Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [194]
TWELVE
Burning a Nation: LeMay
1. Superfortresses
POPULAR PERCEPTIONS of the Second World War identify the August 1945 atomic bomb attacks on Japan as a unique horror. Yet the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can only properly be understood against the background of the air campaign which preceded the nuclear explosions, killing substantially larger numbers of people before the grotesque nicknames of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” imposed themselves upon the consciousness of the world. In the early years of the Pacific war, save for the single dramatic gesture of the April 1942 Doolittle raid, launched from aircraft carriers, Japan was not bombed because it could not be reached. Meanwhile, in 1942 and 1943 the U.S. Army Air Forces in Europe devoted itself to precision attacks on industrial and military installations. This was partly because these were deemed the most useful targets; partly because America’s political and military leadership proclaimed fundamental moral objections to area bombing, as practiced by the British.
As the war advanced, however, scruples faded. Dismissing “psywar ops” against the Japanese, Admiral Leahy, personal chief of staff to Roosevelt and later Truman, said: “The best psychological warfare540 to use on these barbarians [is] bombs.” Likewise a contributor to the British Spectator magazine, writing in September 1944: “No Archbishop is likely to cry out against the bombing of Japan when it comes, for it will be difficult to ask mercy for an enemy that shoots airmen unfortunate enough to bale [sic] out over its sacred soil, and perpetrates atrocities of revolting perversity in China.” It was the Japanese people’s ill-fortune that it became feasible to bomb them just when American squeamishness about killing civilians was eclipsed by ruthlessly pragmatic assessments of how best to exploit available technology to injure the enemy and enhance the credibility of strategic air power.
Such critics as John Dower suggest that racial hatred towards the Japanese people caused them to receive harsher treatment at Allied hands, especially in the matter of aerial bombardment, than the Germans. This view seems to represent a misreading of events in Europe in 1944–45. A large proportion of all German civilians killed by Allied bombing perished in the last months of the war, when huge air forces operated with advanced technology against negligible defences. American airmen knew perfectly well that the effects of USAAF radar bombing of precision targets in urban areas was no more discriminatory than British area attacks. The destruction of Dresden is widely seen as a unique example of “frightfulness.” In truth, of course, every day the Allied air forces aspired to inflict similar destruction, even if Americans enfolded themselves in a mantle of public regret about civilian casualties. Britain devoted almost one-third of its entire war effort to the strategic air campaign, while the USAAF’s bomber forces consumed 10 percent of comparable American expenditure. War in some degree blunts the sensibilities of all those engaged in waging it. This was certainly true of those who made Allied bombardment policy.
It has been suggested above that few belligerents in any conflict are so high-minded as to offer to an enemy higher standards of treatment than that enemy extends to them. In the last phase of World War II, impatience overtook the Allies at every level. From presidents and prime ministers to soldiers in foxholes, there was a desire to “get this business over with.” The outcome was not in doubt. The Axis retained no possibility of averting defeat. It therefore seemed all the more irksome that men were obliged to continue to die because the enemy declined to recognise the logic of his hopeless predicament. Any means of hastening the end seemed acceptable. In Europe, despite the misgivings of some senior officers,