Japan, Firebombing, and Nuclear Warfare

Reading Retribution: The Battle for Japan has given me a lot of food for thought, and a lot of things to go on diatribes about to my patient parents on walks. :-) It's a fascinating book to read, though much of what it chronicles is brutal, horrifying, and regrettable. I didn't realize before, for instance, that the battle for Manilla cost the lives of 100,000 Filipino citizens.

A very interesting subject which the author has just been raising is that of the bombing of Japan. As I understand from the cover flap, the author defends the atomic bombings. I can't describe or answer his arguments, yet, because I haven't come to that part of the book yet, but I think he believes that they reduced the potential cost of an amphibious invasion of Japan. Given the massive human cost already incurred by the Pacific war and the legendary fanaticism of the Japanese army, that was probably quite true. Reading this book, however, though I can agree on principle that the nuclear bombing probably reduced the potential casualties that would have resulted from the U.S. strategy, I'm not convinced that the conditions wherein a nuclear bombing is the only answer to 'reducing casualties' are conditions into which we should have entered. That's a roundabout way of saying that we had such an economic stranglehold on Japan, such military supremacy, that we should never have obliterated so much of their civilian population. I'm not a seasoned historian and I'm not thoroughly familiar with every aspect of that theater of war, but to me the immense moral problem of, for instance, torching 100,000 civilians of Tokyo with napalm, leaving a million homeless, and obliterating 10,000 acres of buildings more than balances out the satisfaction of coercing a nation into signing formal surrender documents--particularly a nation which had already effectively lost the war.

Yes, more kamikaze missions might have threatened American ships and sailors, for a while. That's not a good thing. But Japan was running critically low on fuel, aircraft, and trained pilots (and willing suicide pilots). They were low on food, pitiful in industrial capacity, and completely outclassed militarily. Our extremely successful submarine blockade would probably have reduced them to desperation before long, though mass starvation would not be an appealing eventuality either.

Until late 1942/early 1943, I can understand a certain prevailing fierceness about our war effort: until then it was by no means clear that the Allies were going to win the conflict, and so some nations, primarily Britain and Russia, were actually fighting for survival. I'm sure countless atrocities occurred among the Allies that never should have, particularly in Russia, but I can understand why the Allies wanted to take the war to the enemy, and do it fast. After 1943, though, when industrial might, technological superiority and military initiative were almost entirely on our side, we continued grinding down the Axis through total war in our eagerness for the conflict to end sooner. Granted, we had suffered much, but that is no good excuse for inflicting the same suffering on the enemy--and the U.S. suffered negligibly compared to, for instance, the Soviet Union, which blasted, butchered, and raped its way through Eastern Europe to Berlin in 1944-45 in revenge for the 20 million civilians and probably more than 5 million soldiers who had already perished since Operation Barbarossa.

The Japanese treated POWs and civilians brutally in many, many cases. They were a rapacious militaristic empire with domineering ambitions. Such unbridled aggression and flouting of human rights required a reckoning as much as Germany's perverse ethnic cleansing and dreams of world domination did. But the B-29 pilots and commanders seemed, on the whole, remarkably callous about the manifold terrors, torments, and deaths that their incendiary bombs were inflicting on hundreds of thousands of people who had little to do with the militaristic governments that had launched them into the war.

Curtis LeMay, commander of the XXI Bomber Command responsible for bombing Japan, for instance. He claims there was "no point in slaughtering civilians for the mere sake of slaughter." Yes, but... "All you had to do was visit one of those targets after we'd roasted it, and see the ruins of a multitude of tiny houses, with a drill press sticking up through the wreckage...The entire population got into the act and worked to make those airplanes or munitions of war...men, women, and children. We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned that town. Had to be done" (qtd. in Hastings, Retribution 309).

That is a paltry defense at best, especially when Japan's inferior aircraft had almost been cleared off the sky at this point, so much so that the triumphant Hellcats and Corsairs were running out of targets to shoot down, and the Japanese navy could be bombed and torpedoed with increasing ease. The very B-29s involved in this operation met negligible fighter resistance: of the 414 aircraft downed over a five-month period, only 148 were due to enemy action, which includes anti-aircraft fire as well as fighter activity. 151 were lost because they failed to operate properly in flight (Hastings 314).

Here is the defense offered by the official USAAF post-war history of this bomber group, which probably gives the strongest argument in favor of incinerating civilians:

In its climactic five months of jellied fire attacks, the vaunted Twentieth killed outright 310,000 Japanese, injured 412,000 more, and rendered 9,200,000 homeless...The 1945 application of American Air Power, so destructive and concentrated as to cremate 65 Japanese cities in five months, forced an enemy's surrender without land invasion for the first time....no U.S. soldier, sailor or Marine had to land on bloody beachheads or fight through strongly-prepared ground defense to ensure victory in the Japanese home islands." (qtd. 317)

Yes, true--but my question is, should it have been our purpose to inflict unconditional, prostrate surrender on an already crumbling nation, no matter what the cost to the civilian population? Were our only options Invade or Torch? Could we actually say it was in defense of our nation to obliterate most of Tokyo and 64 other Japanese urban centers, to torch infants off their very mothers' backs as they fled from walls of flame and turn whole families to ash inside their bomb shelters? Will those responsible for such actions be able to successfully defend them when they are judged?

I can't say that there are easy answers to those questions, nor can I give answers for most of them. Perhaps some of this post will have to be amended once I read more of the book. So far, though, I think that those who condemn the decision to drop the nuclear bombs should be more concerned with condemning American Pacific Theater war policy in 1944-45. Was it a brutally necessary strategy for saving American lives--which aren't intrinsically more precious than Japanese lives--or was it just a gross excess of slaughter that should have been avoided at all costs? A lot of soldiers, politicans, and historians might opt for the former, but if someone told me that the key to saving a few of my buddies was to murder three mothers and their young children, I don't believe I would take that path. In any case, it seems to me that we could have kept Japan subjugate and incapable of significant resistance without an outright invasion. Sooner or later they would have been forced to surrender.

Thoughts?