Who by Fire?

Tokyo, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Gaza, and the Politics of Surrender (Part One)

The dropping of two atomic bombs by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remains one of the most controversial events of the twentieth century. They were preceded by the firebombing of Tokyo, an attack that was in many ways even more destructive. These acts were justified both then and now as necessary to avoid an invasion of Japan’s home islands that would have cost a million or more American lives, given the Japanese reluctance to surrender, with others condemning them as war crimes. While the differences between the two situations are legion, there are a remarkable number of parallels between the discussions surrounding Tokyo/Hiroshima/Nagasaki and the ongoing war in Gaza that are well worth exploring. Because of the size of the material, this piece will be divided into four parts. The first three sections, which I’ll publish over the next few days, will summarize the relevant history about the American bombing of Japan, taken from Richard Overy’s excellent new book Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan. The first part will focus on the Tokyo firebombing, the second on the atomic bombs, and the third on the Japanese reluctance to surrender and the end of the war. In the final part, which I’ll publish next week, I’ll explore what these events can teach us about the continued impasse in Gaza.

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Since 1928, American plans for war with Japan included “intensive air attacks” aimed at destroying the Japanese economy from bases captured in nearby island chains, thus making a ground invasion of the home islands unnecessary. Planners assumed that an amphibious assault would fail because of difficulties ensuring supply across the Pacific and intense resistance. Between 1939 and 1941, the plans were developed further, with a focus on bombing Japan’s “vital centers” (transport, industry, cities) with high-explosive bombs, incendiaries, and even poison gas. Some began to think that an air campaign could win a war on its own. “The doctrinal shape of the future bombing campaign against Japan was already developed long before there was any capability of achieving it,” Overy writes. In the spring of 1943, after the end of the Battle of Guadalcanal and the first retreat of Japanese forces, these hitherto hypothetical plans now became more practical.

Despite this history, the switch from the precise bombing of industrial targets at high altitude to nighttime low-altitude raids that deliberately burned down residential urban areas was still surprising. After all, leading figures in the American military had criticized the bombing of Dresden (February 1945) on both strategic and ethical grounds. But this skepticism dissolved because of the urgent desire to end the war: “By inflicting massive damage on civilian urban areas through conventional incendiary bombing, the threshold of atomic bombing was easier to cross.”

In August 1944, the Joint Incendiary Committee had concluded that firebombing Japan’s six largest cities would destroy a minimum 70 percent of the urban area and reduce war production by at least 15 percent, causing the death of 560,000 people by “suffocation, incineration, and heat.” That month, Curtis LeMay was transferred to the China-Burma-India theater, and later placed in charge of all strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands, becoming an enthusiastic cheerleader for area bombing. As Overy writes: “Neither at the time nor in the postwar years did LeMay show any compunction about bombing and killing civilians if it helped to shorten the war.”

Operation Meetinghouse – the bombing of Tokyo – took place on March 9-10, 1945. When LeMay addressed the crews before the operation, one of the officers objected that the plan looked like “the kind of terror bombing used by the RAF that our air force has been trying to avoid.” LeMay allegedly responded “you simply can’t fight a war without civilian casualties” and continued the briefing. The pilots were ordered to concentrate their bombing on the most crowded wards of the city, with a population density of more than 100,000 per square mile. The aim was for the fire to spread beyond the control of the fire service and civil defenders. As LeMay explained: “the US had finally stopped swatting at flies and gone after the manure pile.”

How did the Japanese deal with this threat? In November 1943, it had launched the “Imperial Capital Important Zone Evacuation Plan” to create open spaces and zones to prevent the spread of fire. People living near rail lines, major roads, munitions factories, and railway stations were forced to leave, their houses demolished. However, there were few air-raid shelters, and people were expected to save their own houses. Children and adults deemed inessential to the war effort were evacuated, while some left independently despite being ordered to stay. Significantly, there were only eight gallons of water resources for firefighting per person (in the United States there were 200-300 gallons).

Operation Meetinghouse was launched on March 9 from all three island bases – Guam, Tinian, and Saipan, featuring 334 aircraft, the largest number so far in the war against Japan. 279 reached Tokyo and dropped 1,665 tons of incendiaries, 8,519 incendiary clusters releasing 496,000 six-pound bombs. Hundreds of small fires rapidly grew out of control, exacerbated by the strong wind. The small wooden houses were defenseless. As one survivor, Tsukiyama Mihoro, described: “One by one, without sin and regardless of age or sex, they became nothing but blackened clumps of charcoal.” Those crowded into buildings, Overy writes, were “steamed, braised, asphyxiated, and reduced to a thick layer of ash.” Many tried to escape along bridges, but these overheated and collapsed, killing thousands. Tom Power, who commanded the raid, circled the city while the pilots completed the bombing (fourteen B-29s crashed; two because of enemy action); he later wrote that he watched “until the holocaust had spread into a seething, swirling ocean of fire, engulfing the city below for miles in every direction.” Almost sixteen square miles of Tokyo was reduced to ash. According to official figures, 83,000 people were killed (the true figure is thought to be higher). This was the largest number of civilians killed in a single day in all the wars of the twentieth century; more than twice the total who died during the nine-month Blitz and more than three times killed in the raid on Dresden, the deadliest air raid in Europe.

The next month, Lauris Norstad, the Chief of Staff, Twentieth Air Force, wrote to LeMay, saying that “the XXI Bomber Command, more than any other service or weapon, is in a position to do something decisive” to end the war. LeMay replied: “I feel that the destruction of Japan’s ability to wage war lies within the capability of this command.” Just weeks after it had criticized the bombing of Dresden, the New York Times headline on March 10 read: “TREMENDOUS FIRES LEAP UP IN THICKLY POPULATED CENTER OF BIG CITY.” On March 15, the Intelligence Report of the Twenty-First Bomber Command published photographs of Tokyo after the raid: “Less than 15 per cent of the No. 1 incendiary zone remains standing. Beautiful!” The Photographic Weekly Report published by Japan’s Cabinet Information Office, published images of the destruction on March 28, writing: “[The enemy] has adopted the most barbarous, scorched-earth, genocidal tactic.” It also shared a photograph of Emperor Hirohito – a key figure we’ll pay particular attention to when thinking about Gaza – walking through the ruins. On March 9, he had told his confidant Kido Koichi that “ways to end the war” needed to be found.

By the end of the war, America had attacked 66 urban areas in 83 raids, destroying 176 square miles of urban area, and around 40% of the targeted cities, killing 269,187 people in over five months. Why did this happen? First, because the air force wanted to play a key role in the defeat of Japan. On June 13, 1945, LeMay predicted that, by October 1, when the air raids would be complete, the war would be as good as over. As Maj. Gen. Orvil Anderson wrote in “Air Campaigns of the Pacific War”: “Air power was capable of forcing the capitulation of an enemy nation without surface invasion.”

Revenge also played a role, even if this was not admitted openly, specifically the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the Bataan Death March in May 1942, when 80,000 American and Filipino prisoners were forcibly marched in columns across the Bataan Peninsula after American defeat on the Philippines. Between 5,000 and 18,000 Filipinos died, and between 500 and 650 Americans. LeMay mentioned both when explaining why the raids were morally justified: “Enemy cities were pulverized and fried to a crisp. It was something they asked for and something they got.”

Here, though, Overy makes a vital point that will also be important when discussing Gaza: “The U.S. Army would never have entered Tokyo and slaughtered 87,000 people in cold blood, but bombing, both here and in the war in Europe, made it possible to see the areas below as targets on a map, defined in strategic terms, but not as human spaces filled with people.” This is reflected in the summary of B-29 Tactical Mission Reports from June 1945: “It is noteworthy that the object of these [area] attacks was not to bomb indiscriminately civilian populations. The object was to destroy the industrial and strategic targets concentrated in the urban areas.” Planners argued that, in contrast to the Germans, Japanese war production was spread throughout an urban network of small craft shops, often in private homes. As an intelligence report produced for the Twenty-First Bomber Command in late March 1945 argued: “They can best be destroyed by widespread conflagrations.”

What role did the bombing raids play in ending the war? In practice, they did less harm to war production than might be expected, destroying or seriously damaging 25 aircraft industry installations, thirteen oil storage and refinery sites, six major arsenals, and six other industrial plants. They destroyed a total of 550 industrial installations, most of them small scale. “This was a thin list, even from an industrial economy as limited as that of Japan,” Overy writes. Its impact on morale, though, was more significant, with large numbers of Japanese reporting that the air raids were a key turning point. As Hayashi Keizo, the governor of Tottori Prefecture, said, the attacks “reduced morale to zero.”

Building on these efforts, the Twentieth Air Force launched a pamphlet campaign to encourage further evacuation and demanding an end to the war by petitioning the emperor or overthrowing the warlords. Its impact, though, was limited. As Overy explains:

This campaign…had as little effect as the effort in Europe by the British Political Warfare Executive to encourage the German people to revolt or suffer further bombing, and it reflected the degree to which American psychological warriors little understood the nature of the society they confronted…Bombing almost certainly left the affected population demoralized and aware of imminent defeat, but it did not sponsor a revolutionary wave.

The atomic bombs, though, would play a bigger role in ending the war.

Part two will be published tomorrow.