well below the death toll at Hiroshima or in the Battle of Okinawa. Japan's three million war dead, while thirty times the number of US dead, was still only a small fraction of the toll suffered by the Chinese who resisted the Japanese military juggernaut. These are numbers of relative casualties that the US, by fighting no war on its own soil since the Civil War, and by adapting strategies that maximize its technological and economic strength and minimize its own casualties, would replicate to even greater numerical advantage in subsequent wars.
(...) World War II remains indelibly engraved in American memory as the "Good War" and in important respects it was. In confronting the war machines of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the United States played a large role in defeating aggressors and opening the way for a wave of decolonization that swept the globe in subsequent decades. It was also a war that catapulted the United States to global supremacy and established the institutional foundations for the global projection of American power in a network of military bases and unrivaled technological supremacy.
(...) For most Americans, in retrospect World War II seemed a "Good War" in another sense: the US entered and exited the war buoyed by absolute moral certainty borne of a mission to punish aggression in the form of a genocidal Nazi fascism and Japanese imperialism run amok. Moreover, Americans remember the generosity of US aid not only to war torn allies, but to rebuild the societies of former adversaries, Germany and Japan. Such an interpretation masks the extent to which Americans shared with their adversaries an abiding nationalism and expansionist urges. In contrast to earlier territorial empires, this took the form of new regional and global structures facilitating the exercise of American power. The victory, which propelled the US to a hegemonic position which carried authority to condemn and punish war crimes committed by defeated nations, remains a major obstacle to a thoroughgoing reassessment of the wartime conduct of the US in general, and issues of mass destruction carried out by its forces in particular.
(...) At Nuremberg and subsequent trials, more than 1,800 Germans were convicted of war crimes and 294 were executed. At the Tokyo Trials, 28 were indicted and seven were sentenced to death. At subsequent A and B class trials conducted by the allied powers between 1945 and 1951, 5,700 Japanese, Koreans and Taiwanese were indicted. 984 were initially sentenced to death (the sentences of 50 of these were commuted); 475 received life sentences, and 2,944 received limited prison terms. The result of military defeat, occupation, and war crimes tribunals has been protracted and profound reflection and self-criticism by significant groups within both countries. In the case of Germany -- but not yet Japan -- there has been meaningful official recognition of the criminal conduct of genocidal and other barbaric policies as well as appropriate restitution to victims in the form of public apology and substantial official reparations. For its part, the Japanese state continues to reject official reparations claims to such war victims as Korean and Chinese forced laborers and the military comfort women (sexual slaves), while the war remains a fiercely contested intellectual-political issue as demonstrated by the decades long conflicts over textbook treatments of colonialism and war, the Yasukuni shrine (the symbol of emperor-centered nationalism, empire and war), the military comfort women, and the Nanjing Massacre controversies. [44]
(...) In contrast to these responses to the war in Germany and Japan, and even to the ongoing debate in the US about the uses of the atomic bomb, there has been virtually no awareness of, not to speak of critical reflection on, the US bombing of Japanese civilians in the months prior to Hiroshima. The systematic bombing of Japanese noncombatants in the course of the destruction of Japanese cities must be added to a list of the horrific legacies of the war that includes Nazi genocide and a host of Japanese war crimes against Asian peoples. Only by engaging the issues, and above all the impact of this approach to the massive killing of noncombatants that has been central to all subsequent US wars, can Americans begin to approach the Nuremberg ideal that holds victors as well as vanquished to the same standards with respect to crimes against humanity, or the standard of the 1949 Geneva Accord which requires the protection of civilians in time of war. This is the principle of universality enshrined at Nuremberg and violated in practice by the US and others beginning with the 1946 trials, which declared US immunity from prosecution for war crimes.
(...) American self-conceptions of benevolence and justice have remained fixed not on the reality of the killing of noncombatants but on the combination of American intentions in combat and generosity in charting postwar recovery in all wars since 1945.
(...) The centrality of the wholesale killing of noncombatants through the myriad uses of air power runs like a red line from the bombings of 1944-45 through the Korean and Indochinese wars to the Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In the course of six decades since the firebombing and atomic bombing of Japan, while important continuities are observable, such as the firebombing and napalming of cities, new, more powerful and versatile aircraft and weapons would be deployed in the course of successive American wars fought predominantly in Asia.
(...) LeMay recalled of Korea:
"We slipped a note kind of under the door into the Pentagon and said, 'Look, let us go up there…and burn down five of the biggest towns in North Korea – and they're not very big – and that ought to stop it.' Well, the answer to that was four or five screams – 'You'll kill a lot of non-combatants,' and 'It's too horrible.' Yet over a period three years or so…we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too… Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening – a lot of people can't stomach it." [47]
(...) In the course of three years, US/UN forces in Korea flew 1,040,708 sorties and dropped 386,037 tons of bombs and 32,357 tons of napalm. Counting all types of air borne ordnance, including rockets and machine-gun ammunition, the total tonnage comes to 698,000 tons. Marilyn Young estimates the death toll in Korea, most of it noncombatants, at two to four million, and in the South alone, more than five million people had been displaced, according to UN estimates. [48]
(...) Beginning in Korea, US bombing was extended from cities to the countryside with devastating effects. In what Bruce Cumings has called the "final act of this barbaric air war," in spring 1953 North Korea's main irrigation dams were destroyed shortly after the rice had been transplanted. [49]
(...) In response to reports of Axis plans to use poison gases, Roosevelt warned that "use of such weapons has been outlawed by the general opinion of civilized mankind. This country has not used them, and I hope that we never will be compelled to use them. I state categorically that we shall under no circumstances resort to the use of such weapons unless they are first used by our enemies." [50] This principle, incorporated in US Army Field Manual 27-10, Law of Land Warfare, issued in 1954, affirmed the principle of no first use of gas warfare and bacteriological warfare. By 1956, that provision had disappeared, replaced by the assertion that the US was party to no treaty in force "that prohibits or restricts the use in warfare of toxic or nontoxic gases, or smoke or incendiary materials or of bacteriological warfare." US CBW research and procurement efforts, that began in the early 1950s and culminated in the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, resulted in the use of chemical and biological weapons both against Vietnamese forces and nature, specifically extending from the destruction of forest cover to the destruction of crops. As Seymour Hersh documents, the US CBW program in Vietnam "gradually escalated from the use of leaf-killing defoliants to rice-killing herbicides and nausea-producing gases." [51] How widespread were US gas attacks in Vietnam? A 1967 Japanese study of US anticrop and defoliation attacks prepared by the head of the Agronomy Section of the Japan Science Council concluded that more than 3.8 million acres of arable land in South Vietnam was ruined and more than 1,000 peasants and 13,000 livestock were killed. [52] In the face of US military claims that the gases were benign, Dr. Pham Duc Nam told Japanese investigators that a three-day attack near Da Nang from February 25 to 27, 1966 had poisoned both livestock and people, some of whom died. "Pregnant women gave birth to still-born or premature children. Most of the affected cattle died from serious diarrhea, and river fish floated on the surface of the water belly up, soon after the chemicals were spread." [53]
(...) Before turning to Iraq, it is worth recalling President Nixon's comments on the bombing of Cambodia as preserved in the Kissinger tapes released in May 2004. In a burst of anger on Dec. 9, 1970, when Nixon railed over what he saw as the Air Force's lackluster bombing campaign in Cambodia. Kissinger responded: "The Air Force is designed to fight an air battle against the Soviet Union. They are not designed for this war." Nixon then exploded: "I want them to hit everything. I want them to use the big planes, the small planes, everything they can that will help out there, and let's start giving them a little shock." Here was an early warning signal of the "Shock and Awe" strategy of a generation later. Kissinger relayed the order: "A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves." [54] In the course of the Vietnam War the US embraced chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction as integral parts of its arsenal.
(...) The new evidence makes clear that Cambodia was bombed far more heavily than was previously known, and that, unbeknownst to the American public or the world, it began not with Nixon in 1970 but on October 4, 1965. During a fall 2000 visit to Vietnam, President Clinton made available detailed Air Force records to help the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian governments to uncover the remains of two thousand missing American soldiers. The records provided specific data on place and scale of bombing. The incomplete data reveal that October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons' worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. The consequences go far beyond the dead, the injured, and the continued dangers of unexploded ordinance. As Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan argue persuasively, "Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d'état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide." [55]
(...) Second, as Seymour Hersh and others have observed, the US military, while continuing to pursue massive bombing of Iraqi neighborhoods, above all in the destruction of Falluja but even in Baghdad, has chosen to throw a cloak of silence over the air war. The major media have faithfully honored official dicta in this as in so many other ways. [57] Finally, among the George W. Bush administration's major initiatives have been the efforts to seize control of space as the centerpiece of global domination in an era that is slated to replace the bomber as the primary delivery weapon of mass destruction. [58] Air power remains among the major causes of death, destruction, dislocation and division in contemporary Iraq in a war that had taken approximately 655,000 lives by the summer of 2006 in the most authoritative study to date, that of The Lancet) and created more than two million refugees abroad and an equal number displaced internally (one in seven Iraqis are displaced). Largely unreported in the US mainstream press, and invisible in US television news and reportage, this is the central reality that confronts the Iraq people. US strategy has produced the explosive social divisions that promise to lead to permanent warfare in Iraq and throughout the region. Despite the unchallenged air supremacy that the US has wielded in Iraq since 1991 and especially since 2003, there is no end in sight to US warfare and civil war in Iraq and throughout the region. [59]
(...) We have shown the decisive impact of the final year of World War II in setting in place the preeminence of strategic bombing as quintessential to the US way of war, one that would characterize subsequent major wars that have wreaked yet greater devastation on noncombatant populations. Yet for all the power unleashed by US bombers, for all the millions of victims, in the six decades since 1945, victory against successive, predominantly Asian foes, has proved extraordinary elusive for the United States.
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