IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF MAY 24, under the cover of darkness in Tokyo, air-raid sirens signaled oncoming waves of American B-29 Superfortresses. From the ground, the bombers could be heard before they could be seen, thousands of 2,200-horsepower engines roaring. Then the ships appeared against the moonlit sky, gliding through moving columns of searchlights casting from the ground. One person in Tokyo described the vision of these bomber aircraft: “unreal, light as fantastic glass dragonflies . . . their long, glinting wings, sharp as blades.” Major General Curtis LeMay had dispatched 550 Superfortresses from bases in the Marianas. The attack wave swept low, under 10,000 feet, the planes slicing through Tokyo’s sky before sunrise and releasing canisters that ignited the city.
“The sheer number of the bombs was incredible,” recalled a French journalist who was living in Tokyo, Robert Guillain. “The carpet [of bombs] unrolled with pitiless regularity, spreading its mat of fire over the flat districts between the port and the hills . . . As soon as they touched the ground, the cylinders spewed fire that leaped, the newspapers said, ‘like bounding tigers.’”
All the next day, Tokyo’s fire crews worked to put out the flames. The following night LeMay’s bombers roared again, and they faced little opposition. This time the Superfortresses struck the grounds of the emperor’s palace. Emperor Hirohito was safe, hiding in a concrete-enforced underground shelter. Firefighters abandoned whole neighborhoods to the flames to save the palace, leaving vast sections of Tokyo to burn. Search crews would collect the bodies from the ashes many hours later. Wrote Guillain: “The last of old Tokyo’s architectural treasures—the ones that had survived the 1923 Earthquake—were burned to the ground: the Shiba pagoda; the Yoyogi temple where ‘the ashes of the true Buddha,’ given to Great Japan in 1942, were kept; the black-and-gold-lacquered tombs of the Tokugawa shoguns; all these perished in the tragic forty-eight hours from May 24 to 26.”
At operational headquarters on Guam, LeMay paced all night during these attacks while chewing on his ever-present cigar. He was all-consumed by the war, and by the idea that his command could end it. Nothing else seemed to exist for him. Of this new attack wave, LeMay later wrote in his memoirs: “We plastered the as-yet-unburned areas of Tokyo with nearly nine thousand tons of incendiaries on the 23rd and 25th.” (The planes took off on those dates and reached their targets after midnight, on the 24th and 26th.) LeMay had recently written to his superiors in the Pentagon: “I feel that the destruction of Japan’s ability to wage war lies within the capability of this command, provided its maximum capacity is exerted unstintingly during the next six months, which is considered to be the critical period.”
American newspapers reported the May 24 firebombing on their front pages. No outrage came from the American public. All the critics who had hurled calumny at the British for their willingness to bomb civilian population centers in Nazi Germany now remained silent. In fact, popular American opinion now seemed to embrace this form of warfare. Newspaper articles ran long columns with pictures of the factories where the firebombs were built. FILLING “GOOP BOMBS” THAT ARE FRYING JAPAN LIKE MIXING CAKE DOUGH, stated a Boston Daily Globe headline. “The M-69s [firebombs] become miniature flamethrowers,” reported Time magazine, “that hurl cheesecloth socks full of furiously flaming goo [napalm] for 100 yards. Anything these socks hit is enveloped by clinging, fiery pancakes.”
Only Secretary of War Stimson urged an end to the indiscriminate killing. Stimson went to see the president. “I told him I was anxious about this feature of the war for two reasons,” Stimson wrote in his diary. “First, because I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities; and second, I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength.”
Why had the rules changed—from precision bombing to the firebombing of civilian neighborhoods? What about the Japanese was different, in the eyes of America, from the Third Reich?
Historians have made much of the inherent racism in America against the Japanese during the war, and the fact that the War Relocation Authority had gathered up approximately 120,000 “individuals of Japanese ancestry” and interred them in camps located around the West Coast, under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior. The mainstream press printed cartoons of “Japs” as apes swinging from vines with machine guns in their paws. They were “yellow bastards,” “yellow monkeys,” and vermin-infested “louseous Japanicas.” But American feelings toward the Japanese went beyond racism. A hatred had sunk deep into the American consciousness following Pearl Harbor, a hatred that did not come into play in the European war, even toward the Nazis.
Even before the United States entered World War II, it became apparent that the war in the Far East was different from the one in Europe. Americans read about frenzies of killing by the Japanese, notably the Rape of Nanking in 1937. (“Japanese atrocities marked fall of Nanking,” the New York Times reported. “Nanking invaders executed 20,000.”) A cult of death among Japanese soldiers terrified the Allies and set these soldiers apart from the German forces fighting in Europe. Mass suicides among both civilians and warriors, the idea that death was a better choice for the Japanese soldier than to be captured as a POW—this form of warfare labeled the Eastern enemy as zealots willing to die for their emperor, whom they revered as a deity. Thus the popular press in the United States characterized the enemy in the East as a “racial menace” fighting a holy war.
Atrocities committed by the Japanese could not be characterized as anything more evil than the Nazi Final Solution. But the Nazis had not attacked Americans on American soil. And among high-level military ranks, there was more to the story. It was the Japanese treatment of prisoners of war that sparked hatred toward the Eastern foe among Pentagon operatives, who would have had access to information regarding treatment of American and British POWs. Allied intelligence had plenty of evidence of beheadings, torture, and executions.
American military officials felt it their duty to finish the Japanese off at the cost of as few of their own soldiers as possible. That meant crushing the enemy, using any and all tools at the military’s disposal, firebombs included. As Admiral Leahy wrote, “The best psychological warfare to use on those barbarians was bombs, and we used bombs vigorously.” General Hap Arnold, head of the army air forces, summed up what many military figures in America were thinking, in his diary during the days of the Tokyo firebombings:
“Apparently, the atrocities by the Japs have never been told in the US; babies thrown up in the air and caught on bayonets, autopsies on living people, burning prisoners to death by sprinkling them with gasoline and throwing in a hand grenade to start a fire . . . More and more of the stories, which can apparently be substantiated. Stories of men and boys being killed while all girls and women from ten years of age upward were raped by 1 Jap division retreating from this section of Manila. They are not pretty stories but they explain why the Japs can expect anything . . . There is no feeling of sparing any Japs here, men, women, or children; gas, fire, anything to exterminate the entire race exemplifies the feeling.”
Arnold admitted in his diary that these specific instances could not be entirely verified, but the torture and executions of POWs could be, and they explain much about the attitude of American military decision makers in 1945. The firebombing raids of Major General Curtis LeMay were the most clear example.
Still young in his presidency, Truman followed in the footsteps of his predecessor Roosevelt. He responded with no action following LeMay’s widely reported firebombings, leaving the conduct of the war to his trusted military commanders. Soon fate would thrust this decision making into his own hands.
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On May 25, in the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs met to formulate their final plans for the future of the war with Japan. They disagreed with Curtis LeMay, who believed firebombing alone could bring Japan to its knees. As they had earlier, the Joint Chiefs came to the conclusion that a ground invasion of the Japanese islands was imperative in forcing unconditional surrender. They laid out the strategy for victory in the East as follows, according to the meeting’s minutes:
A. Apply full and unremitting pressure against Japan by strategic bombing and carrier raids in order to reduce war-making capacity and to demoralize the country, in preparation for invasion.
B. Tighten blockade by means of air and sea patrols, and of air striking force and light naval forces to include blocking passages between Korea and Kyushu [the southernmost island of Japan’s mainland] and routes through the Yellow Sea.
C. Conduct only such contributory operations as are essential to establish the conditions prerequisite to invasion.
D. Invade Japan at the earliest practicable date.
E. Occupy such areas in the industrial complex of Japan as are necessary to bring about unconditional surrender and to establish absolute military control.
Three days after this Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting, Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew came to see Truman with a novel idea. Grew arrived at Truman’s office at 12:35 p.m. on May 28 with special counsel to the president Sam Rosenman, a man of gifted intelligence and thoroughly trusted by Truman. With Rosenman listening, Grew laid out a scenario. Even before Truman took over on April 12, Pentagon officials had decided that the invasion of Japan was a necessity. The aim in Japan was to defeat the enemy with the least possible loss of American lives. “The Japanese are a fanatical people,” Grew noted, “and are capable of fighting to the last ditch and the last man. If they do this, the cost in American lives will be unpredictable.” The Japanese worshipped their emperor like a god, Grew said, and Grew would know. He had served as ambassador to Japan for much of the 1930s, and at the time of Pearl Harbor. If the emperor’s fate was in the balance, Grew believed, the Japanese would never surrender.
“If some indication can now be given the Japanese that they themselves . . . will be permitted to determine their own future political structure,” Grew argued, “they will be afforded a method of saving face, without which surrender will be highly unlikely.”
Grew was suggesting that the Japanese might surrender if they knew that their emperor could remain in power. The idea was incisive, yet problematic. Roosevelt and subsequently Truman had demanded unconditional surrender of the Japanese, as they had demanded and achieved with the Nazis. Allowing the emperor to remain in power would be considered a major condition.
Would FDR have approved of such an idea? Would Congress stand for it? And the American people? As Time magazine put it at the time: “The Emperor Hirohito was Japan . . . The war against Japan was inevitably a war against the Emperor.”
Truman understood the challenging nature of this proposition. He could not know, however, that this question would become a pivotal one in world history and would weigh heavily on his legacy.
In the Pentagon, the secretaries of war and navy, General Marshall, and other State Department and military officials argued these matters through the end of May and beyond. The only thing they could agree on was the incertitude of it all. “The Japanese campaign involves therefore two great uncertainties,” Stimson wrote in May 1945. “First, whether Russia will come in [to the war against Japan] though we think that will be all right; and second, when and how S-1 [the atomic bomb] will resolve itself.”