Replies to post #2993 on Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[jbennett53]

Was World War II a battle then to defend human rights? When the Luftwaffe bombed civilian areas of Holland and Denmark, President Roosevelt called it "inhuman barbarism that has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity." But how do we reconcile this with the Army Air Corps' chilling declaration that "there are no civilians in Japan?" At the outset of World War II, America pursued a program of precision bombing, but in the war's waning days lost patience and adopted precisely the opposite approach. General Curtis Lemay, commandant of the Army Air Corps, announced the change in tactics. "I'll you what war is about," he said. "You've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting."

That remark was followed by the firebombing of 66 Japanese cities, in a campaign Lemay crafted specifically to yield maximum death tolls. The Oxford History of the United States describes him as obsessive in the lengths he went to sow destruction: his engineers experimented with different amounts of explosives and incendiaries, and his pilots flew practice attacks, so that when they hit Japan they were able to create "concentric rings of fire...thermal hurricanes that killed by suffocation as well as by heat, as the flames sucked all available oxygen out of the surrounding atmosphere...The victims died from fire, asphyxiation, and falling buildings. Some boiled to death in superheated ponds and canals where they had sought refuge from the flames."

The firebombing of Japan killed upwards of 900,000 people. As with the atomic bomb, people have since differed as to its justification. Brigadier General Bonner Fellers called it "the most ruthless and barbaric killing of noncombatants in all history." Historian Benjamin Schwartz considers it a sadly reasonable course of action, one that precluded a land invasion. Unlike the atomic bomb, though, few Americans ever learned about the incendiary campaign, and of those of us who did, many allowed it to slide off into history's peripheries. We viewed it, as we viewed all such things prior to September 11, with a certain distance. We understood on some level that it was horrible, but the barriers of geography and time prevented us from appreciating its true enormity.