World War II was a landmark in the development and deployment of technologies of mass
destruction associated with air power, notably the B-29 bomber, napalm and the atomic bomb.
An estimated 50 to 70 million people lay dead in its wake. In a sharp reversal of the pattern of
World War I and of most earlier wars, a substantial majority of the dead were noncombatants. [1]
The air war, which reached peak intensity with the area bombing, including atomic bombing, of
major European and Japanese cities in its final year, had a devastating impact on noncombatant
populations.

What is the logic and what have been the consequences—for its victims, for subsequent global
patterns of warfare and for international law—of new technologies of mass destruction and their
application associated with the rise of air power and bombing technology in World War II and
after? Above all, how have these experiences shaped the American way of war over six decades
in which the United States has been a major actor in important wars? The issues have particular
salience in an epoch whose central international discourse centers on terror and the War on
Terror, one in which the terror inflicted on noncombatants by the major powers is frequently
neglected.

Strategic Bombing and International Law

Bombs had been dropped from the air as early as 1849 on Venice (from balloons) and 1911 in
Libya (from planes).

Major European powers attempted to use them in newly founded air forces during World War I.
If the impact on the outcomes was marginal, the advance of air power alerted all nations to the
potential significance of airpower in future wars. [2] A series of international conferences at the
Hague beginning in 1899 set out principles for limiting air war and securing the protection of
noncombatants from bombing and other attacks. The 1923 Hague conference crafted a sixty-two
article “Rules of Aerial Warfare,” which prohibited “Aerial bombardment for the purpose of
terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military
character, or of injuring non-combatants.” It specifically limited bombardment to military
objectives, prohibited “indiscriminate bombardment of the civilian population,” and held
violators liable to pay compensation. [3] Securing consensus and enforcing limits, however,
proved extraordinarily elusive then and since.

Throughout the long twentieth century, and particularly during and in the immediate aftermath of
World War II, the inexorable advance of weapons technology went hand in hand with
international efforts to place limits on killing and barbarism associated with war, particularly the
killing of noncombatants in strategic or indiscriminate bombing raids. [4] This article considers
the interplay of the development of powerful weapons and delivery systems associated with
bombing and attempts to create international standards to curb the uses of bombing against
noncombatants, with particular reference to the United States.

The strategic and ethical implications of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have
generated a vast contentious literature, as have German and Japanese war crimes and atrocities.
By contrast, the US destruction of more than sixty Japanese cities prior to Hiroshima has been
slighted both in the scholarly literatures in English and Japanese and in popular consciousness in
both Japan and the US. It has been overshadowed by the atomic bombing and by heroic
narratives of American conduct in the “Good War”, an outcome not unrelated to the emergence
of the US as a superpower. [5] Arguably, however, the central technological, strategic and ethical
breakthroughs that would leave their stamp on subsequent wars occurred in area bombing of
noncombatants prior to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A.C. Grayling explains
the different responses to firebombing and atomic bombing this way: “. . . the frisson of dread
created by the thought of what atomic weaponry can do affects those who contemplate it more
than those who actually suffer from it; for whether it is an atom bomb rather than tons of high
explosives and incendiaries that does the damage, not a jot of suffering is added to its victims
that the burned and buried, the dismembered and blinded, the dying and bereaved of Dresden or
Hamburg did not feel.” [6]

If others, notably Germany, England and Japan led the way in area bombing, the targeting for
destruction of entire cities with conventional weapons emerged in 1944-45 as the centerpiece of
US warfare. It was an approach that combined technological predominance with minimization of
US casualties in ways that would become the hallmark of the American way of war in campaigns
from Korea and Indochina to the Gulf and Iraq Wars and, indeed define the trajectory of major
wars since the 1940s. The result would be the decimation of noncombatant populations and
extraordinary “kill ratios” favoring the US military. Yet for the US, victory would prove
extraordinary elusive. This is one important reason why, six decades on, World War II retains its
aura for Americans as the “Good War”, and why Americans have yet to effectively come to grips
with questions of ethics and international law associated with their area bombing of Germany
and Japan.

The twentieth century was notable for the contradiction between international attempts to place
limits on the destructiveness of war and to hold nations and their military leaders responsible for
violations of international laws of war (Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals and successive Geneva
conventions, particularly the 1949 convention protecting civilians and POWs) and the systematic
violation of those principles by the major powers. [7] For example, while the Nuremberg and
Tokyo Tribunals clearly articulated the principle of universality, the Tribunals, both held in cities
that had been obliterated by Allied bombing, famously shielded the victorious powers, above all
the US, from responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Telford Taylor, chief
counsel for war crimes prosecution at Nuremberg, made the point with specific reference to the
bombing of cities a quarter century later: [8]

Since both sides had played the terrible game of urban destruction—the Allies far
more successfully—there was no basis for criminal charges against Germans or
Japanese, and in fact no such charges were brought . . . . Aerial bombardment had
been used so extensively and ruthlessly on the Allied side as well as the Axis side that
neither at Nuremberg nor Tokyo was the issue made a part of the trials.

From 1932 to the early years of World War II the United States was an outspoken critic of city
bombing, notably but not exclusively German and Japanese bombing. President Franklin
Roosevelt appealed to the warring nations in 1939 on the first day of World War II “under no
circumstances [to] undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of
unfortified cities.” [9] Britain, France and Germany agreed to limit bombing to strictly military
objectives, but in May 1940 German bombardment of Rotterdam exacted 40,000 civilian lives
and forced the Dutch surrender. Up to this point, bombing of cities had been isolated, sporadic
and for the most part confined to the axis powers. Then in August 1940, after German bombers
bombed London, Churchill ordered an attack on Berlin. The steady escalation of bombing
targeting cities and their noncombatant populations followed. [10]

Strategic Bombing of Europe

After entering the war following Pearl Harbor, the US continued to claim the moral high ground
by abjuring civilian bombing. This stance was consistent with the prevailing view in the Air
Force high command that the most efficient bombing strategies were those that pinpointed
destruction of enemy forces and installations, factories, and railroads, not those designed to
terrorize or kill noncombatants. Nevertheless, the US collaborated with indiscriminate bombing
at Casablanca in 1943, when a US-British division of labor emerged in which the British
conducted the indiscriminate bombing of cities and the US sought to destroy military and
industrial targets. [11] In the final years of the war, Max Hastings observed that Churchill and his
bomber commander Arthur Harris set out to concentrate “all available forces for the progressive,
systematic destruction of the urban areas of the Reich, city block by city block, factory by
factory, until the enemy became a nation of troglodytes, scratching in the ruins.” [12] British
strategists were convinced that the destruction of cities by night area bombing attacks would
break the morale of German civilians while crippling war production. From 1942 with the
bombing of Lubeck followed by Cologne, Hamburg and others, Harris pursued this strategy. The
perfection of onslaught from the air, or what should be understood as terror bombing, is better
understood, however, as a British-American joint venture.

Throughout 1942-44, as the air war in Europe swung ineluctably toward area bombing, the US
Air Force proclaimed its adherence to precision bombing. However, this approach failed not only
to force surrender on either Germany or Japan, but even to inflict significant damage on their
war-making capacity. With German artillery and interceptors taking a heavy toll on US planes,
pressure mounted for a strategic shift at a time of growing sophistication, numbers and range of
US aircraft, and the invention of napalm and the perfection of radar. Ironically, while radar could
have paved the way for a reaffirmation of tactical bombing, now made feasible at night, in the
context of the endgame of the war what transpired was the massive assault on cities and their
urban populations.

On February 13-14, 1945 British bombers with US planes following up destroyed Dresden, a
historic cultural center with no significant military industry or bases. By conservative estimate,
35,000 people were incinerated in a single raid led by. [13] The American writer Kurt Vonnegut,
then a young POW in Dresden, penned the classic account: [14]

They burnt the whole damn town down . . . . Every day we walked into the city and dug
into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went
into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of
people who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all
dead. A fire storm is an amazing thing. It doesn’t occur in nature. It’s fed by the tornadoes
that occur in the midst of it and there isn’t a damned thing to breathe.

“Along with the Nazi extermination camps, the killing of Soviet and American prisoners, and
other enemy atrocities,” Ronald Schaffer observes, “Dresden became one of the moral causes
célèbres of World War II.” [15] Although far worse was in the offing in Japan, Dresden
provoked the last significant public discussion of the bombing of women and children to take
place during World War II, and the city became synonymous with terror bombing by the US and
Britain. Coming in the wake of both the Hamburg and Munich bombings, the British government
faced sharp questioning in parliament. [16] In the United States, debate was largely provoked not
by the destruction wrought by the raids, but by an Associated Press report widely published in
the US and Britain stating explicitly that “the Allied air commanders have made the long-awaited
decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of the great German population centers as a ruthless
expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.” American officials quickly acted to neutralize the report by
pointing to the widely publicized great cathedral of Cologne, left standing after US bombing as a
symbol of American humanity, and by reiterating US adherence to principles restricting attacks
to military targets. Secretary of War Henry Stimson stated that “Our policy never has been to
inflict terror bombing on civilian populations,” claiming that Dresden, as a major transportation
hub, was of military significance. [17] In fact, US public discussion, not to speak of protest, was
minimal; in Britain there was more impassioned discussion, but with the smell of victory in the
air, the government easily quieted the storm. The bombing continued. Strategic bombing had
passed its sternest test in the realm of public reaction in Britain and the United States.

Strategic Bombing of Japan

But it was in the Pacific theatre, and specifically in Japan, that the full brunt of air power would
be felt. Between 1932 and 1945, Japan had bombed Shanghai, Nanjing, Chongqing and other
cities, testing chemical weapons in Ningbo and throughout Zhejiang province. [18] In the early
months of 1945, the United States shifted its attention to the Pacific as it gained the capacity to
attack Japan from newly captured bases in Tinian and Guam. While the US continued to
proclaim adherence to tactical bombing, tests of firebombing options against Japanese homes
throughout 1943-44 demonstrated that M-69 bombs were highly effective against the densely
packed wooden structures of Japanese cities. [19] In the final six months of the war, the US
threw the full weight of its air power into campaigns to burn whole Japanese cities to the ground
and terrorize, incapacitate and kill their largely defenseless residents in an effort to force
surrender.

As Michael Sherry and Cary Karacas have pointed out for the US and Japan respectively,
prophecy preceded practice in the destruction of Japanese cities, and well before US planners
undertook strategic bombing. Thus Sherry observes that “Walt Disney imagined an orgiastic
destruction of Japan by air in his 1943 animated feature Victory Through Air Power (based on
Alexander P. De Seversky’s 1942 book),” while Karacas notes that the best-selling Japanese
writer Unna Juzo, beginning in his early 1930s “air-defense novels”, anticipated the destruction
of Tokyo by bombing. [20] Both reached mass audiences in the US and Japan, in important
senses anticipating the events to follow.

Curtis LeMay was appointed commander of the 21st Bomber Command in the Pacific on January
20, 1945. Capture of the Marianas, including Guam, Tinian and Saipan in summer 1944 had
placed Japanese cities within effective range of the B-29 “Superfortress” bombers, while Japan’s
depleted air and naval power left it virtually defenseless against sustained air attack.
LeMay was the primary architect, a strategic innovator, and most quotable spokesman for US
policies of putting enemy cities, and later villages and forests, to the torch from Japan to Korea
to Vietnam. In this, he was emblematic of the American way of war that emerged from World
War II. Viewed from another angle, however, he was but a link in a chain of command that had
begun to conduct area bombing in Europe. That chain of command extended upward through the
Joint Chiefs to the president who authorized what would become the centerpiece of US warfare.
[22]

The US resumed bombing of Japan after a two-year lull following the 1942 Doolittle raids in fall
1944. The goal of the bombing assault that destroyed Japan’s major cities in the period between
May and August 1945, the US Strategic Bombing Survey explained, was “either to bring
overwhelming pressure on her to surrender, or to reduce her capability of resisting invasion. . . .
[by destroying] the basic economic and social fabric of the country.” [23] A proposal by the
Chief of Staff of the Twentieth Air Force to target the imperial palace was rejected, but in the
wake of successive failures to eliminate such key strategic targets as Japan’s Nakajima Aircraft
Factory west of Tokyo, the area bombing of Japanese cities was approved. [24]

The full fury of firebombing and napalm was unleashed on the night of March 9-10, 1945 when
LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from the Marianas. Their mission was to reduce the city
to rubble, kill its citizens, and instill terror in the survivors, with jellied gasoline and napalm that
would create a sea of flames. Stripped of their guns to make more room for bombs, and flying at
altitudes averaging 7,000 feet to evade detection, the bombers, which had been designed for
high-altitude precision attacks, carried two kinds of incendiaries: M47s, 100-pound oil gel
bombs, 182 per aircraft, each capable of starting a major fire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelledgasoline
bombs, 1,520 per aircraft in addition to a few high explosives to deter firefighters. [25]
The attack on an area that the US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated to be 84.7 percent
residential succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of air force planners. Whipped by fierce winds,
flames detonated by the bombs leaped across a fifteen square mile area of Tokyo generating
immense firestorms that engulfed and killed scores of thousands of residents.

In contrast with Vonnegut’s “wax museum” description of Dresden victims, accounts from
inside the inferno that engulfed Tokyo chronicle scenes of utter carnage. We have come to
measure the efficacy of bombing by throw weights and kill ratios, eliding the perspectives of
their victims. But what of those who felt the wrath of the bombs?

Police cameraman Ishikawa Koyo described the streets of Tokyo as “rivers of fire . . . flaming
pieces of furniture exploding in the heat, while the people themselves blazed like ‘matchsticks’
as their wood and paper homes exploded in flames. Under the wind and the gigantic breath of the
fire, immense incandescent vortices rose in a number of places, swirling, flattening, sucking
whole blocks of houses into their maelstrom of fire.”

Father Flaujac, a French cleric, compared the firebombing to the Tokyo earthquake twenty-two
years earlier, an event whose massive destruction, another form of prophecy, had alerted both
Japanese science fiction writers and some of the original planners of the Tokyo holocaust: [26]
In September 1923, during the great earthquake, I saw Tokyo burning for 5 days. I saw in
Honjo a heap of 33,000 corpses of people who burned or suffocated at the beginning of the
bombardment . . . After the first quake there were 20-odd centers of fire, enough to destroy
the capital. How could the conflagration be stopped when incendiary bombs in the dozens of
thousands now dropped over the four corners of the district and with Japanese houses which
are only match boxes? . . . Where could one fly? The fire was everywhere.

Nature reinforced man’s handiwork in the form of akakaze, the red wind that swept with
hurricane force across the Tokyo plain and propelled firestorms across the city with terrifying
speed and intensity. The wind drove temperatures up to eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit,
creating superheated vapors that advanced ahead of the flames, killing or incapacitating their
victims. “The mechanisms of death were so multiple and simultaneous—oxygen deficiency and
carbon monoxide poisoning, radiant heat and direct flames, debris and the trampling feet of
stampeding crowds—that causes of death were later hard to ascertain . . .” [27]

The Strategic Bombing Survey, whose formation a few months earlier provided an important
signal of Roosevelt’s support for strategic bombing, provided a technical description of the
firestorm and its effects on Tokyo:

The chief characteristic of the conflagration . . . was the presence of a fire front, an extended
wall of fire moving to leeward, preceded by a mass of pre-heated, turbid, burning vapors . . . .
The 28-mile-per-hour wind, measured a mile from the fire, increased to an estimated 55 miles
at the perimeter, and probably more within. An extended fire swept over 15 square miles in 6
hours . . . . The area of the fire was nearly 100 percent burned; no structure or its contents
escaped damage.

The survey concluded—plausibly, but only for events prior to August 6, 1945—that
“probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the
history of man. People died from extreme heat, from oxygen deficiency, from carbon monoxide
asphyxiation, from being trampled beneath the feet of stampeding crowds, and from drowning.
The largest number of victims were the most vulnerable: women, children and the elderly.”
How many people died on the night of March 9-10 in what flight commander Gen. Thomas
Power termed “the greatest single disaster incurred by any enemy in military history?” The
Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that 87,793 people died in the raid, 40,918 were injured,
and 1,008,005 people lost their homes. Robert Rhodes, estimating the dead at more than 100,000
men, women and children, suggested that probably a million more were injured and another
million were left homeless. The Tokyo Fire Department estimated 97,000 killed and 125,000
wounded. The Tokyo Police offered a figure of 124,711 killed and wounded and 286,358
building and homes destroyed. The figure of roughly 100,000 deaths, provided by Japanese and
American authorities, both of whom may have had reasons of their own for minimizing the death
toll, seems to me arguably low in light of population density, wind conditions, and survivors’
accounts. [28] With an average of 103,000 inhabitants per square mile and peak levels as high as
135,000 per square mile, the highest density of any industrial city in the world, and with
firefighting measures ludicrously inadequate to the task, 15.8 square miles of Tokyo were
destroyed on a night when fierce winds whipped the flames and walls of fire blocked tens of
thousands fleeing for their lives. An estimated 1.5 million people lived in the burned out areas.
Given a near total inability to fight fires of the magnitude produced by the bombs, it is possible
to imagine that casualties may have been several times higher than the figures presented on both
sides of the conflict. The single effective Japanese government measure taken to reduce the
slaughter of US bombing was the 1944 evacuation to the countryside of 400,000 children from
major cities, 225, 000 of them from Tokyo. [29]

Following the attack, LeMay, never one to mince words, said that he wanted Tokyo “burned
down—wiped right off the map” to “shorten the war.” Tokyo did burn. Subsequent raids brought
the devastated area of Tokyo to more than 56 square miles, provoking the flight of millions of
refugees.

No previous or subsequent conventional bombing raid ever came close to generating the toll in
death and destruction of the great Tokyo raid of March 9-10. The airborne assault on Tokyo and
other Japanese cities ground on relentlessly. According to Japanese police statistics, the 65 raids
on Tokyo between December 6, 1944 and August 13, 1945 resulted in 137,582 casualties,
787,145 homes and buildings destroyed, and 2,625,279 people displaced. [30] Following the
Tokyo raid of March 9-10, the firebombing was extended nationwide. In the ten-day period
beginning on March 9, 9,373 tons of bombs destroyed 31 square miles of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka
and Kobe. Overall, bombing strikes destroyed 40 percent of the 66 Japanese cities targeted, with
total tonnage dropped on Japan increasing from 13,800 tons in March to 42,700 tons in July. [31]
If the bombing of Dresden produced a ripple of public debate in Europe, no discernible wave of
revulsion, not to speak of protest, took place in the US or Europe in the wake of the far greater
destruction of Japanese cities and the slaughter of civilian populations on a scale that had no
parallel in the history of bombing.

In July, US planes blanketed the few remaining Japanese cities that had been spared firebombing
with an “Appeal to the People.” “As you know,” it read, “America which stands for humanity,
does not wish to injure the innocent people, so you had better evacuate these cities.” Half the
leafleted cities were firebombed within days of the warning. US planes ruled the skies. Overall,
by one calculation, the US firebombing campaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67 cities, killed
more than 300,000 people and injured an additional 400,000, figures that exclude the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [32]

Between January and July 1945, the US firebombed and destroyed all but five Japanese cities,
deliberately sparing Kyoto, the ancient imperial capital, and four others. The extent of the
destruction was impressive ranging from 50 to 60% of the urban area destroyed in cities
including Kobe, Yokohama and Tokyo, to 60 to 88% in seventeen cities, to 98.6% in the case of
Toyama. [33] In the end, the Atomic Bomb Selection Committee chose Hiroshima, Kokura,
Niigata, and Nagasaki as the pristine targets to display the awesome power of the atomic bomb
to Japan and the world in the event that would both bring to a spectacular end the costliest war in
human history and send a powerful message to the Soviet Union.

Michael Sherry has compellingly described the triumph of technological fanaticism as the
hallmark of the air war that quintessentially shaped the American way of fighting and heavily
stamped remembrances of the War ever after:

The shared mentality of the fanatics of air war was their dedication to assembling and
perfecting their methods of destruction, and . . . doing so overshadowed the original
purposes justifying destruction . . . .The lack of a proclaimed intent to destroy, the sense
of being driven by the twin demands of bureaucracy and technology, distinguished
America’s technological fanaticism from its enemies’ ideological fanaticism.

Technological fanaticism served to conceal the larger purposes of power both from military
planners and the public. This suggestive formulation, however, conceals core ideological patterns
at the heart of American strategic thought. Wartime technological fanaticism in my view is best
understood as a means of operationalizing national goals. Taken for granted were the legitimacy
and benevolence of American global power and a perception of the Japanese as both uniquely
brutal and inherently inferior. Technology was harnessed to the driving force of American
nationalism, which repeatedly came to the fore in times of war, and was fashioned under wartime
conditions, beginning with the conquest of the Philippines in 1898 and running through
successive wars and police actions in Latin America and Asia that spanned the long twentieth
century. In other words, technological fanaticism is inseparable from American nationalism and
conceptions of a benevolent American-dominated global order. In contrast to British, Japanese
and other nationalisms associated with expansive powers, the American approach to the postwar
order lay not in a vision centered on the acquisition of colonies but in a global network of
military bases and naval and air power that only in recent years has begun to be understood as
the American way of empire. [34]

Throughout the spring and summer of 1945 the US air war in Japan reached an intensity that is
still perhaps unrivaled in the magnitude of human slaughter. [35] That moment was a product of
the combination of technological breakthroughs, American nationalism, and the erosion of moral
and political scruples pertaining to the killing of civilians, perhaps intensified by the racism that
crystallized in the Pacific theatre. [36]

The targeting for destruction of entire populations, whether indigenous peoples, religious
infidels, or others deemed inferior or evil, may be as old as human history, but the forms it takes
are as new as the latest technologies of destruction and strategic innovation, of which air power,
firebombing and nuclear weapons are particularly notable. [37] The most important way in
which World War II shaped the moral and technological tenor of mass destruction was the
erosion in the course of war of the stigma associated with the systematic targeting of civilian
populations from the air, and elimination of the constraints, which for some years had restrained
certain air powers from area bombing. What was new was both the scale of killing made possible
by the new technologies and the routinization of mass killing or state terrorism. If area bombing
remained controversial throughout much of World War II, something to be concealed or denied
by its practitioners, by the end of the conflagration it would become the acknowledged
centerpiece of war making, emblematic above all of the American way of war even as the nature
of the targets and the weapons were transformed by new technologies and confronted new forms
of resistance. Indeed, for six decades the US (and those fighting under its umbrella) has been
virtually alone in fighting wars and police actions notable for their reliance on airpower in
general and the deliberate targeting for destruction of civilians, and the infrastructure that makes
possible their survival, in particular. Certainly in this epoch no others have bombed on a scale
approaching that of the US. The US would conceal the deliberate annihilation of noncombatants
with the figleaf that Sahr Conway-Lanz describes as the myth of collateral damage, that is the
claim, however systematic the bombing, that the intent was elimination of military targets, not
the slaughter of noncombatants.

Concerted efforts to protect civilians from the ravages of war reached a peak in the aftermath of
World War II in the founding of the United Nations, German and Japanese War Crimes
Tribunals, and the 1949 Geneva Accords and its 1977 Protocol. The Nuremberg Indictment
defined “crimes against humanity” as “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and
other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war,”
language that resonated powerfully with the area bombing campaigns not only of Japan and
Germany but of Britain and the US. [38] These efforts appear to have done little to stay the hand
of power. Indeed, while the atomic bomb would leave a deep imprint on the collective
consciousness of the twentieth century, memory of the area bombings and firebombing of major
cities soon disappeared from the consciousness of all but the victims.

The ability to destroy an entire city and annihilate its population in a single bombing campaign
was not only far more “efficient” and less costly for the attacker than previous methods of
warfare, it also sanitized slaughter. Air power distanced executioners from victims, transforming
the visual and tactile experience of killing. The bombardier never looks squarely into the eyes of
the victim, nor does the act of destruction have the physical immediacy for the perpetrator of
decapitation by sword or even shooting with a machine gun. This may be particularly important
when the principal targets are women, children and the elderly.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the pinnacle of the process of annihilation
of civilian populations in the pursuit of military victory. While President Truman claimed that
the Hiroshima bomb targeted a naval base, the decision to detonate the bomb in the skies above
Hiroshima and Nagasaki was taken to maximize the killing of their inhabitants and the
destruction of the built environment. It was also calculated to demonstrate to the Japanese
government and people, to the authorities in the Soviet Union and other potential challengers of
American preeminence, and to the people of the world, the omnipotence of American power and
the certain destruction that would be visited on any who defied the United States. The debate
over the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has reverberated throughout the
postwar era, centered on the killing of noncombatants and on its significance in ending World
War II and shaping the subsequent US-Soviet conflict that defined postwar geopolitics. [39] In a
sense, however, the very focus of that debate on the atomic bomb, and later on the development
of the hydrogen bomb, may have contributed to the silencing of the no less pressing issues
associated with the killing of noncombatants with ever more powerful ‘conventional’ weapons.
The US did not drop atomic bombs again in the six decades since the end of World War II,
although it repeatedly threatened their use in Korea, in Vietnam and elsewhere. But it
incorporated annihilation of noncombatants in the bombing programs that have been integral to
the successive “conventional wars” that it has waged subsequently. With area bombing at the
core of its strategic agenda, US attacks on cities and noncombatants would run the gamut from
firebombing, napalming, cluster bombing, and atomic bombing to the use of chemical defoliants
and depleted uranium weapons and bunker buster bombs in an ever expanding circle of
destruction. [40] Indiscriminate bombing of noncombatants has been responsible for the most
massive destruction and loss of life throughout this epoch, even while the US staunchly
maintains that it does not deliberately kill civilians, thereby hewing to Conway-Lanz’s collateral
damage principle to protect it not only from political criticism in the US, but also from
international criticisms.

World War II remains unrivaled in the annals of war by important measures such as the number
of people killed and the scale of mass destruction. In that war, it was not the bombing of cities
but Nazi genocide against Jews, Catholics, Romany, homosexuals and other Germans as well as
Poles, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and Japanese slaughter of Asian noncombatants
that exacted the heaviest price in human lives. Each of these examples had its unique character
and historical and ideological origins. All rested on dehumanizing assumptions concerning the
“other” and produced large-scale slaughter of noncombatant populations. Japan’s China war
produced notable cases of atrocities that, then and later, captured world attention. They included
the Nanjing Massacre, the bombings of Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankou, Chongqing and other cities,
the enslavement of the comfort women, and the vivisection experiments and biowarfare bombs
of Unit 731. Less noted then and since were the systematic barbarities perpetrated against
resistant villagers, though this produced the largest number of the estimated ten to thirty million
Chinese who lost their lives in the war, a number that far surpasses the half million or more
Japanese noncombatants who died at the hands of US bombing, and may have exceeded Soviet
losses to Nazi invasion conventionally estimated at 20 million lives. [41] In that and subsequent
wars it would be the signature barbarities such as the Nanjing Massacre, the Bataan Death
March, and the massacres at Nogunri and My Lai rather than the quotidian events that defined
the systematic daily and hourly killing, which have attracted sustained attention, sparked bitter
controversy, and shaped historical memory.

The war dead in Europe alone in World War II, including the Soviet Union, have been estimated
in the range of 30 to 40 million, fifty percent more than the toll in World War I. To this we must
add 25 to 35 million Asian victims in the fifteen-year resistance war in China (1931-45),
approximately three million Japanese, and millions more in Southeast Asia. Among the
important instances of the killing of noncombatants in World War II, the US destruction of
Japanese cities is perhaps least known and least controversial. In contrast to the fierce and
continuing debate over the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nazi extermination
of Jews and others, and the far smaller-scale allied bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, and such
Japanese atrocities as the Nanjing Massacre and the vivisection experiments of Unit 731, the US
firebombing of Japanese cities has virtually disappeared from international and even American
and Japanese historical memory of the war.

In World War I, ninety percent of the fatalities directly attributable to the war were military,
nearly all of them Europeans and Americans. Most estimates place World War II casualties in
Europe in the range of 50-60 percent noncombatants. In the case of Asia, when war-induced
famine casualties are included, the noncombatant death toll was almost certainly substantially
higher in both absolute and percentage terms. [42] The United States, its homeland untouched by
war, suffered approximately 100,000 deaths in the entire Asian theater, a figure lower than that
for the single Tokyo air raid of March 10, 1945, and well below the death toll at Hiroshima or in
the Battle of Okinawa. Japan’s three million war dead, while thirty times the number of US dead,
was still only a small fraction of the toll suffered by the Chinese who resisted the Japanese
military juggernaut. These are numbers of relative casualties that the US, by fighting no war on
its own soil since the Civil War, and by adapting strategies that maximize its technological and
economic strength and minimize its own casualties, would replicate to even greater numerical
advantage in subsequent wars.

World War II remains indelibly engraved in American memory as the “Good War” and in
important respects it was. In confronting the war machines of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan,
the United States played a large role in defeating aggressors and opening the way for a wave of
decolonization that swept the globe in subsequent decades. It was also a war that catapulted the
United States to global supremacy and established the institutional foundations for the global
projection of American power in a network of military bases and unrivaled technological
supremacy.

For most Americans, in retrospect World War II seemed a “Good War” in another sense: the US
entered and exited the war buoyed by absolute moral certainty borne of a mission to punish
aggression in the form of a genocidal Nazi fascism and Japanese imperialism run amok.
Moreover, Americans remember the generosity of US aid not only to war torn allies, but to
rebuild the societies of former adversaries, Germany and Japan. Such an interpretation masks the
extent to which Americans shared with their adversaries an abiding nationalism and expansionist
urges. In contrast to earlier territorial empires, this took the form of new regional and global
structures facilitating the exercise of American power. The victory, which propelled the US to a
hegemonic position which carried authority to condemn and punish war crimes committed by
defeated nations, remains a major obstacle to a thoroughgoing reassessment of the wartime
conduct of the US in general, and issues of mass destruction carried out by its forces in
particular.

World War II, building on and extending atavistic impulses deeply rooted in earlier civilizations
and combining them with more destructive technologies, produced new forms of human
depravity. German and Japanese crimes have long been subjected to international criticism from
the war crimes tribunals of the 1940s to the present. [43] At Nuremberg and subsequent trials,
more than 1,800 Germans were convicted of war crimes and 294 were executed. At the Tokyo
Trials, 28 were indicted and seven were sentenced to death. At subsequent A and B class trials
conducted by the allied powers between 1945 and 1951, 5,700 Japanese, Koreans and Taiwanese
were indicted. 984 were initially sentenced to death (the sentences of 50 of these were
commuted); 475 received life sentences, and 2,944 received limited prison terms. The result of
military defeat, occupation, and war crimes tribunals has been protracted and profound reflection
and self-criticism by significant groups within both countries. In the case of Germany—but not
yet Japan—there has been meaningful official recognition of the criminal conduct of genocidal
and other barbaric policies as well as appropriate restitution to victims in the form of public
apology and substantial official reparations. For its part, the Japanese state continues to reject
official reparations claims to such war victims as Korean and Chinese forced laborers and the
military comfort women (sexual slaves), while the war remains a fiercely contested intellectualpolitical
issue as demonstrated by the decades long conflicts over textbook treatments of
colonialism and war, the Yasukuni shrine (the symbol of emperor-centered nationalism, empire
and war), the military comfort women, and the Nanjing Massacre controversies. [44]

In contrast to these responses to the war in Germany and Japan, and even to the ongoing debate
in the US about the uses of the atomic bomb, there has been virtually no awareness of, not to
speak of critical reflection on, the US bombing of Japanese civilians in the months prior to
Hiroshima. The systematic bombing of Japanese noncombatants in the course of the destruction
of Japanese cities must be added to a list of the horrific legacies of the war that includes Nazi
genocide and a host of Japanese war crimes against Asian peoples. Only by engaging the issues,
and above all the impact of this approach to the massive killing of noncombatants that has been
central to all subsequent US wars, can Americans begin to approach the Nuremberg ideal that
holds victors as well as vanquished to the same standards with respect to crimes against
humanity, or the standard of the 1949 Geneva Accord which requires the protection of civilians
in time of war. This is the principle of universality enshrined at Nuremberg and violated in
practice by the US and others beginning with the 1946 trials, which declared US immunity from
prosecution for war crimes.

In his opening address to the tribunal, Chief Prosecutor for the United States, Justice Robert
Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States, spoke eloquently, and memorably, on the
principle of universality. “If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes,” he said, “they are
crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not
prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to
have invoked against us….We must never forget that the record on which we judge these
defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a
poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.” [45]

Every US president from Roosevelt to George W. Bush has endorsed in practice an approach to
warfare that targets entire populations for annihilation, one that eliminates all vestiges of
distinction between combatant and noncombatant, with deadly consequences. The awesome
power of the atomic bomb has obscured the fact that this strategy came of age in the firebombing
of Tokyo and became the centerpiece of US war making from that time forward.

That poisoned chalice was put to American lips in the 1945 trials and all the more so in
subsequent wars. Sahr Conway-Lanz rightly points to the deep divisions among Americans
seeking to strike an appropriate balance between combat and atrocity, and between war and
genocide. [46] But with absolute American preponderance of technological power and the threat
of enemies from Communists to terrorists magnified by government and the media, in practice,
there were few restraints on the annihilation of noncombatants in the succession of US wars that
have exacted such a heavy toll in lives. American self-conceptions of benevolence and justice
have remained fixed not on the reality of the killing of noncombatants but on the combination of
American intentions in combat and generosity in charting postwar recovery in all wars since
1945.

Epilogue: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and the Uses of Airpower to Target Noncombatants

The centrality of the wholesale killing of noncombatants through the myriad uses of air power
runs like a red line from the bombings of 1944-45 through the Korean and Indochinese wars to
the Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In the course of six decades since the firebombing and
atomic bombing of Japan, while important continuities are observable, such as the firebombing
and napalming of cities, new, more powerful and versatile aircraft and weapons would be
deployed in the course of successive American wars fought predominantly in Asia.

General Curtis LeMay, the primary architect of the firebombing and atomic bombing strategy
applied to Japan in 1945 played a comparable role in Korea and Vietnam. Never one to pull
punches, or to minimize the claimed impact of bombing, LeMay recalled of Korea:
We slipped a note kind of under the door into the Pentagon and said, “Look, let us go up
there…and burn down five of the biggest towns in North Korea – and they’re not very big
– and that ought to stop it.” Well, the answer to that was four or five screams – “You’ll
kill a lot of non-combatants,” and “It’s too horrible.” Yet over a period three years or
so…we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too… Now, over a
period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening
– a lot of people can’t stomach it.” [47]

In the course of three years, US/UN forces in Korea flew 1,040,708 sorties and dropped 386,037
tons of bombs and 32,357 tons of napalm. Counting all types of air borne ordnance, including
rockets and machine-gun ammunition, the total tonnage comes to 698,000 tons. Marilyn Young
estimates the death toll in Korea, most of it noncombatants, at two to four million, and in the
South alone, more than five million people had been displaced, according to UN estimates. [48]
One striking feature of these wars has been the extension of bombing from a predominantly
urban phenomenon to the uses of airpower directed against rural areas of Korea and Vietnam,
leading the United States to breach another of international principles that had sought to curtail
indiscriminate attacks on noncombatants. Beginning in Korea, US bombing was extended from
cities to the countryside with devastating effects. In what Bruce Cumings has called the “final act
of this barbaric air war,” in spring 1953 North Korea’s main irrigation dams were destroyed
shortly after the rice had been transplanted. [49]

Here we consider one particularly important element of American bombing of Vietnam. Franklin
Roosevelt, in 1943 issued a statement that long stood as the clearest expression of US policy on
the use of chemical and biological weapons. In response to reports of Axis plans to use poison
gases, Roosevelt warned that “use of such weapons has been outlawed by the general opinion of
civilized mankind. This country has not used them, and I hope that we never will be compelled
to use them. I state categorically that we shall under no circumstances resort to the use of such
weapons unless they are first used by our enemies.” [50] This principle, incorporated in US
Army Field Manual 27-10, Law of Land Warfare, issued in 1954, affirmed the principle of no
first use of gas warfare and bacteriological warfare. By 1956, that provision had disappeared,
replaced by the assertion that the US was party to no treaty in force “that prohibits or restricts the
use in warfare of toxic or nontoxic gases, or smoke or incendiary materials or of bacteriological
warfare.” US CBW research and procurement efforts, that began in the early 1950s and
culminated in the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, resulted in the use of chemical and
biological weapons both against Vietnamese forces and nature, specifically extending from the
destruction of forest cover to the destruction of crops. As Seymour Hersh documents, the US
CBW program in Vietnam “gradually escalated from the use of leaf-killing defoliants to ricekilling
herbicides and nausea-producing gases.” [51] How widespread were US gas attacks in
Vietnam? A 1967 Japanese study of US anticrop and defoliation attacks prepared by the head of
the Agronomy Section of the Japan Science Council concluded that more than 3.8 million acres
of arable land in South Vietnam was ruined and more than 1,000 peasants and 13,000 livestock
were killed. [52] In the face of US military claims that the gases were benign, Dr. Pham Duc
Nam told Japanese investigators that a three-day attack near Da Nang from February 25 to 27,
1966 had poisoned both livestock and people, some of whom died. “Pregnant women gave birth
to still-born or premature children. Most of the affected cattle died from serious diarrhea, and
river fish floated on the surface of the water belly up, soon after the chemicals were spread.” [53]
Before turning to Iraq, it is worth recalling President Nixon’s comments on the bombing of
Cambodia as preserved in the Kissinger tapes released in May 2004. In a burst of anger on Dec.
9, 1970, when Nixon railed over what he saw as the Air Force’s lackluster bombing campaign in
Cambodia. Kissinger responded: “The Air Force is designed to fight an air battle against the
Soviet Union. They are not designed for this war.” Nixon then exploded: “I want them to hit
everything. I want them to use the big planes, the small planes, everything they can that will help
out there, and let’s start giving them a little shock.” Here was an early warning signal of the
“Shock and Awe” strategy of a generation later. Kissinger relayed the order: “A massive
bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” [54] In the course
of the Vietnam War the US embraced chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction as
integral parts of its arsenal.

Another story of indiscriminate bombing in Cambodia came to light thirty six years after the
events. The new evidence makes clear that Cambodia was bombed far more heavily than was
previously known, and that, unbeknownst to the American public or the world, it began not with
Nixon in 1970 but on October 4, 1965. During a fall 2000 visit to Vietnam, President Clinton
made available detailed Air Force records to help the Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian
governments to uncover the remains of two thousand missing American soldiers. The records
provided specific data on place and scale of bombing. The incomplete data reveal that October 4,
1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was
previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. The
consequences go far beyond the dead, the injured, and the continued dangers of unexploded
ordinance. As Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan argue persuasively, “Civilian casualties in
Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively
little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War
deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately
the Cambodian genocide.” [55]

It is notable, by contrast to the preceding six decades of American warfare, that the centrality of
the image of airpower and the bomb as the summa of destructive might, has shifted dramatically
in the Iraq War: Americans remember World War II above all as the crowning achievement of
air power, symbolized and mythologized by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki;
they remember the era of US-Soviet confrontation above all as one of nuclear standoff; and they
remember both Korea and Vietnam in no small part through images of American predominance
in the air, as in the bombing of Hanoi and North Vietnam as well as the defoliation using Agent
Orange, air power. But, as Michael Sherry observes, air power has largely receded from
consciousness in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the shift in target from the
other superpower to faceless terrorists associated with Al-Quaida and Islamic militants. Sherry
concludes that a sea change has occurred, a shift from prophecy to memory in which air power
declines in American consciousness: “Bombers attacking Baghdad, B-52s over Belgrade,
Russian planes hitting Grozny, rulers bombing their own peoples–the scale of those operations
(however devastating for the locals) and the fact that they involved such unequal forces did not
stir Americans’ apocalyptic fears and fantasies.” Where air power did appear in American
consciousness, he finds, “American bombing came across on U.S. television screens more as a
fascinating video game than as a devastating onslaught.” More importantly, he concludes,
because of the attack on New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11, and because of the
horrific images that it conjured, in contrast to the heroic images of air power in World War II, the
prophecy associated with it “did not seem to last long or run deep.” [56]

In thinking about the Iraq War and contemporary American consciousness, I would like to
suggest an alternative scenario. First, I believe that 9/11 and the Twin Towers in flames remains
the iconic image of our times in American consciousness. It is the central mobilizing image for
US war making and the primal impulse that drives American fears of the future. Second, as
Seymour Hersh and others have observed, the US military, while continuing to pursue massive
bombing of Iraqi neighborhoods, above all in the destruction of Falluja but even in Baghdad, has
chosen to throw a cloak of silence over the air war. The major media have faithfully honored
official dicta in this as in so many other ways. [57] Finally, among the George W. Bush
administration’s major initiatives have been the efforts to seize control of space as the
centerpiece of global domination in an era that is slated to replace the bomber as the primary
delivery weapon of mass destruction. [58] Air power remains among the major causes of death,
destruction, dislocation and division in contemporary Iraq in a war that had taken approximately
655,000 lives by the summer of 2006 in the most authoritative study to date, that of The Lancet)
and created more than two million refugees abroad and an equal number displaced internally
(one in seven Iraqis are displaced). Largely unreported in the US mainstream press, and invisible
in US television news and reportage, this is the central reality that confronts the Iraq people. US
strategy has produced the explosive social divisions that promise to lead to permanent warfare in
Iraq and throughout the region. Despite the unchallenged air supremacy that the US has wielded
in Iraq since 1991 and especially since 2003, there is no end in sight to US warfare and civil war
in Iraq and throughout the region. [59]

We have shown the decisive impact of the final year of World War II in setting in place the
preeminence of strategic bombing as quintessential to the US way of war, one that would
characterize subsequent major wars that have wreaked yet greater devastation on noncombatant
populations. Yet for all the power unleashed by US bombers, for all the millions of victims, in
the six decades since 1945, victory against successive, predominantly Asian foes, has proved
extraordinary elusive for the United States.
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This article was written for Japan Focus. Posted on May 2, 2007.Mark Selden is a research associate at the East Asia Program, Cornell University, and a coordinator of Japan Focus. His recent books include War and State Terrorism. The United
States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century.
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For notes & references See  original essay at  www.japanfocus.org/-mark-selden/2414