Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [14]
To some combatants, the controversy attending strategic bombing appeared odd in the extreme. The Italian philosophy was well established, courtesy of Douhet, who died in 1930, but the Regia Aeronautica had little opportunity to test his theories by attacking major cities. The German record is checkered, from the controversial 1937 bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, to the attempt to recall the unnecessary mission against Rotterdam in 1940. However, if there was ever any discussion of the matter in Germany, there was probably none at all in Japan.
Prior to 1942 the world’s most sustained, most ruthless, and bloodiest air campaign was conducted by Emperor Hirohito’s bombers over China. In Tokyo’s attempt to control the Asian landmass, more than fifty cities were attacked from 1937 onward. Japanese bombers killed as many as 4,000 Chinese at a time, most notably at Chungking in 1941. But faced with immense distances and an enemy army that usually refused to concentrate, the Japanese were forced into much the same position as the Anglo-Americans in 1942–44: bomb something or do nothing. The essential difference lay in each side’s relative objectives: the Allies, victims of aggression, sought to cripple German industry, whereas the Japanese aggressors found precious few industrial targets and therefore resorted to an undisguised terror campaign.
Without realizing it, Tokyo’s warlords handed their enemies a powerful weapon: a moral certitude that the Japanese nation and its population had earned the firestorm that lurked beyond the broad sweep of the Pacific Ocean.
The View from Tokyo
In 1941, while American planners focused their efforts on a war with Germany, the least likely enemy posed an unappreciated threat. By then Japan’s 73 million people were personally and culturally inured to war in China. Based upon previous acquisitions, another 30 million subjects lived under Japanese rule, primarily in Korea and Formosa. The empire’s combined population enabled Tokyo’s propagandists to speak of a people 100 million strong.
Japan had largely been unified for 1,500 years and, in an astonishing national sprint, raced from essentially a feudal economy to near military parity with the Western powers in barely seventy years. Tough, disciplined, and enormously hardworking, Japanese were trained from childhood to serve the nation. Since 1890 students had been required to “offer yourselves courageously to the State.”
Beginning in the nineteenth century the ages-old Bushido warrior’s code had morphed into a European-style fascist ideology mated to the Shinto concept of emperor worship. The pillars of Bushido were loyalty, honor, and skill at arms, but Japan’s increasingly militarist governments succeeded in displacing the moderate samurai values with far harsher attitudes. The leavening ethics of Confucianism and Buddhism were increasingly replaced, with Shintoism becoming the state religion during the Meiji era of modernization from the 1860s. However, changes under Emperor Meiji did not extend to plain speaking, ultimately with disastrous long-term results. Japanese culture still abhorred American-style candor—far better to tolerate a poor situation than to offend people, especially one’s superiors.
Based on a homogenous population, the Ministry of Education touted inborn national character traits that lent moral authority to any enterprise. It was the same attitude found in the Japanese Serviceman’s Code of Conduct, a rigid, brutal compulsion to obedience framed as “sublime self sacrifice.” Yamato damashi, the Japanese fighting spirit, was exulted as mind over matter; flesh over steel.
Still, there were ironic foreign influences. The Imperial Navy absorbed the British Royal Navy’s values at the cellular level, to the extent of printing some texts in English, treasuring a lock of Horatio Nelson’s hair, and adopting bridge as