CHAPTER 3
FEUERSTURM
The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing … I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives … rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.
Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister, after the bombing of Dresden, 1945
AS SPRING OF 1945 APPROACHED, the Japanese people toiled in darkness, ignorant of the dimensions of their worsening predicament. Early in the year Washington had approved a new air offensive that would place millions of Japanese civilians in the cross hairs of a campaign of air-borne obliteration, the scale and concentration of which has no parallel in the history of war.
In 1918 the controversial US General William ‘Billy’ Mitchell – the founding commander of the US Air Force – envisaged aerial bombardment as the future of human conflict, possibly rendering the carnage of the trenches obsolete, he declared, even as it ushered in a darker era of destruction. In 1926, as air-war enthusiasts were gaining influence in Washington, Mitchell laid before Congress the concept of the ‘strategic’ air raid: it flew over the exhausted, sodden infantry thrashing about on the ground and struck deep in the heart of the enemy nation. It smashed factories and homes, killed women and children and, in theory, broke the will of the people to resist; the soldiers, conscious of their loved ones being slaughtered in the rear, would lose the will to fight. Mitchell already had in mind the Japanese, America’s ally in World War I and now the emerging Pacific power whom he named as America’s future enemy. For years he extolled strategic air power, and ‘waves of long-range bombers’, as the best means of defeating Japan – by burning their paper cities.
The world’s first civilian victims of ‘strategic bombing’ were the few Belgians who died during the German Zeppelin raid on Liege in August 1914. The next was three-year-old Elsie Leggatt, of London’s East End, killed by a bomb dropped from a German airship in 1915. German Zeppelins and Gotha heavy bombers subsequently unloaded 9000 bombs on Britain in 84 raids during the Great War, killing 1413 and wounding 3408 people. The lessons of this were terrifyingly vivid: in a future war involving long-range bombers, the victor would be the first to deliver a knockout blow that destroyed as many people, created as much chaos, and levelled as many homes and factories as possible. The point was to compel the surviving citizens to surrender, or rise in terror against their government and force it to surrender.
Mitchell’s concept chimed with the concurrent ideas of a little book published in 1921 by Giulio Douhet, an Italian general, called The Command of the Air. Its perfect timing, on the cusp of the realisation of the importance of air supremacy, assured the book’s international influence. Like Mitchell, the Italian envisaged a ‘new form of war’ – that of mass slaughter. ‘To gain command of the air,’ Douhet remarked, during the Great War, ‘was to render the enemy harmless.’ He prescribed an air strategy in which the victor would launch spectacular, pre-emptive strikes before the enemy had a chance to move, far less retaliate: ‘A complete breakdown of the social structure,’ he wrote, ‘cannot but take place in a country subjected to … merciless pounding from the air.’ To end the horror and suffering, the people ‘would rise up and demand an end to war’. In such circumstances, he asked, would not ‘the sight of a single enemy plane be enough to stampede the population into panic?’ In such a war, ‘the decisive blows will be directed at civilians’, and the victor would be the side that ‘first succeeds in breaking down the … resistance of the other’. It would be ‘an inhuman, an atrocious performance,’ Douhet conceded. Wars of the future would make no distinction between combatant and civilian, he predicted. All would apply the ‘most powerful and terrifying means, such as poison gas and other things, against the civilian population’. Attacking civilians was inevitable, that is, ‘logically destined’, because in future the women making shells, farmers harvesting wheat and scientists in their labs would all be deemed combatants. In such a war, the safest place ‘may be in the trenches’. That black joke scarcely registered in such a book.
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The Japanese and Germans were the first to apply a Douhet-style knockout blow: 5400 Chinese nationals died when Japanese aircraft dropped incendiaries on Chongqing, China, in 1939. The Luftwaffe’s destruction of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War presaged air wars on a scale more terrible than Douhet had conceived: it ushered in the blitzkrieg, or ‘lightning strike’, which Goering applied with merciless efficiency on Poland, Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Britain. The Luftwaffe’s raid on central Rotterdam in May 1940 killed more than 1000 civilians and wounded many thousands more. The Blitz rained bombs on London for 76 consecutive nights from 7 September 1940, leaving more than 40,000 civilians dead and more than 375,000 people homeless.
In late 1941 Winston Churchill, on the recommendation of Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, considered a new policy of ‘area’ raids on German cities. Precision bombing – of factories and refineries, for example – had failed, it was felt. Of those aircraft recorded as attacking their targets only one in three got within 8 kilometres, and only one in four did so over Germany, due largely to inadequate equipment, underdeveloped radar systems and poor training, according to the Butt Report of August 1941 on the effectiveness of precision bombing, compiled by David Bensusan-Butt, a civil servant in the War Cabinet Secretariat. The conclusions were a shock. Rather than attempt to amend the RAF’s deficiencies, the British government chose to adopt a new policy, and gave their pilots a new mission: to render German cities ‘physically uninhabitable’, and ‘the people conscious of constant personal danger’, through Douhet-prescribed air raids on civilians. The RAF’s new aims were brutally simple: (1) to achieve utter destruction; and (2) to incite the fear of death in the people.
Portal occupied himself with calculating the likely effect of dropping 1.25 million tons (1.1 tonnes) of bombs on German towns: they would destroy six million homes; leave 25 million people homeless; and kill 900,000 civilians and seriously injure one million. The first raids awaited further research. Indeed, studying the effect of destroying enemy homes became a kind of obsession for Lord Cherwell, formerly Dr Adolphus Frederick Lindemann, the Prime Minister’s German-born scientific adviser. ‘Having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale,’ he told Churchill in March 1942 in his ‘Dehousing Memorandum’, after surveying the devastation of Hull and Birmingham. ‘People seem to mind it more than having their friends or relatives killed.’ Perhaps this projected Cherwell’s fear of homelessness rather than the quality of friendship, or value of homes, in Hull. Regardless, nothing dissuaded him from his grim task: ‘We should be able to do ten times as much harm to each of the 58 principal German towns. There seems little doubt that this would break the spirit of the people.’ Portal agreed: the loss of the German’s home, if not his family, would break enemy morale, he advised Churchill in November 1942.
Francis Vivian Drake, considered an expert on air war, seized the initiative in his book Vertical Warfare (1943). He claimed that area bombing would ‘bring Germany to her knees’ within six months. Drake recommended dropping 240,000 tons (218,000 tonnes) of bombs in that time, at a cost, he calculated, of 1660 Allied planes and the lives of 20,000 airmen. The crews’ lives would not be wasted: they would win the war, he argued, because, ‘It is outside the realm of possibility that the population of any country, no matter how determined or how desperate, could withstand anything like such a terrible tonnage…’ In the event, the Allies dropped 2.7 million tons (2.4 million tonnes) on Germany during World War II – 260,000 tons in March 1943 – for the loss of more than 160,000 airmen.
Air Marshal Arthur Harris, appointed commander in chief of Britain’s Bomber Command in February 1942, wholeheartedly supported the policy he inherited – at least at the start of the air-raid ‘experiment’, as he called it: ‘Germany … will make a most interesting subject for the initial experiment. Japan can be used to provide the confirmation.’ Portal masterminded the coming air war on German cities; Harris executed it. Unwilling to risk aircraft trying to pinpoint ‘non-civilian’ targets using poor radar, ‘Bomber’ Harris (also dubbed ‘Chopper’ and ‘Butcher’ by the RAF) argued that ‘dehousing’ the Germans would more effectively destroy their will to fight. This was pure Mitchell and Douhet. Until early 1942, air raids on Germany had neither specifically targeted civilians nor dropped the new incendiary (or jellied petroleum) weapons – early versions of napalm – to a substantial degree. That changed on the night of 30 May 1942 with the first ‘thousand bomber’ raid on Cologne, hitherto the most devastating air attack in war. ‘Area’ bombardment of dozens of German cities would follow – the intent of which was to destroy homes and civilian lives.
On 25 July 1943, Harris achieved, in Operation Gomorrah, the obliteration of most of the city of Hamburg, Germany’s second most populous. ‘The total destruction of this city,’ stated Most Secret Operation Order No. 173 before the raid, ‘… together with the effect on German morale … would play a very important part in shortening and in winning the war.’ To complete ‘the process of elimination’ would require at least 10,000 tons (9000 tonnes) of bombs. The methods and results were unprecedented in the history of war: soon after midnight, 728 RAF aircraft dropped thousands of incendiary clusters and high explosives on Hamburg’s urban areas. Within an hour, roaring fires and smoke covered 10 square kilometres of residential Hamburg. The city’s fire department conjured a new word for the effect: a Feuersturm – firestorm – a phenomenon rare in nature. Perhaps a volcanic eruption over a forest, or a multitude of flaming geysers, or a band of arsonists in the bush on a hot summer’s day would deliver the same result:
‘Small fires united into conflagrations in the shortest time,’ reported a secret German document of the time,
and those in turn led to the fire storms. To comprehend these … one can only analyse them from a physical, meteorological angle. Through the union of a number of fires, the air gets so hot … which causes other surrounding air to be sucked towards the centre. By that suction, combined with the enormous differences in temperature (600-1000 degrees centigrade) tempests are caused … In a built-up area … the overheated air stormed through the street with immense force taking along not only sparks but burning timbers and roof beams … developing in a short time into a fire typhoon such as was never before witnessed, against which every human resistance was quite useless.
‘Self-energised dislocation’ was how the RAF described the scene in Hamburg, using a euphemism as callous as it was inexact, suggesting the bombers had merely ignited small fires that had mysteriously self-energised into a raging inferno, which had, of itself, dislocated the public. ‘Terror-bombing’ – a phrase coined by German Propaganda Minister Goebbels – more accurately described the most efficient way yet discovered of killing human beings: ‘It would be ironical,’ stated the British military historian Basil Liddell Hart, ‘if the defenders of civilisation depend for victory upon the most barbaric and unskilled way of winning a war the world has seen.’ That was his private view, expressed in a diary. In public the British rejoiced at the success, as ‘the Hun’ burned. After three nights of this torment, half of Hamburg ceased to exist. More than 30,000 civilians perished in the inferno. Harris later justified this air strategy as ‘humane’ compared with the British blockade of Germany, which reportedly would kill 800,000 civilians, according to a British White Paper. The word ‘humane’ had no place in this hypothetical debate; neither Harris nor civil servants in Whitehall could accurately calculate how many people the blockade would kill, directly or indirectly.
Over the course of the war, Bomber Command terror-bombed 70 German cities, of which 69 suffered the destruction of at least 50 per cent of their urban (industrial and residential) areas. The preponderance of war factories in the Ruhr Valley validated those cities as military targets, although most of the victims were factory workers. Elsewhere civilians were the main casualties: of 2,638,000 tons of bombs dropped on Germany and German-held territory, 48,000 tons – less than 2 per cent – fell on war-related factories, while 640,000 tons landed on ‘industrial areas’ – largely workers’ homes. Indiscriminate terror strikes on residential areas accounted for most of the rest. Not all were as ‘effective’ as Hamburg; Harris lost 1047 bombers in his failed attempt to burn Berlin (in which American aircraft also took part).
In February 1945 Harris turned his attention to Dresden. Churchill and his advisers had selected the target while they were at Yalta, as part of Operation Thunderclap, a demonstration to Stalin of the Western Allies’ resolve to strike deep in Germany territory. Dresden, the ‘Florence on the Elbe’, the paragon of baroque architecture, was not a military target by any stretch of the definition. In fact, it did not appear on Bomber Command’s list of targeted German cities drawn up by Harris’s second-in-command, Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby. No doubt Dresden had an important post office and a railway marshalling yard. A local factory made gas masks. And 8 kilometres north of town an old disused arsenal produced soap, baby powder, toothpaste and items rumoured to be aircraft navigation instruments and bombsights. Whatever it made, the arsenal was outside the RAF’s target area.
By the night of 13 February, Dresden’s population had swelled to more than one million people, including 400,000 refugees – German and third-country civilians – fleeing the Soviet tank invasion. These people had nowhere to live. They huddled beneath the rococo angels and baroque eaves and flying buttresses of buildings like religious pilgrims in search of sanctuary.
That night, 796 RAF Lancaster bombers in two waves unloaded 650,000 incendiary bombs over Dresden. The aircraft met no ground fire; the city lay undefended. The pilots, some of whom felt affronted, even ashamed, by this lack of opposition, flew in low. The first wave dropped 4000-pound high explosives that broke open the roofs of buildings like the tops of eggshells; 750-pound clusters of incendiaries followed. The second wave encountered not a city but a raging furnace. Billowing clouds of smoke and flame obscured the aiming points. So they firebombed the fireball: ‘There was a sea of fire covering … 40 square miles [100 square kilometres],’ a crew member of the last Lancaster over Dresden later said. ‘We were so aghast at the awesome blaze that … we flew about in a stand-off position for many minutes before turning home, quite subdued by our imagination of the horror that must be below. We could still see the glare of the holocaust thirty minutes after leaving.’
About noon the next day 311 US bombers joined the RAF over Dresden, the first US aircraft to participate in a civilian terror strike. It was a superfluous act of overkill. The pilots believed they were attacking a railway terminal. Instead, they pulverised whatever remained of the inner city. The rubble danced and the corpses fell to dust. Then, lest any sign of life dare show itself, scores of low-flying Mustang fighters strafed the smouldering ruin and mowed down dishevelled crowds on the river banks and in the gardens where a remnant of the Kreuzkirche children’s choir and some British prisoners of war had sought refuge.
Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden that night as an American prisoner of war. The author of Slaughterhouse V could not forget the sight of rows of asphyxiated people sitting up in a shelter, ‘like a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had heart failure … Those in underground shelters said they heard a strange howling sound, unlike any they’d heard, overhead: the sound of a tornado of flames.’
At least 100,000 civilians lost their lives in Dresden in a single night (upper estimates put the number of dead at 135,000). By comparison, 568 civilians died in the Coventry attack and the London Blitz claimed 40,000 lives. Dresden’s dead included two trainloads of evacuee children aged between 12 and 14. Tens of thousands of body parts were unidentifiable. The Central Bureau of Missing Persons resorted to collecting wedding rings – it was the German custom to engrave the married couple’s names inside the band – to aid identification; some 20,000 wedding rings were salvaged from unknown corpses. Soviet troops then trampled the piles of the dead into stacks and burned them in the Altmarkt (Old Market).
The story of Dresden swiftly reached London and Washington. Press reports of ‘terror-bombings of German population centres’ alarmed General Eisenhower and US Secretary of War Henry Stimson. General Carl Spaatz, Commander of US Strategic Air Forces in Europe, assured Eisenhower that the targets had been purely military and apprised Stimson of Dresden’s importance as a transport centre. No evidence could be found to justify the claim by US General George Marshall that Russia had requested the ‘neutralisation’ of Dresden. The controversy dissolved behind the doors of officialdom. Barbs of doubt, however, lodged in the mind of Churchill, who had initially championed the attack and was fully informed of the execution of the air war. He now recoiled from the spectacle, adroitly shifted responsibility to Bomber Command, more specifically to Harris, and recast his own role for posterity:
‘It seems to me,’ the British Prime Minister wrote, in a famous minute of 28 March 1945, ‘that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror … should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land … The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing … I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives … rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.’
Bomber Command greeted Churchill’s remark with muted fury: most distressing, Saundby alleged, was the insinuation that Bomber Command had been terror-bombing Germany on its own initiative – when the orders clearly came from the War Cabinet. The Chiefs of Staff were similarly aghast, and would not be held responsible for the decisions of their political masters. The Chiefs and air commanders compelled Churchill to rephrase the minute: ‘We must see to it,’ ran Churchill’s revised version, ‘that our attacks do not do more harm to ourselves in the long run than they do to the enemy’s immediate war effort.’
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Until 1944 the US Air Force had not widely targeted civilians in the European theatre, preserving their ordnance for high-altitude precision strikes on bridges, factories, railways and military bases. General Carl Spaatz, then commanding the US Eighth Air Force, had at first refused to countenance terror-bombing. This culture of restraint was founded less on humanitarian considerations than on military pragmatism; however, it echoed Roosevelt’s earlier revulsion at the ‘inhuman barbarism’ of German and Japanese civilian bombing, which, he told Congress on 1 September 1939, had ‘sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.’ Even so, the US Air Force kept its options open: terror-bombing had been a longstanding contingency, drawing on the recommendations of Mitchell in the 1920s. In November 1943 aircrews tested a new kind of incendiary weapon on a mock Japanese town built in the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, an exact replica in miniature of a Japanese paper suburb, ‘down to the books on the shelves and the matting on the floor’, observed General Curtis LeMay. A fire brigade even simulated its hapless Tokyo counterpart. The testing resulted in the development of the new napalm-based M69 incendiary bomb, which came on stream at the end of 1944.
Roosevelt’s revulsion faded as Germany and Japan set the terms of total war. By late 1944, driven by the exigencies of mounting casualties and enemy atrocities, Washington determined to take the war to the Japanese civilian. The first American incendiaries fell on Japanese-occupied Hankow, China, in December 1944 in an experimental raid. This breached the terms of the 1907 Hague Declaration prohibiting the ‘discharge of explosives from balloons’ and the General Rules of Aerial Warfare, which outlawed ‘aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorising the civilian population’. Legally, however, the US had no case to answer, having refused to observe the terms of the 1907 law; conveniently, the Hague’s ‘General Rules’ of air combat were never ratified. Not that old rules of war restrained any of the combatants of World War II. Shortly the US Air Force brought forward plans for its first massive proto-napalm (jellied petroleum) strike on the Japanese mainland. The first target would be Tokyo.
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General Curtis LeMay, commanding XXI Bomber Command, led America’s strategic air offensive against the Japanese home islands and earned the cold respect, if not the affection, of the pilots in his charge. He had flown, with courage and skill, several air raids against the Germans in 1943; he was willing to do so over Japan, and would have done so had not his knowledge of S-1 – the atomic bomb development project – grounded him at the US air base in Saipan; his superiors could not risk the secret’s extraction under torture. Instructed by his superior, General Hap Arnold, Commanding General of the US Army Air Forces, to give priority to cities, not factories, LeMay worried that low-level incendiary raids would put his aircrews dangerously at risk from ground fire. On the eve of XXI Bomber Command’s first incendiary attack on Tokyo – scheduled for 9 March 1945 – he feared the loss of 300 planes and 3000 airmen. But he reassured himself that conventional air raids had severely weakened Tokyo’s air defences, and the US naval blockade that surrounded Japan had denied the enemy any hope of reinforcements.
Aircrews in the packed Quonset hut on Saipan listened in awed silence to their pre-flight briefings: more than 300 Superfortresses (hitherto a maximum of 150 had been deployed in a single raid) packed with incendiaries would strike Tokyo at altitudes of just 5000 to 8000 feet (1500 to 2000 metres). Their mission, to burn the city, would involve dropping thousands of cylinders of napalm on Tokyo’s most congested residential areas. Anxious crews were told to jettison guns and ammunition – and thus risk flying over enemy territory without retaliatory fire – in order to accommodate more M69 bomb clusters. Each cluster contained 38 incendiary cylinders, or bombs, of jellied petroleum. A single plane would carry about 40 clusters, making a total of 1520 incendiary bombs per plane. LeMay’s instructions dismayed his airmen: most thought the operation impossible; surely their planes would be cut to pieces by anti-aircraft fire? The ‘pall of a suicide mission’ hung over the pilots, LeMay recalled. If the mission horrified US pilots, how would the Japanese react to a low-altitude incendiary raid? Shock tactics were LeMay’s answer; the enemy had had no experience of a low-level mass incendiary strike.
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The people of Tokyo heard the long, dreary wail of an air-raid warning at 10.30pm. They were accustomed to warnings and little troubled: Tokyo, a city of 4.3 million, had thus far lost about 1000 people to air raids. They sat in their darkened homes awaiting the second decisive siren that confirmed an attack. A violent gale rattled the shutters of their flimsy paper-and-wood homes. For a while nothing happened. Then, a little after midnight, coast watchers detected the silver bellies – for a year, there had been no need to camouflage them, as they usually flew beyond the range of groundfire – of the first B-29 Superfortresses flying low over the water. Nicknamed ‘Bikko’ or ‘B-san’ in Japan, the Superforts reached the city at eight minutes past midnight. The raid seemed a feint, as the aircraft dropped few bombs and ‘looked as though they were escaping towards the south of Boso Peninsula’, observed one witness.
At 12.15am, coastal radio alerted Tokyo to more enemy aircraft, a whole formation in fact, also flying at unusually low altitude. They approached east Tokyo, the city’s most densely populated area, whose scattering of small factories and cottage industries confirmed – in US Air Force public relations parlance – its designation as a ‘military target’. The second air-raid sirens wailed. Hundreds of thousands of people scurried from their homes; some wore air-raid hoods and lugged buckets and wet towels; fathers carried sleeping mats and food; mothers bore children in their arms or on their backs. They ran towards the few concrete shelters. If these were full – and Tokyo’s concrete shelters in total had room for only 5000 people – they resorted to shallow trenches, covered holes, anything underground. Expecting high explosives, they hoped to shield themselves from shrapnel and flying debris. Then, above the roar of the planes came a strange, new whizzing sound unknown to the people of Joto, the first targeted area on Tokyo’s eastern plain, and the most densely populated area of the world.
Weather conditions were perfect for igniting a paper city: a cold, moonlit night with fierce northerly gales that would act as giant bellows to the storm. The incendiary canisters burst on impact. The 4-pound bombs bounced across the parks and rooftops, spewing flaming jellied petroleum onto homes, attics, alleys, schools, hospitals, temples and factories. The high winds fanned these spot fires into a fireball that sucked in the surrounding oxygen. What followed was a firestorm more terrible than anything seen in Germany.
The flat plain of Tokyo’s shitamachi (downtown) residential area, where up to 84,000 people per square kilometre lived in a crush of little paper-and-wood dwellings, was the kindling for a hurricane of flames: ‘The scattered fires came together into a single huge flame and 40% of the capital was burned to the ground,’ the Japanese Home Affairs Ministry blankly reported. In his memoirs, LeMay chose a biblical metaphor: ‘It was as though Tokyo had dropped through the floor of the world and into the mouth of hell.’
The second wave of aircraft ‘saw a glow on the horizon like the sun rising,’ pilot Robert Ramer recalled. ‘The whole city of Tokyo was below us … ablaze in one enormous fire with yet more fountains of flame pouring down…’ The pilots flew into clouds of black smoke and huge updraughts that buffeted the planes ‘like embers over a campfire’, and threw up ‘the horrible smell of human flesh’.
On the ground, as the spot fires ignited and spread, the official policy was, ‘Fight, don’t run.’ The neighbourhood associations, armed with mops, buckets and sandbags, rallied their wan tribes beneath an escarpment of fire. Those who stayed to fight were burned. Millions chose to flee the flames that chased them through the city like furies. The firestorm flung ahead gigantic cinders – burning beams, joists, palings – which smashed to the ground, or into buildings, lighting new spot fires that fed the advancing inferno. Homes and people, like trees in the path of a bushfire, burst into flames; families, the elderly, mothers and children went mad with pain and terror; victims rolled about on the molten streets unable to douse the jelly that burned to the bone. The people headed for the parks or along the train lines or rushed to the river and hurled themselves in. Coils of flame surrounded and ensnared the weak or slow or overburdened, who caught fire and fell, unhelped by the fleeing populace; others gave up and knelt at prayer in the direction of the Imperial Palace as the conflagration swept over them. No structures were safe or sacred: hospitals crashed down, their patients incinerated where they lay; temples collapsed on the bowed heads inside; schools, mercifully deserted at night, were ash by dawn.
The city sounded the ‘all-clear’ at 3.20am. In those few hours, 325 American Superforts had dropped almost half a million incendiary cylinders on the people of Tokyo. Twelve planes were lost, and antiaircraft fire damaged 42 – such was the hopeless state of Japan’s air defences. The homes of 372,108 families and about 4000 hectares of property were destroyed. Scores of temples, shrines, churches and convents burned. More than 1.15 million people fled the city. Nobody knows the exact number of dead, but close to 100,000 is the generally accepted figure, mostly of burns and asphyxiation. The US Strategic Bombing Survey (set up by Roosevelt in early 1945 to assess the air-inflicted damage to Germany and Japan) calculated 93,000 deaths but acknowledged that many bodies were uncounted. Japanese sources claimed that 72,000 bodies ‘or more’ had been removed and cremated by 15 March, most in hastily dug mass graves in public parks. The historian Mark Selden put the casualties at far greater, in a teeming city with ‘ludicrously inadequate’ firefighting measures fanned by the hurricane-force winds. This, he concluded, combined with LeMay’s insistence that Tokyo be ‘burned down, wiped off the map … to shorten the war’, surely killed tens of thousands more.
The US Air Force judged the first firebombing of Tokyo – several raids would follow – a great success, as measured by the scale of destruction and loss of life. General Arnold praised LeMay’s brilliant planning and execution, and the courage of his crews. ‘Under reasonably favourable conditions,’ Arnold added, the US Air Force ‘should have the capacity to destroy whole industrial cities.’
That is what they did. LeMay meant to take the war to the Japanese people with every weapon in his arsenal: ‘Bomb and burn them until they quit,’ was the general’s guiding principle. In the following weeks LeMay’s XXI Bomber Command firebombed the urban areas of every major Japanese city, dropping almost five million incendiaries (98,466 tons/89,327 tonnes) – one-third of which fell in July 1945 – burning more than two million properties. Tokyo, Nagoya, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe and Kawasaki were the worst hit, sustaining 315,922 casualties (of whom 126,762 were killed) and the loss of 1,439,115 properties covering 270 square kilometres. US pilots dropped millions of pamphlets a few days in advance of the attacks. One stated, ‘America, which stands for humanity, does not wish to injure the innocent people, so you had better evacuate these cities.’ Japanese military police ordered people not to read the pamphlets; in any case, half the leafleted cities were bombed within a few days of the warning.
Tokyo’s leaders responded with mere propaganda – appeals to Japanese spirit – as city after city was laid to waste. Living in the bomb shelters was ‘an adventurous and manly life,’ two high-ranking Home Ministry officials assured the nation, ‘but we cannot deny that it lacks stability from the standpoint of public order.’ The ministry noted an ‘insufficient’ number of bomb shelters but lacked the materials or manpower to build better ones. On 1 June the regime secretly discussed moving the government, but publicly declared its determination ‘to stay in the Metropolis, even if the Metropolis is reduced to ashes’.
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The American press – with the exception of a few religious journals – delighted in the burning of Japanese cities. A euphoric media hailed the incendiary campaign as a brilliant strategy that would win the war and bring the boys home. In fact the media ‘demanded more bombing of civilian targets’ and criticised the earlier policy that had restricted US aircraft to targeting military and industrial facilities. Time magazine reported the Tokyo air raid as ‘a dream come true … properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves’. LeMay boasted to a press conference on 30 May 1945 that firebombing had killed a million Japanese. The American people similarly applauded the ‘area bombardment’ of ‘arsenal cities’.
Some high US officials, however, demurred. A few days after LeMay’s remarks, US War Secretary Henry Stimson privately feared the United States would ‘get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities’. Admiral William Leahy, Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff, and General Douglas MacArthur were similarly disturbed by what they saw as the utter barbarity of the air campaign. Yet Washington did nothing to curb the bombing – ‘only LeMay’s tongue’.
While publicly it claimed the targets were ‘military’, privately the US Air Force from March 1945 had abandoned any pretence that they were attacking military targets; they made no distinction between civilians and combatants: ‘The entire population of Japan is a proper Military Target,’ declared one US Air Force intelligence report. ‘THERE ARE NO CIVILIANS IN JAPAN.’ It was a belief shared by Japan’s leaders, for whom the ‘hundred million’ Japanese people would assuredly fight to defend the homeland. Understanding that assuaged any qualms about terror-bombing, if they existed, in the minds of US air commanders.
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Terror-bombing failed. The firestorms caused immense loss of life and property but failed to break the enemy’s war machine and the people’s will to resist. Douhet, Mitchell, Goering, Harris and LeMay had underestimated both the astonishing resilience of a people under siege, and the steadfastness – and callous disregard – of the regimes in charge. There would be no Douhet knockout blow; no domestic uprising; no surrender, in the aftermath. This is not the wisdom of hindsight; the London Blitz offered a valuable lesson: the German air raids hardened rather than weakened the British will to fight on. Terror-bombing could not defeat a country with strong air defences and high morale – or a totalitarian regime in charge – a lesson ignored in the firebombing of Germany and Japan, whose people similarly refused, or were ordered not, to capitulate.
Nor did the Allied campaign take into account the fact that Germany and Japan deployed the largest cohort of slave labour ever assembled: the Nazis herded more than five million Europeans off to work to rebuild the mines, rail and road networks, and factories of the Reich; Albert Speer, Germany’s Minister for Armaments and War Production, was determined to keep them working at the frontlines and simply replaced the casualties with new workers. The Japanese similarly used Koreans, Chinese and prisoners of war as slaves – and as ‘shields’ against air attack – to work in arms and other war-related factories in ‘frontline’ cities. There were more than 140,000 white prisoners of war in the Japanese Empire, many of whom worked in mines and factories in the homeland in or near the bombed cities.
Bombing slaves and prisoners in residential areas did little damage to the German war effort. Civilian areas were ‘unprofitable’ targets; targeting them drained air resources from profitable targets and had little impact on Germany’s productive capacity; in fact, German tank and fighter production rose in 1944.
As a memorandum to the US Secretary of War in June 1945 on the ‘effectiveness’ of the bomber offensive dryly observed: ‘In contrast to the offensive against oil and transportation, there is considerable evidence that the attacks upon German cities, although extremely heavy, had a relatively indecisive effect upon German war production…’ In conclusion, it noted, in the clipped tone of an afterthought, ‘The Germans were far more concerned about air attacks on any one of their basic industries and services, such as oil and chemicals, steel, power and transportation, than they were about attacks on finished armament capacity or on city areas … The attacks on oil and transport were the decisive ones.’ One cannot help but be struck by the devastating consequences for civilian life of failing to apprehend this before the act.
Bomber Harris himself reached the same conclusion after the war: ‘Almost every German officer who knew anything about the subject’ knew this: that the conventional destruction of factories, communication posts and transport lines inflicted much greater damage on the war effort than civilian ‘area raids’. D-day succeeded largely because Allied aircraft destroyed the railway lines in northwest Europe: ‘We had forty … reserve divisions,’ said one German officer, ‘Your effective bombing … made it impossible for us to remove our troops rapidly, if at all.’ Without the aerial destruction of ‘our lines of communication and transportation’, said another, ‘your invasion ships and barges would have been sunk or driven out to sea, and the invasion would have been a dismal failure’. Harris applauded the precision bombing of vital factories and rail lines in German-occupied France that preceded D-day. He cited, for example, the Lancasters’ demolition of ‘a small but very important needle-bearing factory consisting of only two buildings … almost entirely hidden in cloud’. Indeed, by 1944 British and American aircrews had the skills and technology to deliver heavy concentrated night attacks with real precision. Their commanders decided instead, in 1945, to ratchet up the bombardment of civilians to a level of unprecedented ferocity.
Similarly, in Japan: LeMay’s concentration on civilian destruction preserved much of the nation’s war infrastructure: the visible rail network, the Kokura arsenal and vital coal ferry between Hokkaido and Honshu were still operating in mid-1945. So too were several major industrial centres. Their ‘strangulation’ would have defeated Japan ‘more efficiently’ than ‘individually destroying Japan’s cities’, according to the US Strategic Bombing Survey. LeMay was ordered not to do so, in line with his personal mission to destroy Japanese civilian morale. In the broader picture, the US naval blockade as well as Fleet Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey’s carrier aircraft – which attacked Japanese military targets with withering accuracy in July 1945 – destroyed Japan’s capacity to wage war more effectively than LeMay’s indiscriminate air offensive. That offensive may be judged a moral and military failure.
The clearest manifestation of its failure was the people’s resistance. They did not revolt. Insurrection was unthinkable to hungry, bombed civilians. The assumption that ‘civilian hardship’ produced public anger and political opposition ‘did not stand up’. ‘Counter-civilian coercion’ merely hurt or killed ordinary people ‘for no good purpose’, concluded the historian Robert Pape; it was ‘wasteful and immoral’. Major Alexander de Seversky, an air-war expert, put it rather more brutally in an appropriately named chapter: ‘The Fallacy of Killing People’: ‘The dead can’t revolt.’
No one could describe Major de Seversky as a bleeding heart. A Russian naval aviator who lost his right leg in combat against Germany in 1915, he went on to fly 57 combat missions over the Baltic Sea, downed 13 German planes and won every decoration within his government’s gift. He defected to America after the Russian Revolution and later designed and built the first bombsight. His book Victory Through Air Power drew the attention of leading aviators and was made into an animated Walt Disney film, which Churchill and Roosevelt viewed at the Quebec Conference in 1943. De Seversky’s opinion of civilian terror-bombing stands as its most clear-headed denunciation: ‘In air battle, killing is incidental to the strategic purpose [my emphasis].’
Bomber Harris belatedly acknowledged this truth. The idea that bombing German cities would break the enemy’s morale ‘proved to be wholly unsound’, he wrote in his memoirs after the war.
So too, in Japan: even without adequate air defences, the nation refused to yield. Undoubtedly air bombardment weakened Japanese morale, yet they would not surrender: ‘The workers would still go to work or be forced to go…’ Most students, farmers and factory workers made every effort to stay on the job; in any case, the Japanese military police (Kempeitai), like the Gestapo, were on hand to compel them.
* * *
To the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki it remained a mystery why they were spared from America’s aerial onslaught. They remained unmolested in April 1945, at a time when most cities shrank under waves of Superfortresses. ‘We heard about the destruction of Tokyo on the news,’ Miyoko Watanabe, a Hiroshima resident, recalled. ‘Everyone was in a state of panic. After the bombing of Tokyo more people started to evacuate their children in response.’ The expected attack did not come. The reason lay in a cable LeMay received on 17 May 1945 at his HQ on Tinian Island, from where the atomic bombs would be flown to Japan:
TELECON MESSAGE - G-15-11: TOP SECRET
SUBJECT: RESERVED AREAS
TO: COMCENBOMCOM 21
FROM: COMAF 20
(LEMAY EYES ONLY)
THIS IS TOP SECRET IT IS DIRECTED THAT NO BOMBING ATTACKS BE MADE AGAINST THE FOLLOWING TARGETS WITHOUT SPECIFIC AUTHORIZATION FROM THIS HEADQUARTERS. THESE TARGETS ARE THE CITIES OF HIROSHIMA, KYOTO AND NIIGATA. THIS DIRECTIVE SHOULD RECEIVE MINIMUM DISTRIBUTION AND BE ACCOMPLISHED WITHOUT PUBLICITY AND WITHOUT EMPHASIS ON THE RESTRICTION AS THESE CITIES ARE TENTATIVELY ESTABLISHED AS INITIAL TARGETS FOR THE 509TH COMPOSITE GROUP.
Soon, the Pentagon would add Nagasaki to the target list for the atomic bomb.