US destruction of Japanese cities

[Héctor]

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. 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. 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 intellectual-political 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. 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.”
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. 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.

Mark Selden, A Forgotten Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities and the American Way of War from World War II to Iraq

[haydnguy]

Hector, why all of a sudden are you posting all this anti-Americanism??

[Mischa]

Mark Selden, A Forgotten Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities and the American Way of War from World War II to Iraq

The purpose to employ the word Holocaust for war activities or war crimes or whatever you want to call it - is it to belittle the Holocaust or just for sensationalist purpose? Shall we leave the word for what it stands for?

A premise saying "The systematic bombing [...] 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" shows a historical consciousness, that's nothing but frightening.

Hector, why all of a sudden are you posting all this anti-Americanism??

I wonder why is he posting at all.

[Stlukesguild]

It was a far earlier American general, William Tecumseh Sherman who admitted that "War is Hell." Sherman recognized that the most rapid means to ending a war was to crush the enemy's strategic, economic, and psychological ability to wage further war through the waging of "total war". He employed the so-called "scorched earth" tactics to break the backbone of the rebellion, which he called "hard war". One of the officers serving in Sherman's staff noted that if the scorched earth strategy served "to paralyze their husbands and fathers who are fighting ... it is mercy in the end.

World War Two was the most horrific example of total war of the last century. The notion that the United States... or any of the other allies should have waged a "kinder, gentler" war is pure absurdity. The reality is that the Japanese and the Germans counted upon the the "kindness"... the empathy and the value placed upon the individual as the great weaknesses that they could exploit. When push came to shove, both sides employed their full destructive abilities upon each other. The reality is that the United States simply had far greater destructive abilities due to their isolation from the active theater of the war and the scale of their industrial complex.

The notion that war should be a game of tit for tat... of like retaliations... that the United States and the other Allies should not have unleashed the full capabilities of their military because the Japanese and Germans had never been successful in unleashing similar damages upon the United States is ridiculous. The idea that the United States of the other Allies should not have been willing to sacrifice thousands... tens of thousands... even hundreds of thousands of lives of Allied troops rather than have employed carpet bombing of Berlin, fire bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, or the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is absurd. The results of such strategies can be seen in the quagmires of Vietnam and Iraq.

War IS hell... and the notion of playing by the rules when it comes to war... especially modern war is beyond absurd. The differentiation between civilian and combatant in modern war is hazy at best when one considers that the armies often consist of largely soldiers who were drafted rather than volunteered... while a vast many civilians work either directly or indirectly in aid of their nation's military endeavors.

[Héctor]

“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes,” he (Justice Robert Jackson) 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.”

[Scott Good]

Originally Posted by Stlukesguild

War IS hell... and the notion of playing by the rules when it comes to war... especially modern war is beyond absurd.

Ya man, beyond absurd...

So I guess you are one of those types who thinks the US govt and pals should drop a few nukes on Iraq. And perhaps a couple over in Afghanistan. No rules...ya, I'm starting to tingle. why not drop a few on North Korea...save some time. Oh, that sounds delicious!! Then, well, China, Iran, Russia might get a bit edgy, so just keep going. Scorch the earth!!! Just like the good ol civil war days.

Nice and tidy. And o so modern. Those bombs are just begging to be used. What's a million or so people anyways...or 10 million...or 100 million...keep going, it's just some zeros. If only those bleeding hearts would shut up and let us have our hell.

(Btw, I prefer "War is murder". The hell part is "absurdly" obvious.)

Come on, man. Let's hear it. How far do you want to go? How about some biological nastiness? Chemicals! Agent Orange...ha, that's nothing. Wait till you see what they have now. You know, there are sound weapons that can explode peoples heads! Fun!!!

Pull up G16...boom...cool...what about G17?

Your message reads like an Ann Coulter wet dream.

[haydnguy]

Of course, my question was not answered.

There is a corresponding right to freedom of speech. It is freedom not to listen.

Therefore, I am exercising my freedom not to listen to this crap. I am taking my toys and leaving. Goodbye.

[Philidor]

Plenty of music to talk about folks..... Just for the record, I LOVE Americans. I'm debating on another forum with some hard line US gun nuts atm. They're soft on Timothy McVeigh, believe Obama's a dangerous socialist (or fascist - they can't quite make up their minds) would have heart attacks if their pastor advocated gay clergymen, and would like to intern every "A-rab" in America. But I still can't bring myself to dislike them as people. I'm pretty sure that if I met them in their community, kept off politics, was friendly and respectful, they'd give me the shirts off their backs.

Ahem... there's also the small matter of British Bomber Command... Dresden... Berlin... Cologne... 1,000 bomber raids...

[Héctor]

Originally Posted by haydnguy

Hector, why all of a sudden are you posting all this anti-Americanism??

Sorry, my dear friend... but anti-americanism??

David Ray Griffin is an american,

Mark Selden is an american,

Robert Jackson is an american.

I, too, am America

[Philidor]

Originally Posted by Héctor

I, too, am America

Thank you Héctor. That's a great poem.