burnt offerings

So, Hiroshima Day once more. Those who think the bombing was wrong are often characterised as gutless pacifists unprepared to make the hard decisions necessary to bring war to a decisive conclusion. In fact, the gutless pacifists have some distinguished military company, as Justin Logan reveals from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

"...Most top U.S. military leaders (including even the famous hawk Gen. Curtis LeMay) strongly condemned the decision as soon as they felt free to speak publicly after the war.

LeMay, for one, is on record as judging the war would likely have ended in two weeks. Japan was essentially defeated by the summer of 1945--her navy sunk, her industries in ruins, her cities undefended against conventional bombardment. U.S. intelligence argued as early as April 1945 that a modification of the unconditional surrender formula plus the shock of the forthcoming Russian declaration of war (expected in early August) would almost certainly end the conflict long before the first landing of troops could occur in November.

Moreover, even if U.S. intelligence advice proved wrong, three full months remained in which the bombs could be used before any troops hit the beachheads. During this period, Gen. George Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, urged another option. A document dated May 1945 reads: '[Marshall] thought these weapons might first be used against straight military objectives such as a large naval installation and then if no complete result was derived from the effect of that, he thought we ought to designate [a] number of large manufacturing areas from which the people would be warned to leave...

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are generally judged as free standing events. Yet they can also be seen as the resolution of a process, in this case a fierce ongoing debate about the uses and purposes of bombing which took place throughout World War II aty the higher levels of the Anglo-American command structure, a debate which pitched "precisionists" against advocates of widespread civilian bombing. So called area bombing was particularly favoured by the British, partly out of revenge for the Blitz and partly out of the conviction that they key to victory over Germany lay in the destruction of civilian morale, as was partly the case in 1918. Additonally, bombing civilians had shown itself to be an effective and cost effective way of quelling anti-colonial uprisings in Kurdistan and in the Third Afghan War of 1919. As a result:

The RAF accordingly organized a discussion group, the so-called Zoroastrian Society, to share technical information and promote the city-burning strategy.[21] It soon became an intellectual home for aggressive young commanders like Curtis Le May who were infected with the British enthusiasm for incendiary weapons and wanted to see their deployment greatly expanded in every theater. Their views were endorsed by Assistant Secretary of War Robert Lovett. In a meeting to discuss the adoption of a nightmare anti-personnel bomb loaded with napalm and white phosphorus, he argued: "If we are going to have a total war we might as well make it as horrible as possible."

Zoroaster was, of course, a fire god. This wasn't a gentlemanly debate about the division of resources. It was an at times extremely bitter conflict between advocates of bombing military targets and those who wanted to wipe out as many cities as possible. Mike Davis, again:

Although Brittain and Thomas were generally excoriated in the press, some of the US air chiefs, like General George McDonald, the director of Air Force intelligence, privately shared their revulsion against "indiscriminate homicide and destruction."General Cabell, another "precisionist," complained about the "the same old baby killing plan of the get-rich-quick psychological boys." Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Chief of Staff George Marshall also quietly struggled to maintain a moral distinction between the Nazi leadership and the German working class. (Stimson, not wanting "the United States to get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities," equally opposed the fire-bombing of Japan.

In Europe, the fact that allied forces were on the ground and fighting meant that they had to be supported by bombing military targets, a factor which tended to support the arguments of the precisionists. There were no allied troops figiting in Japan itself until Okinawa was overrun and so no structural factors in the war telling against the Zoroastrian brethren. And so:

The secret napalm tests at Dugway's “Japanese Village" and later at Eglin Field's "Little Tokyo" in Florida, together with Curtis Le May's experimental "incendiary only" raid on the Chinese city of Hankow in December 1944, gave American planners the confidence that they could achieve bombing pioneer Billy Mitchell's old dream of incinerating Japan's "paper cities" ("the greatest aerial targets the world has ever seen"). The Committee of Operations Analysts-whose Brahmin membership included Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan, W. Barton Leach of Harvard Law, and Edward Mead Earle of Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study-was convinced it had cracked the scientific puzzle of how to generate holocausts whose "optimum result" would be "complete chaos in six Japanese] cities killing 584,00 people." In the event, the Twenty-First Bomber Command's attack on Tokyo on 10 March 1945 exceeded all expectations: General Norstad described it as "nothing short of wonderful."

More actually died in the Tokyo firestorm than in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And though nukes were step too far for enthusiastic city bombers like Le May, they fitted pretty neatly into the dominat view of how bombing should be used in the war against Japan. By the time the bombs themselves were ready to go, it was inevitable that they would be used whatever the tactical military situation was.

Comments

[caliban]

Nice post. I recently read that Admiral Leahy, I believe the highest ranking US squid at the time, strongly opposed the nukes. I think selecting civilian targets was wrong, but then others have said that a conventional invasion would have cost more Japanese lives, certainly more US lives. But the deaths of the civilians at Nag. and Hiro. was a tragedy beyond belief: some of the beat writers such as Ferlinghetti were in the area at the time and the sight of the carnage radicalized them, as it does me to some extent. We were generally the "good guys," the cowboys etc. but starting with Hiroshima I think the US joins the ranks of the military tyrannies of the 20 century--certaintly not to Wehrmacht or Stalinist levels of horror, but still guilty of some wicked shit (including actions taken in Korean and 'Nam wars).