The memory of the Civil War looms large in the American wars of the twentieth century. Generations of officers absorbed tactics and strategies during “staff rides” to Civil War battlefields and studied Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign, Grant’s turning movement at Vicksburg, and Lee’s audacious division of his army during the Seven Days Battles. The great Civil War commanders provided moral, tactical, and strategic inspiration to a succession of generals from Pershing, Patton, and MacArthur to “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf and Tommy Franks.
During the First Gulf War, General Schwarzkopf made Grant’s memoirs his bedside reading and placed on his desk a Sherman quotation: “War is the remedy our enemies have chosen, and I say let’s give them all they want.” General Wesley Clark, the commander of NATO forces during the Kosovo War, has praised Sherman as “a man who used his skill and insight not only to blaze a trail of destruction across the American South but also to create a new form of maneuver, a ‘strategy of the indirect,’” because of which “future generations of military leaders would ask themselves if there wasn’t a way of avoiding the big battles, of breaking the enemy through indirect maneuver. And they looked back, always, to Sherman to find the answer.”1
Politicians have also drawn lessons from Sherman’s campaigns. In the closing months of World War I, the Republican Party senator Henry Cabot Lodge urged the U.S. government and its allies to force Germany’s complete surrender and march “on to Berlin,” declaring that “the Republican Party stands for unconditional surrender and complete victory, just as Grant stood.” Cabot Lodge argued that invasion and occupation would confirm Germany’s defeat and justified this view on the basis of his youthful memories of the Civil War, when he had followed “with deepest interests Sherman’s march to the sea.”2
Cabot Lodge’s political adversary President Woodrow Wilson also referred to Sherman’s campaigns in these debates, but as an argument against imposing a harsh punitive peace on Germany. “The thing that holds me back is the aftermath of war,” he told his cabinet secretary. “I come from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its wreckage and terrible ruin.”3 As an eight-year-old boy, Wilson had watched Confederate soldiers preparing to defend Augusta against Sherman’s advancing army. He told his cabinet of his memories of relatives in Columbia describing “the outrageous deeds of Sherman’s troops.” Wilson also cited Reconstruction as an argument against the occupation of Germany; he remembered it as a “dark chapter of history” and a period of “fear, demoralization, disgust, and social revolution.”
These very different interpretations suggest that Sherman’s influence on American warfare was not as one-dimensional as his critics have sometimes claimed. Some associated Sherman with the “terrible ruin” and cruelty of war and the extension of military destruction beyond the battlefield, but there were also those who regarded his campaigns in the Deep South as a tactical and strategic model for minimizing military destruction. Neither of these interpretations was obvious in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Apart from some recommendations regarding the formation and supply of armies on the march, Sherman himself did not include his most famous campaigns in a section on military lessons of the war in his memoirs, which was mostly concerned with suggestions for the reorganization of the U.S. Army and the professionalization of its officer class. In 1906 the Leavenworth Infantry and Cavalry School in Kansas, which was founded at Sherman’s instigation, began the practice of visiting Civil War battlefields to provide officers with insights into the “face of battle.” On these so-called staff rides or tactical rides, officers consulted handbooks on particular Civil War battles published by the newly established Army War College and replayed the struggle on game boards based on topographical maps of the battlegrounds like the Germans, whose Kriegsspiel (war-gaming) would later become standard practice in the U.S. military.4
Sherman’s name is conspicuously absent from these writings, and his campaigns in Georgia and the Carolinas barely feature at all. This absence is partly due to the fact that the post–Civil War army did not expect to be fighting wars in which such methods would be necessary, and also to the U.S. Army’s own ambivalence toward his policy of devastation. In The Principles of Strategy, Illustrated Mainly from American Campaigns (1894), the influential military intellectual Captain John Bigelow cited Sherman and Sheridan’s destructive campaigns as examples of a “political strategy” that “carried the war home to the enemy’s people” by targeting the civilian population and its government. Though Bigelow recognized that such political strategy might be useful in wars in which “the people of a republic are a more decisive objective than those of a despotism or absolute monarchy,” he remained doubtful whether “the idea of dispiriting a people may be advantageously carried” and speculated that “the infliction of suffering on a people who can stand all that can be inflicted only makes the military problem more difficult by embittering them.”5
In 1895, the Massachusetts military historian John Codman Ropes similarly suggested that Sherman had “conducted war on obsolete and barbarous principles” and that his campaigns had “violated one of the fundamental canons of modern warfare” in destroying “property which was not needed for the supply of his army or of the enemy’s army.”6 One of Sherman’s own former subordinates, Major General John M. Schofield, made not dissimilar criticisms in his 1897 memoirs. These less-than-ringing official endorsements did not mean that Sherman’s campaigns were forgotten or ignored, however, and within a decade of his death the “psychological” strategy of destruction that he developed in Georgia and the Carolinas was implemented to devastating effect in the first of America’s foreign wars that followed the Civil War.
Benevolent Destruction
More than any of America’s wars, the Philippine War of 1898–1902 bore the direct imprint of Sherman’s campaigns in terms of both strategy and personnel. The war was an inadvertent and mostly unexpected consequence of the Spanish-American War. On May 1, 1898, the U.S. Navy’s Asiatic Squadron under Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila harbor and found itself in joint control of the Philippine capital with three or four thousand members of Emilio Aguinaldo’s Army of Liberation, which had previously been a de facto ally of the United States. In December 1898, the United States bought the Philippines from Spain during the negotiations in Paris that ended the Spanish-American War, and President McKinley adopted a policy of “benevolent assimilation” toward the islands. As a consequence, the U.S. Army’s Eighth Corps in the Philippines was ordered to suppress Aguinaldo’s Army of Liberation and “win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines.”
This mission turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated. Though Aguinaldo’s poorly armed insurrectos were no match for the better-equipped U.S. troops in conventional battles, they were able to inflict significant casualties with ambushes, snipers, booby traps, and attacks on lone soldiers or stragglers in the tropical landscape of swamps, rice paddies, inaccessible mountains, and muddy roads that did not favor pursuit operations. In response the Americans frequently made no distinction between fighters, suspects, and sympathizers. Civilians and captured insurrectos were often subjected to various forms of torture, including the “water cure,” in which suspects were pumped full of water and stomped or suspended headfirst into wells and buckets of water to extract information, after which they were often killed.
Conquerors: American soldiers displaying enemy skulls after unknown battle, between 1899 and 1913. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
In the spring of 1899, General Loyd Wheaton, a Civil War hero who had served under Sherman, ordered his men to burn every village within a twelve-mile radius along the Pasig River in response to a guerrilla ambush. One of Wheaton’s soldiers later described the scene: “A long black column of smoke sprang up . . . cascoes [flatboats] were dragged up to the fires and burned and the entire district so destroyed so that it would seem necessary not only for a bird but even a Filipino to carry his rations while crossing it.”7
Aguinaldo’s forces also destroyed crops and property in an attempt to slow down the U.S. advance or terrorize the population into supporting them, but the punitive measures adopted by the army were based on the realization that the Filipino desire for independence was more popular and deep-rooted than the McKinley administration had predicted. In May 1900, the dull and unimaginative American commander General Elwell Otis was replaced by the fifty-four-year-old Civil War hero Arthur MacArthur Jr., the former military governor of northern Luzon, who extended a general amnesty to rebels who declared their loyalty to the United States. Very few Filipinos took advantage of this offer, and MacArthur’s commanders increasingly called for more aggressive measures that recalled the Lincoln administration’s hard-war policy during the Civil War.
In February 1901, a battalion of Seventh Infantry and five companies from the Forty-Eighth U.S. Volunteer Infantry conducted a scorched-earth campaign in the guerrilla stronghold of Abra Province in northern Luzon; villages, crops, and storehouses were systematically ruined and burned, till commanding officer Major William C. Bowen reported that “the entire province was as devoid of food products as was the valley of the Shenandoah after Sheridan’s raid during the Civil War.”8
Food-denial operations were sometimes coupled with a tactic that had been vociferously condemned by the American press when employed by Spanish forces in Cuba—civilian populations were forced into stockaded “zones of protection” or “colonies,” while the army devastated the evacuated areas so that the guerrillas could not find subsistence in them.
On September 28, 1901, a group of armed insurrectos under the command of General Vicente Lukbán carried out a surprise attack on the recently established base of Company C of the Ninth Infantry Regiment at the town of Balangiga, on the island of Samar, in which fifty-nine soldiers were killed and twenty-three wounded, many of them horribly mutilated. In response the American commander General Adna R. Chaffee appointed Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith as commander of the Sixth Separate Brigade, with orders to take control of the pacification of Samar and Leyte. Known as Hell Roaring Jake because of his stentorian voice, Smith told Major Littleton W.T. “Tony” Waller, the commander of three hundred marines sent to assist these operations in October: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me.”
When Waller asked for clarification of these orders, he was told to kill every male on the island above the age of ten. For the next three months, Smith’s troops did their best to fulfill his instructions to turn Samar into a “howling wilderness,” in a chaotic, brutal, and badly organized campaign that wreaked havoc on the island’s 250,000 inhabitants. While U.S. Navy gunboats patrolled the coastline and rivers to prevent the guerrillas from being resupplied, columns of soldiers trekked through swamps and jungle, burning villages, hamlets, and farms and destroying or confiscating livestock and food supplies.
These operations soon reduced much of the population to starvation, till some of Smith’s own commanders pleaded with him to allow food supplies to be brought from outside the island to prevent famine. Subsequent estimates of the death toll from these operations have ranged from 2,500 to 50,000, and they were widely criticized in the United States despite their effectiveness against Lukbán’s guerrillas. Smith’s radical orders were revealed when Major Waller was court-martialed for the executions of eleven prisoners during a disastrous thirty-five-mile march into the interior of Samar. Summoned as a witness, Smith affirmed that “treachery must be punished, that war must be prosecuted vigorously; that war was hell; that great General Sherman had said that ‘war is hell,’ and that the quicker the war was ended the less cruelty,” but nevertheless denied that he had ordered Waller to carry out indiscriminate killings.9
As a result of this trial, Smith was also court-martialed and was found guilty of “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.” Smith received considerable support from many of his fellow officers, and he was quietly retired rather than punished, while Waller was acquitted. The pacification of Samar coincided with an equally destructive but far more effective campaign under General James Franklin Bell, commander of the Third Separate Brigade in the provinces of Batangas, Laguna, and Tayabas. A West Point graduate and a lawyer and professor of military science and tactics, Bell was cut from very different cloth than the hard-drinking and manically ferocious Smith. In December 1901, Bell prepared for the coming campaign by issuing a series of telegraphic circulars to his post commanders and the population, carefully outlining his orders.10 As in Samar, all civilians were to be removed to “zones of protection” with their possessions, and anyone remaining outside them would be considered hostile and their property subject to confiscation or destruction. In the event of any attacks on American soldiers or collaborators, Filipino prisoners would be selected at random and shot. Officers were ordered to burn the nearest homes and villages whenever telegraph wires were cut or bridges were destroyed by insurgents.
Bell justified these measures in very Sherman-like terms. In his third telegram, he declared, “Military necessity frequently precludes the possibility of making just discriminations, but it should be borne in mind that the greatest good to the greatest number can best be brought about by putting a prompt end to insurrection. A short and severe war creates in the aggregate less loss and suffering than benevolent war indefinitely prolonged.” Like Sherman, Bell also saw his campaign as an instrument of long-term pacification. In a letter to his immediate superior, Major General Wheaton, on December 26, he stated: “A peace brought about by peace commissioners prior to the suffering by these people of the real hardships of war would almost certainly be followed by another insurrection within the next five years. These people need a thrashing to teach them some good common sense, and they should have it for the good of all concerned.”
As on Samar, these methods were brutally effective. On April 16, 1902, the revolutionary commander Miguel Malvar y Carpio surrendered, and 2,973 insurrectos soon followed his example. Exactly one month later, Bell issued his final circular, number 38, which declared an end to these special war measures in order to “re-establish a feeling of security and tranquility among the people as rapidly as possible.” On June 23, martial law was suspended and Batangas was handed over to a civil government made up of conservative members of the local Filipino elite acting under the auspices of the U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs. By this time, hundreds of villages in the province had been destroyed, large areas of farmland had been devastated, and some 75 to 90 percent of the cattle had been slaughtered. Many of the people were still in concentration camps, where malnourishment and cramped and unsanitary conditions bred cholera, measles, and other diseases that killed thousands. The U.S. Army itself estimated that the population of Batangas fell by more than 90,000 between 1896 and 1902, and others have suggested that as many as 100,000 Filipinos died from hunger, fighting, or disease in the province as a direct consequence of Bell’s operations.11 The Batangas campaign was the last major operation of a war that cost 4,200 American lives and the lives of 16,000 to 20,000 insurrectos. The death toll among Filipino civilians has been variously estimated from 200,000 to a million, either as a direct result of military operations or from war-related hunger and disease—an outcome that the Civil War historian Michael Fellman has attributed to the “American terrorist war practices” adopted by Bell, Smith, and other U.S. commanders.12
At the Lodge Committee hearings on the conduct of the war in 1902, Bell’s methods were defended by U.S. Army public relations officer Arthur Lockwood Wagner, the most influential military intellectual in the first decade of the twentieth century, who compared the burning of towns and villages to Sherman’s destruction of Atlanta, which he called a “cruel measure, but it was a measure of military necessity.”13 In a letter to the Senate on May 7 that same year, Secretary of War Elihu Root declared that Bell’s operations had been carried out with the approval of the War Department and described them as “the most effective and the most humane which could possibly be followed.” Such approval ensured that Bell, unlike Smith, was not court-martialed or censured. Whereas Smith’s career ended in disgrace, Bell went on to head the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth and subsequently become chief of the Army General Staff. Today, more than a century later, his telegrams are still cited at the U.S. Army’s Combat Studies Institute (CSI) at Fort Leavenworth as a “masterpiece of counterguerrilla warfare” and a valuable source of “insights” into counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sherman in Vietnam
Many of the methods adopted in the Philippines also formed part of the more “scientific” pacification campaigns of the Vietnam War. In his memoirs, Colin Powell recalls his youthful participation in operations against Vietcong guerrillas in the A Shau Valley: “We burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters. . . . Why were we torching houses and destroying crops? Ho Chi Minh had said the people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam. . . . We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference did it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death?”14
Philip Sheridan had once espoused a similar “hard logic” when he ordered the burning and destruction of barns and food storehouses in the Shenandoah Valley and Indian camps during winter campaigns on the Great Plains. In Vietnam, Vietnamese villages suspected of containing persons with Vietcong sympathies were routinely destroyed to deny food and sanctuary to guerrillas or as an act of collective punishment. In many cases, the Vietnamese homes—or “hootches” to U.S. soldiers—were demolished by dynamite and plowed under by specially adapted bulldozers known as Rome plows or set on fire by “Zippo squads” wielding cigarette lighters. Other villages were bombed from the air together with their surrounding crops. During Operation Pipestone Canyon in May 1969, four marine battalions and units of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN, the South Vietnamese Army) and the South Korean Army attacked Go Noi Island, a delta area approximately five miles long and two miles wide in Quang Nam Province. At least 750,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the island before the population was removed and their villages demolished and plowed under, thereby transforming “a densely populated, heavily wooded area into a barren wasteland, a plowed field,” as the after-action report approvingly recorded.15
As in the Philippines, Sherman was often cited in connection with these campaigns. In 1969 the army journalist Jay Roberts described the actions of Captain Ernest Medina’s C company at My Lai as “an old tactic and a good one. Sherman’s march to the sea. You’ve just got to. We saw soldiers drag a body from hut and throw it in a well to destroy the water supply.”16 During Medina’s 1971 court-martial in Atlanta, Mary McCarthy described the March to the Sea as an “earlier war crime” comparable to My Lai.17 In 1974, a Georgia judge justified his decision to release Second Lieutenant William Calley, the only U.S. soldier found guilty of the massacre, from house arrest at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, with an exposition of Sherman’s philosophy of war in which he concluded, “The point is that Sherman is absolutely right: not in what he did, but about the nature of war: war is hell.”18
The particular hellishness of the Vietnam War owed more to the more recent innovations in U.S. counterinsurgency strategy than it did to Sherman’s campaigns. Under the U.S. commander General William Westmoreland, the primary metric of military achievement was a weekly body count of enemy casualties. The U.S. Army sent out reconnaissance patrols as bait, drawing out enemy forces so that they could be annihilated by artillery or tactical air strikes. This search-and-destroy strategy was intended to produce a “crossover point” where the enemy would conclude that fighting was no longer in its own rational interest. In practice it degenerated into a program of incentivized killing and massive destruction that made little distinction between armed fighters, Vietcong sympathizers, and Vietnamese civilians.19
Between December 1968 and May 1969, the Ninth U.S. Infantry Division carried out a round-the-clock “surprise and shock” campaign known as Operation Speedy Express in the Vietcong stronghold of the Upper Mekong Delta, in an attempt to bring the area under the control of the Saigon government before the upcoming Paris peace negotiations. For six months, the division conducted this offensive, supported by ARVN units, naval and aerial bombardments, and helicopter gunships, under the direction of its notoriously gung-ho commander, General Julian J. Ewell, and his chief of staff, Colonel Ira Hunt.
Ewell and Hunt were obsessed with increasing their kill statistics; one of their officers later recalled that “commanders were under constant pressure to produce body count as a measure of their own effectiveness.” At the beginning of Speedy Express, Ewell’s division had an average body count of eight enemy dead for each dead American soldier. Within a month of the operation, the ratio had risen to 21:1. In April the following year, it reached an extraordinary 134:1. By the end of the operation, the Ninth Infantry claimed to have killed 10,899 Vietcong, yet only 748 weapons were recovered. In their after-action report, Ewell and Hunt described these operations as a means of “un-brutalizing” the war through a combination of combat operations and psychological warfare directed at the “destruction of the enemy’s will to fight and the winning of the confidence of the civilian populace.” Raids on villages were followed by civic action teams who held raffles with chickens and ducks as prizes, handed out free T-shirts with the colors of the South Vietnamese government, provided medical care, distributed food, and entertained the populace with military bands and country music (“a big hit with the Vietnamese”).20
This very American combination of destruction and civic action was an essential and often incongruous component of the Vietnam War. As in the Philippines and the Indian wars, Vietnamese peasants were removed en masse at gunpoint from their destroyed villages to fortified “strategic hamlets” in order to drain the “sea” in which the Vietcong guerrillas swam. In some cases, U.S. combat units arrived with trucks and helicopters and forcibly removed the people before razing their villages, poisoning their wells, and destroying their rice paddies to prevent them from returning. In the summer of 1967, the 101st Airborne’s Tiger Force, a forty-five-man “kick-ass” reconnaissance unit formed by Colonel David Hackworth to “out-guerrilla the guerrillas,” carved a legendary trail of atrocities through the Song Ve Valley in Quang Ngai Province as part of Westmoreland’s Task Force Oregon operations in the Central Highlands. After wrecking rice paddies and driving seven thousand peasants with their cattle and water buffalo out of the valley, Tiger Force embarked on a spree of rape and murder. Its soldiers shot farmers on sight, killed civilians and mutilated their bodies, and threw hand grenades into bunkers containing men, women, and children.
At the end of the summer, New Yorker correspondent Jonathan Schell flew over Song Ve and found that “all the houses there had been destroyed.”21 Schell also observed fields and crops turned uniformly brown as a result of the U.S. Army’s Operation Ranch Hand defoliation program, authorized by John F. Kennedy and continued by his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Between 1961 and 1971, the U.S. military and the South Vietnamese Army defoliated some 5 million acres of forest and jungle with Agent Orange and other herbicides in an attempt to expose the supply trails and hiding places used by the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army, in what a historian of Operation Ranch Hand, David Zierler, has called “a scale of chemical warfare unseen since World War I.”
Like Sherman, American strategists of the Vietnam War saw destruction as an instrument of sociopolitical engineering. As James William Gibson has pointed out in his forensic analysis of the U.S. techno-war in Vietnam, some technocrats regarded the evacuation of the rural population as a form of “development.”22 In the aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive, the political scientist Samuel Huntington suggested that the application of U.S. military power on a “massive scale” could promote a “massive migration from countryside to city,” in which rural villagers would become exposed to the benefits of an “American-sponsored urban revolution” that would undercut “the Maoist-inspired rural revolution.”23
These aspirations were never realized. Unable or unwilling to understand the powerful nationalist impulse in Vietnamese history, often remarkably oblivious to the bitterness and anger that its bombing and counterinsurgency campaigns engendered among the population that it aspired to “save,” the U.S. government remained committed to the zero-sum domino theory of international relations that presented every Third World leftist or nationalist movement as the product of an international Communist conspiracy. Such representations were particularly anomalous and inappropriate in Vietnam, where the Eisenhower administration was told by the CIA as early as 1956 that Ho Chi Minh would have won 80 percent of the vote had scheduled elections taken place across the whole of Vietnam. Unwilling to accept this outcome, successive U.S. administrations committed the army to uphold a government in South Vietnam that too many Vietnamese did not want, and never had wanted, and fight a war without a viable political strategy, ending in a humiliating withdrawal that has haunted the U.S. military ever since.
The Indirect Approach
The rural pacification campaigns of the Philippines and Vietnam belong to a tradition of American counterinsurgency warfare that developed from Sherman’s Southern campaigns and the Indian wars in that they made little distinction between armed fighters and civilians and their political, military, and psychological goals overlapped. But Sherman’s strategies and philosophy of war also embody certain assumptions and practices that were intrinsic to America’s conventional wars in the twentieth century. In an analysis of World War I in the early 1920s, Lieutenant Commander Holloway Halstead Frost of the U.S. Navy argued that “when great nations are at war with approximately equal military forces it will seldom be possible to win a purely military decision” and that future wars should follow the Civil War campaigns of Sherman and Sheridan and take the form of “direct attacks on the enemy economic forces.”24
For Frost and for many military strategists in the interwar years, attacks on economic targets not only offered a potential solution to the strategic deadlock of industrialized warfare, but also pointed the way toward a less destructive form of war than the bloody stalemate of World War I. One of the most influential exponents of this view was the British military strategist Basil Henry Liddell Hart. A captain in the British army during World War I, Liddell Hart was the foremost British military intellectual of the interwar period. His theories on mobile warfare, maneuver, and the role of mechanized forces were heavily influenced by his disgust with the meat-grinding carnage that he witnessed in France. In a series of books and articles written in the 1920s, Liddell Hart promulgated a war of movement—the “indirect approach”—as an alternative to the static battlegrounds of World War I.
In The Strategy of Indirect Approach (1929), Liddell Hart argued that battles between heavily armed industrialized armies had become so costly as to make them militarily unviable and that future armies should seek to avoid such confrontations by targeting the adversary’s rearguard command-and-communications structure. These proposals were not entirely new, and Liddell Hart offered numerous historical precedents dating back to the Greek-Persian Wars to show how the indirect approach had been put into practice. He suggested, “It is . . . more potent, as well as more economical, to disarm the enemy than to attempt his destruction by hard fighting. . . . A strategist should think in terms of paralyzing, not of killing.” This advice had particular resonance in the aftermath of World War I.25
For Liddell Hart, William Tecumseh Sherman was the first modern general to have fully grasped and implemented these principles. In his biography Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American (1929), he hailed Sherman’s “economy of force by manoeuvre” in Georgia and the Carolinas as a more intelligent form of war than Grant’s “direct strategy” in Virginia. He argued that Sherman’s strategies and tactics were more suited to the “psychology of a democracy” and the new demands of mechanized warfare, with their emphasis on speed, mobility, and territorial gains rather than the bludgeoning destruction of the enemy’s armed forces that Grant favored. In Liddell Hart’s view, the “indirect” dimensions of Sherman’s campaigns manifested in rapidity of movement coupled with a tactical flexibility that enabled Sherman to place his opponents “on the horns of a dilemma” regarding his intentions. Rather than attack enemy strong points, Sherman had gone between and around them. Instead of seeking battle, he had exerted a form of “moral pressure” on Southern civilians that precluded the need for “serious physical pressure” on the Confederate Army.
These components of Sherman’s campaigns, Liddell Hart insisted, were particularly relevant at a time when the invention of the internal combustion engine and the caterpillar track and the development of airpower offered new instruments for eliminating the “deadly ground”—the space between an advancing and defending army—and targeting the enemy rear guard. Long before World War II, Liddell Hart argued that tanks and mechanized forces could be used for “deep strategic penetration,” in much the same way that Sherman had used horses, wagons, and infantry columns. These ideas were echoed by Liddell Hart’s British contemporary the military historian and journalist General J.F.C. Fuller. A tank commander during World War I, Fuller was not an admirer of Sherman, but his views on mechanized warfare and the “rebirth of mobility” were not that far removed from Liddell Hart’s formulations. In a May 1918 memorandum, Fuller argued that the British army should switch from the destruction of German soldiers, or “body warfare,” to “brain warfare” aimed at the destruction of Germany’s command and supply structures, through “a sudden eruption of squadrons of fast-moving tanks, which unheralded would proceed to the various enemy headquarters, and either round them up or scatter them.”26
Such ideas were part of a more general “rebirth of mobility” in the aftermath of World War I that was shared by most of the armies that had taken part in it. In 1918, the American Expeditionary Force under General John J. Pershing suffered huge losses in Grant-like massed assaults on German defensive positions, and in the interwar years U.S. military strategists increasingly concluded that such confrontations were insufficient in themselves to produce military decision and began to adapt the new era of mechanization to older traditions of American war making.
Raiders
Like many Union commanders, Sherman had great respect for the destructive raids carried out by the Confederate cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest, but he tended to use cavalry for screening, reconnaissance, and feints, leaving the work of destruction to fast-moving infantry units. In a 1928 memorandum, “A Mechanized Unit,” Major General Adna R. Chaffee Jr. (1884–1941), the son of the former military governor of the Philippines, called for the replacement of the U.S. horse cavalry by mechanized forces. A former cavalry officer himself, Chaffee proposed that these new units would emulate the “army-sized raids through Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas” carried out by Sherman and the destructive 525-mile cavalry rampage carried out by James Harrison Wilson in the aftermath of Sherman’s marches, penetrating deep into the enemy rear guard, targeting command, control, and logistical networks in a strategy that echoed Liddell Hart’s “indirect” formulations.27
In 1940 Chaffee became commander of First Armored Corps, the U.S. Army’s first armored force. In his first address to his officers, he declared that its purpose was “to attack through hostile weakness. It creates surprise . . . by the sustained celerity and power of tactical movement. It uses its mobility to choose the most favorable direction for attack to reach vital enemy rear areas.” The “father of the U.S. armored force” did not live long enough to put these ideas into practice, but his emphasis on “celerity and power” was shared by his contemporary and another former cavalry officer General George S. Patton Jr. Patton was a member of the American Tank Corps and commander of the U.S. tank school in France during World War I, and his views on mechanized warfare were strongly influenced by German interwar texts, which advocated a dynamic war of movement combining detachments of motorized infantry with tanks and armored units. As commander of the U.S. Seventh Army in North Africa and Sicily, Patton acquired a reputation for slashing, fast-moving, and somewhat reckless offensives using motorized infantry and armor. His most famous campaign took place in France, following the D-day landings, when he was given command of the U.S. Third Army during the Allied breakout from the Normandy lodgment area. Patton arrived in France more than a month after the initial landings and found the Allied armies bogged down in the “hedgerow war” of the Normandy bocage that recalled the cramped battlefields of the Civil War.
Faced with the looming prospect of a static World War I–style front line, General Omar Bradley launched his First Army in a combined aerial bombing and infantry offensive called Operation Cobra on July 25, piercing the German defensive lines and opening the way for what Russell Weigley called a “virtual road march” that appealed “to the passion for moving that is so much a part of the American character and heritage.” This “passion for moving” was the cornerstone of Patton’s concept of war, just as it had once been of Sherman’s. On August 1, the Third Army advanced into Brittany with the objective of capturing Brest and other German-held Breton ports. In a speech to his staff officers, Patton outlined the kind of campaign he wanted with characteristic bluntness and disregard for military convention: “Flanks are something for the enemy to worry about, not us. . . . We are advancing constantly and are not interested in holding anything, except the enemy. . . . Our basic plan of operation is to advance and keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy.”28
Sherman’s thrust into central Georgia was based on a very similar principle of constant motion. If Liddell Hart is to be believed, Patton may have been partly inspired by this campaign. In a meeting in England shortly before departing for France, Patton told Liddell Hart that he had once spent some weeks studying Sherman’s Atlanta campaign with his biography in hand as a “very good guide”—a combination, Liddell Hart suggested, that influenced Patton’s decision to carry out a Sherman-style campaign in Normandy.29 The Third Army’s movements certainly followed the broad outlines of Liddell Hart’s indirect approach. Patton’s campaign was directed toward the destruction of German armies rather than the devastation of civilian property. But like Sherman, Patton emphasized speed and mobility to punch through weak points in the German defensive lines or bypass them altogether, using armored columns and mechanized infantry to penetrate deep into the enemy rear guard, disrupting lines of communication and giving his opponents no time to redeploy or reorganize their defenses.
Patton also followed Liddell Hart’s concept of “selling the dummy” and placing his opponents “on the horns of a dilemma” regarding his line of attack and his ultimate destination, by allowing his divisional commanders to exploit “breaks” and gaps and vary the route of their advance in order to maintain their forward momentum. In the era of radio and telephone communications and aerial reconnaissance, Patton’s motorized divisions could not “vanish” as Sherman’s army had after leaving Atlanta, and they received a constant flow of intelligence information from aircraft, the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, and a thirty-man mobile reconnaissance team known as Patton’s Household Cavalry, which moved ahead of them.
Nevertheless, the speed of the Third Army’s advance often meant that radio contact with headquarters was temporarily broken, and Patton’s commanders were expected to show the same capacity for improvisation that Sherman had once expected from his corps commanders and make decisions in accordance with Patton’s general guidelines. To move as quickly as possible, Patton’s troops were expected to travel lightly, and the Third Army’s rapid progress was a prodigious feat of teamwork, administration, and logistical organization, in which supplies of food, ammunition, and gasoline were brought forward from Normandy in trucks and sometimes dropped from the air. One of Patton’s commanders described the supply trucks following the advancing columns “like a band of stage-coaches making a run through Indian country. We got used to keeping the wheels going, disregarding the snipers, and hoping we wouldn’t get lost or hit.”
Using these methods, Third Army advanced four hundred miles and fought on two fronts, five hundred miles apart, in the first three weeks of August, liberating 47,829 square miles of French territory and taking thousands of prisoners. Between August 1 and September 24, Patton’s “flying columns,” as Eisenhower called them, drove the Germans toward Brest before turning eastward toward the Loire Valley, bypassing Paris, and heading toward Reims, Verdun, Commercy, and the Moselle River with such speed that soldiers often rode on tanks, trailers, and jeeps as well as in trucks, in a campaign whose “brilliant rapidity” was subsequently praised by the Allied supreme commander as “perhaps the most spectacular ever seen in modern warfare.”30
By the end of September, the Third Army was within eighty miles of Hitler’s West Wall, the defenses along the Rhine known as the Siegfried Line, when its gasoline finally ran out, after supplies were diverted to the British Second Army. That autumn the entire Allied advance on Germany ran out of steam as a result of supply shortages. The speed and verve of Patton’s “American blitzkrieg” had nevertheless captured the imagination of the American public. When Patton’s great rival General Bernard Montgomery pressed Eisenhower to place the Third Army in a more static flank-protection role while the Second British and First American armies advanced toward the Ruhr, the supreme commander replied, “The American public would never stand for stopping Patton in full cry, and public opinion wins war.” In December Montgomery once again recommended that the Third Army fall back into a defensive position in order to allow the British to take the lead in the coming offensive against Germany. Patton’s section chiefs produced a seven-point memorandum rejecting this proposal, arguing that “the American (soldier and public) psychology must be considered. . . . Third Army troops know and understand the attack. They do not know or understand the retreat or general withdrawal.”31
Sherman’s decision to abandon Atlanta had once been based on very similar considerations. In the event, these debates were made irrelevant by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s desperate and initially successful counteroffensive in the Ardennes forest. Moving with the same breakneck speed and fighting in freezing conditions, Patton’s forces relieved the beleaguered First Army at Bastogne. Following the Allied victory in the Battle of the Bulge, the Third Army joined the broad-front offensive on Germany, breaching the Siegfried Line and crossing the Rhine on March 22. By the time the Third Army made contact with the Red Army on May 8, it had captured twelve thousand cities, towns, and villages in six different countries, killed, wounded, or taken prisoner nearly 3 million German soldiers, overrun military bases and installations, liberated concentration camps, and destroyed two major armies, while its own casualties amounted to 21,441 battlefield dead and 99,224 wounded, in one of the most devastating and celebrated campaigns in American military history.
Leapfrogging
Like the March to the Sea, the popularity of Patton’s campaigns was due not just to their speed and seeming irresistibility, but also to their relatively low cost in American lives. In the Pacific campaign, General Douglas MacArthur adopted a variant of the indirect approach in even more challenging conditions during the Allied invasion of the Pacific. In France and Germany, Patton’s divisions hurtled down roads that were visible on any tourist map. In the Pacific, Allied soldiers faced some 668,000 tenacious Japanese troops in swamps, mountains, and deep jungle that often lacked roads or even paths, conducting complex land, air, and naval operations with supply lines that reached across thousands of miles of land and sea and included coral reefs, atolls, and innumerable islands. When MacArthur was appointed supreme commander of the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) on April 18, 1942, following his defeat in the Philippines, the Allied strategic plan in the Pacific was to mount a two-pronged step-by-step offensive, with MacArthur’s forces moving through Papua New Guinea and the southwest Pacific in conjunction with amphibious landings through the Marshall and Gilbert Islands in the central Pacific under the direction of Admiral Chester Nimitz (1885–1966), commander in chief of the Pacific Ocean Area.
These efforts required a complex and grueling combination of air, land, and amphibious operations whose ultimate goal was the conquest of Rabaul, the capital of New Britain and the bastion of Japanese military power in the Pacific. On August 7, the First Marine Division landed on the islands of Guadalcanal and Tulagi, beginning a bloody to-and-fro naval and land campaign that finally ended in an American victory in February the following year. Between November 22, 1942, and January 22, 1943, Australian and American troops destroyed the Japanese garrison at Buna-Gona, New Guinea, in a bloody confrontation that cost the lives 8,500 Allied soldiers. Faced with a potentially endless series of costly “storm landings” against well-entrenched Japanese positions, in August 1943 the Allied chiefs of staff abandoned the attempt to capture Rabaul and opted to neutralize it instead. In September MacArthur outlined his strategy in the Western Pacific islands: “Key points must of course be taken, but a wise choice of each will obviate the need for storming the mass of islands now in enemy possession. ‘Island hopping’ with extravagant losses and slow progress . . . is not my idea of how to end the war as soon and as quickly as possible.”32
In December 1943, American fliers bombed Rabaul’s airfields and naval bases, and in February and March the following year MacArthur ordered an amphibious assault on the more weakly defended island of Los Negros in the Admiralty Islands to the west of New Britain. With its supply line cut, Rabaul’s garrison of a hundred thousand was left stranded until the war ended. Other Japanese-held islands were similarly neutralized. MacArthur also applied his leapfrogging strategy to the conquest of New Guinea. Between April and July 1944, Allied forces conducted a series of amphibious landings on the northern coast of New Guinea from Finschhafen to Sansapor in the Vogelkop Peninsula, beginning with a naval assault on the Japanese airbase of Hollandia in the Humboldt Bay area of Dutch New Guinea. The real objective of this operation was the coastal town of Wewak, four hundred miles farther east, where twenty thousand crack troops from the Japanese Eighteenth Army under the command of General Hatazō Adachi were braced for an Allied assault.
Instead of attacking Wewak, MacArthur’s air force bombed the three weakly defended Japanese air bases at Hollandia and Ataipe, which was roughly halfway between Humboldt Bay and Wewak. In this way, Adachi’s Eighteenth Army was cut adrift as the Allied armies gained 750 miles without fighting a major battle. In July, Adachi attempted to reverse these gains with a counterattack from Wewak. Weakened by malaria and an exhausting 400-mile jungle trek, his troops suffered massive casualties. After the war, a senior Japanese intelligence officer praised MacArthur’s strategy, which “with minimum losses, attacked and seized a relatively weak area, constructed airfields and then proceeded to cut the supply lines to [our] troops in that area. . . . Our strongpoints were gradually starved out.”
MacArthur’s policy of “hitting ’em where they ain’t” was partly a response to the strategic geography of the Pacific, and like Patton’s campaign in Normandy it evoked a lost “romantic” form of warfare won by guile, intelligence, and dash rather than brute force. These campaigns did not preclude physical destruction. Patton’s reliance on tactical air support and artillery bombardments reduced German-defended villages into rubble-strewn “Third Army memorials.” MacArthur’s territorial leaps were made possible by the extension of the “bomber line,” the distance from which the air force could attack Japanese positions from airfields or aircraft carriers.
In the Pacific, amphibious assaults on fortified positions could not always be avoided and were often preceded by “softening-up” bombardments and followed by a savage struggle that wreaked havoc on soldiers and civilians alike. Between April and June 1945, nearly half of Okinawa’s three hundred thousand inhabitants died during the three-month battle for the island. In February 1945, MacArthur ordered an assault on Manila; in it 70 percent of the city was destroyed and a hundred thousand Filipinos were killed. Most of the civilian dead were massacred by the vengeful Japanese, but the destruction of the city was also due to the American use of tanks and artillery in street fighting characterized by what the Thirty-Seventh Infantry’s After-Action Report described as “literal destruction of a building in advance of the area of friendly troops.”33
Allied artillery and aerial bombings in Normandy and Germany left a similar trail of wrecked military vehicles, of roadsides choked with the corpses of soldiers, animals, and civilians, of ruined towns and roofless villages, and of rubble-choked streets that had to be cleared by bulldozers to allow the Allied armies to get through them. From June 6 to 8, Royal Air Force (RAF) and U.S. Eighth Air Force planes pulverized the city of Caen in an attempt to prevent German reinforcements from bolstering their defenses. Though these raids had little military impact, they killed some 600 civilians and reduced much of the city to rubble. The advance of the Third and Seventh armies into the Saar-Palatinate was accompanied by similar scenes of devastation. “It is difficult to describe the destruction,” wrote one Seventh Army divisional commander during pursuit of German motorized units through the Pfälzerwald, the Palatine Forest. “Scarcely a man-made thing exists in our wake; it is even difficult to find buildings suitable for CP’s: this is the scorched earth.” In the town of Zweibrücken, the advance American units found some 5,000 people, out of a population of 37,000, living in cellars and caves while fires burned uncontrollably above them.34
As in the Philippines, some of this destruction was a consequence of airpower and artillery directed against military positions rather than civilian targets, even if the distinction was often irrelevant in practical terms. In two separate raids, in January and April 1945, American and British bombers bombed the German-held Gironde Estuary near Bordeaux with explosives, the standard thermite- or phosphorus-based incendiaries, and a new invention, “jellied gasoline,” or napalm; the raid destroyed the former vacation town of Royan, killing more than a thousand civilians.35 The civilian death toll was a by-product of airpower aimed at German defensive positions. However, many of the devastated towns and cities that the Third and Seventh armies encountered in Germany had been destroyed long before their arrival—by another variant of the “indirect strategy,” which was aimed not at soldiers but against the German people.
Wings of Victory
Once again, Sherman’s campaigns have often been cited in connection with these developments. “Once proportionality and discrimination were subverted by Sherman, it is arguable that they made the severities of modern American war making at least conceptually possible, from the saturation bombing of World War II, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong in 1972,” argues James Reston Jr. in his indictment/investigation of Sherman’s campaigns.36 Those who make such claims tend to imagine a direct causal link that is by no means obvious. Nevertheless, these parallels are not outlandish. In Paris; or, The Future of War (1925), Liddell Hart himself wrote that “aircraft enables us to jump over the army which shields the enemy government, industry, and people and so strike direct and immediately at the seat of the opposing will and policy.” Liddell Hart did not explicitly advocate the bombing of civilians, and he later rejected the policy of bombing German civilians during World War II. But the prophets of airpower who emerged after World War I had no such reservations. In August 1917, the British government appointed General Jan S. Smuts to head a commission to examine the use of airpower in response to the raids by German Gotha bombers on London that summer. The subsequent report concluded that “the day may not be far off when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populous centres on a vast scale may become the principal operations of war.”37
In The Command of the Air (1921), Giulio Douhet (1869–1930), the former commander of the Italian aviation battalion at Turin, predicted that future wars would be decided by massive bombing raids on cities and civilian population centers, using explosives and chemical and bacteriological weapons. Subjected to this “merciless pounding from the air,” he predicted, “the time would soon come when, to put an end to the horror and suffering, the peoples themselves, driven by an instinct of self-preservation, would rise up and demand an end to the war.”38 Similar ideas percolated through the strategic debates on the use of airpower in the United States in the same period. In Air Warfare (1926), Major William C. Sherman (no relation), an Air Corps pilot and instructor in air tactics at Fort Leavenworth, stated, “A decision is reached not by the actual physical destruction of an armed force, but by the destruction of its believe [sic] in ultimate victory and its will to win,” maintaining that airpower could play a role in achieving this objective.39 The most influential advocate of airpower in the interwar period was Major William “Billy” Mitchell, a pilot in Pershing’s army during World War I, who borrowed heavily from Douhet’s concept of aerial bombing against the enemy’s “vital centers.”
In Walt Disney’s 1943 celebration of his ideas and theories, Victory Through Air Power, Mitchell described airpower as the “dominant feature of military operations. Airpower can fly directly to the vital centers of an opposing state and neutralize them. It can destroy the cities and wreck the aqueducts. It can knock out the lines of communications. It can destroy the food supply. It can make the people helpless to resist.” In the same film, Mitchell’s disciple Major Alexander de Seversky predicted that airpower would soon “transform the entire surface of our planet into a battlefield. The distinctions between soldiers and civilians will be erased.” Mitchell’s vision of airpower was initially out of step with U.S. military thinking in the interwar years. Though the Tactical Air Corps accepted in principle the notion that airpower could be used to target the morale, the will to win, of the civilian population, air force debates tended to focus on precision bombing of economic and military targets rather than wholesale terrorizing of civilians.40
These priorities changed when America entered World War II in 1941. At the beginning of the war, President Roosevelt explicitly rejected the indiscriminate bombing of civilians, and even when the U.S. Air Force joined the bombing of Germany, it remained committed to precision bombing in daylight bombing raids on German industrial, economic, transportation, and communications targets rather than indiscriminate strategic or wide-area bombing of German cities by night favored by the Royal Air Force. The daylight raids initially targeted shipyards, submarine bases, ball-bearing factories, and railway and road networks, but the distinction between precision bombing aimed at military or economic targets and strategic attacks on entire cities was not always easy to maintain in bombing raids on the water, sewage, and electrical systems and other elements of the infrastructure that enabled German cities to function.
As de Seversky noted, “The kind of large-scale demolition which would be looked upon as horrifying vandalism when undertaken by soldiers on the ground can be passed off as a technical preparation or ‘softening’ when carried out by aerial bombing,” and such destruction inevitably produces a broader psychological and physical impact on the surviving population. For John Steinbeck, aerial bombing was a new form of frontier warfare, in which “the American boy simply changes the nature of his game. Instead of raiding Sioux or Apache, instead of buffalo or antelope, he lays his sights on Zero or Heinkel, on Stuka or Messerschmitt.”41
Bombing raids exacted a high cost in British and American air crews and downed planes, and daylight raiders were especially vulnerable to antiaircraft fire and attacks from German fighter planes as a result of their greater visibility. It was partly in an attempt to reduce these costs that American bombing strategies moved closer to the British model of saturation bombing and strategic devastation by night in the last year of the war. But American war planners also explicitly embraced the strategies advocated by their British allies. In 1943 the Air Corps commander General Henry “Hap” Arnold declared, “War has become vertical. . . . Strategic air power is a war-winning weapon in its own right, and is capable of striking decisive blows far behind the battle line, thereby destroying the enemy’s capacity to wage war.”42 Though Arnold publicly condemned the “terror bombing” of civilians, he privately confided to his subordinates that “this is a brutal war and . . . the way to stop the killing of civilians is to cause so much damage and destruction and death that the civilians will demand that their government cease fighting.”43
Sherman once justified his own campaigns with very similar arguments. He had set out to project the power of the U.S. government into the “innermost recesses” of the South. U.S. air war planners built mock cities at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, with replicas of Berlin tenements and Japanese residential neighborhoods, where scientists, academics, and technicians from Standard Oil and other companies studied the impact of various incendiaries and bombs on houses equipped with curtains, cots, furniture, and children’s toys to test their flammability and maximize the destruction.
“. . . in their innermost recesses.” Mock German village with observation bunker, Dugway Proving Ground. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
In late July 1943, the Eighth Air Force carried out a joint attack with the RAF on Hamburg, in which explosives and incendiaries generated a firestorm that burned, crushed, and suffocated between 60,000 and 100,000 people and gutted much of the city. On February 3, 1945, more than nine hundred B-17 bombers took part in a night raid on Berlin with the RAF called “Operation Thunderclap,” which was specifically intended to deal a knockout blow to civilian morale; it killed 3,000 people. On February 13–15, 1945, the Allies carried out an even more destructive raid on Dresden, which killed at least 35,000 people and transformed the city into what one British pilot called “a sea of fire covering in my estimation some 50 square miles.”
In all, some 305,000 German civilians were killed and 780,000 wounded in raids that destroyed or partially destroyed fifty cities and made 7.5 million German civilians homeless. Civilian casualties were often obscured by euphemistic bureaucratic language in which the success of such operations was measured by lists of factories or bridges destroyed or numbers of workers who had been “dehoused.” The impact on German morale was more difficult to measure. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey that followed the Allied invasion of Germany found that the population “showed surprising resistance to the terror and hardships of repeated air attack, to the destruction of their homes and belongings, and to the conditions under which they were reduced to live. . . . The power of a police state over its people cannot be underestimated.”44
Paper Cities
Both the legitimacy and the effectiveness of bombing German cities have continued to be debated by historians. Regardless of whether or not it “worked” on its own terms, the strategy of bombing German civilians in order to crush their will to fight or support their government did not meet with universal favor, even within the U.S. military. Patton considered the bombing of German cities to be “barbaric, useless and sadistic.” In a memorandum to General Carl A. Spaatz, commander of U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, a staff officer declared it “contrary to [American] ideals to wage war on civilians.”45 However, although American air-war planners had some reservations about bombing German civilians, they had a very different attitude toward the Japanese. During the 1930s, Mitchell and other American airpower advocates identified flammable Japanese “paper cities” and “teeming bamboo ant heaps” as natural targets in the event of war. These recommendations were realized to terrible effect during the massive B-29 raids on Japanese cities in 1945 that followed the promotion of General Curtis LeMay (1906–90) to lead the Twentieth Bomber Command in the Mariana Islands in December 1944. In February 1945, LeMay was ordered to experiment with incendiary bombings of selected Japanese urban centers. On February 20, his forces carried out their first incendiary raid, on the city of Kobe.
This was followed by the massive raid on Tokyo on the night of March 9–10, in which 334 bombers flew as low as 4,900 feet and created an inferno without historical precedent. At least 83,000 people were burned, boiled, or suffocated to death in a conflagration that transformed much of the city into a wasteland. LeMay considered this raid a resounding success and vowed to continue to “bomb and burn them till they quit.” Throughout the summer, Japan’s largest cities were relentlessly bombed, and operations analysts began preparing for a bombing campaign against “all urban areas with a population greater than 30,000 peoples” that would have included 180 towns in total, and involved spraying rice paddies with oil, defoliants, and biological agents in order to starve the population.
As in Germany, operations analysts talked of “man-hours lost” and “dehoused” workers in ostensibly targeting Japan’s factories and wartime cottage industries, but the broader intentions behind LeMay’s campaigns were summed up approvingly by an editor of the Atlanta Constitution, despite the city’s history of wartime destruction, who observed that it was “shocking to think of the thousands who must be burned to death” in such attacks but nevertheless concluded, “If it is necessary, however, that the cities of Japan are, one by one, burned to black ashes, that we can, and will, do.” Such approval was fueled by racist depictions of the Japanese as a bestial and subhuman enemy and also by the belief that the bombing of Japanese cities would “save lives”—meaning the lives of American soldiers. At least 806,000 Japanese civilians were killed or wounded in nine months—more than all the Japanese soldiers killed during the whole war—in a campaign that one of MacArthur’s key aides described in a confidential memorandum as “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of civilians or non-combatants in history.”46
If the scale of destruction exceeded anything in the history of American warfare, it was not always carried out within clear strategic parameters. “It was not necessary for us to burn every city, to destroy every factory, to shoot down every airplane or sink every ship, and starve the people. It was enough to demonstrate that we were capable of doing all this,” observed the writers of the Strategic Bombing Survey after the war.47 In an account of the Tokyo raid in the New Yorker, LeMay’s public-relations officer compared LeMay’s actions to “a decision like Grant’s when he let Sherman try to march through Georgia.”48 In an interview after the war, LeMay defended his actions, saying, “There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.” Asked about the morality of such methods, LeMay replied, “Actually I think it’s more immoral to use less force than necessary, than it is to use more. If you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run because you are merely protracting the struggle.”49
In Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War, Robert McNamara, who worked as a statistical analyst with LeMay’s Bomber Command, explained that his role was to make LeMay’s operations “more efficient, i.e., not more efficient in the sense of killing more, but more efficient in weakening the adversary. I remember reading that General Sherman in the Civil War . . . the mayor of Atlanta pleaded with him to save the city. And Sherman essentially said to the mayor just before he torched it and burned it down: ‘War is cruel. War is cruelty.’ That was the way LeMay felt.”50
LeMay’s cruelty was like Sherman’s “statesmanship” in its attempt to demonstrate the futility of further resistance by attacking people in their homes and neighborhoods. These intentions were often made explicit in leaflets dropped on cities that were about to be bombed, and warning their inhabitants to flee and also blithely advising them to overthrow their government, regardless of whether or not it was possible for them to do so.
On August 6, 1945, the United States ushered in a new era of military destruction when the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing and wounding 150,000 people; three days later, another nuclear attack, on Nagasaki, killed or injured 80,000. There is no space here to consider the historical debate regarding whether the atomic bomb was really necessary to make Japan surrender or the degree to which its use was determined by wider geopolitical objectives regarding the Soviet Union.51
These attacks demonstrated that America had won what President Harry Truman called “the battle of the laboratories,” and the justifications for their use offered by Truman and American officials were essentially the same as those used to justify the even more destructive firebombings that preceded them. On various occasions, Truman argued that the bomb was a cruel but ultimately humane necessity, which hastened the end of the war and precluded the need for an invasion and the resultant loss of life on both sides. But the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was also a “strategic” act of political and military coercion, designed to force the Japanese government to surrender by demonstrating that U.S. leaders had the will and the ability to kill civilians in even greater numbers if necessary. From the American perspective, the radio announcement by Emperor Hirohito on August 15 announcing Japan’s surrender provided the most conclusive proof that this message had been received.
Bomb-o-grams
By the end of World War II, America’s bomber fleets had become a confirmation of American military technological supremacy, and airpower was firmly embedded in the nation’s conventional and unconventional war strategies. Airpower played a major role in the massive destruction inflicted on both North and South Korea during the Korean War (1950–53). UN (almost entirely American) air forces flew 1,040 sorties and dropped 698,000 tons of bombs and rockets on North and South Korea filled with white phosphorus, thermite, napalm, nerve gas, defoliant chemicals, or clusters of bomblets filled with metal balls and fiberglass fléchettes to maximize injuries to people. In September 1950, the British journalist Reginald Thompson described the impact of American firepower on Seoul and its surrounding villages as “a new technique of machine warfare” in which “the slightest resistance brought down a deluge of destruction, blotting out the area. Dive bombers, tanks and artillery blasted strong points, large or small, in town and hamlet, while the troops waited at the roadside as spectators until the way was cleared for them. Few people can have suffered so terrible a liberation.”52
Airpower was also used for “strategic” attacks on civilian population centers, particularly after the Chinese intervention in November 1950, when UN troops were driven back across the 38th parallel. Between November 1950 and February 1951, American bombing raids killed 67,000 North Korean civilians, in a campaign intended by the commander of the Far East Air Force (FEAF), General George E. Stratemeyer, to “destroy every means of communication and every installation, factory, city, and village” in North Korea. Air force pilots complained that there were not enough targets left to bomb.53
Traveling through North Korea in 1951, the Hungarian correspondent Tibor Méray found “a complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital” that he compared to “travelling on the moon . . . every city was a collection of chimneys.” General William Dean, a POW during the war, reported that most towns and cities in the North had become “unoccupied shells” reduced to “rubble or snowy open spaces” by 1952, and that their inhabitants either were living underground or had been relocated to canyons to escape the bombers. The official U.S. military history of the war admitted that “we killed civilians, friendly civilians, and bombed their homes: fired whole villages with the occupants—women and children and ten times as many hidden Communist soldiers—under showers of napalm”—an outcome that its authors insisted was necessary in response to an enemy whose “savagery towards the people” was comparable to the Nazi treatment of Poland and Ukraine.54
Following the Chinese intervention, American civilian and military leaders also flirted with the possibility of using atomic weapons. In March 1951, MacArthur called for a “D Day atomic capability” to use against the incoming Chinese armies and China itself, and subsequently wrote of his desire to drop “between 30 and 50 atomic bombs . . . strung out across the neck of Manchuria” to form a “belt of radioactive cobalt” that would prevent a land invasion from the North. In April that year, MacArthur was replaced by Eighth Army commander General Matthew Ridgway. Though the military continued to discuss the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons, its bombing strategy increasingly became an extension of diplomacy, which was not aimed at unconditional surrender, as in Japan, but at forcing North Korea and the Chinese government to accept an armistice on U.S. terms.
In April 1952, the FEAF outlined a new policy of “maximum selected destruction” directed toward “targets of military significance so situated that their destruction will have a deleterious effect upon the morale of the civilian population engaged in the logistic support of enemy forces.”55 In addition to renewed attacks on towns and cities, the target list was expanded to include dams and hydroelectric plants. In the summer of 1953, U.S. pilots bombed three dams, which supplied 75 percent of the North’s food production, in an attempt to prevent the harvesting of 250,000 tons of rice. The massive Toksan Dam was breached by fifty-nine F-84 Thunderjets in May, flooding twenty-seven miles of river valley and parts of Pyongyang. These efforts were regarded by the military as instrumental in inducing North Korea and China to sign the armistice agreement at Panmunjom on July 27, 1953, according to one U.S. field officer, who claimed, “Our around-the-clock air operations brought to all North Korea the full impact of war. The material destruction wrought, the panic and civil disorder created, and the mounting casualties in civilian and military populations alike became the most compelling factors in enemy accession to an armistice.”
American bombing campaigns in Vietnam were intended to generate the same “compelling factors.” In January 1967 alone, U.S. planes dropped 63,000 tons of ordnance on South Vietnam, two and half times the peak month in Korea. Between 1964 and 1973, Laos was bombed an average of every eight minutes and achieved the unwelcome distinction of being the most heavily bombed country per capita in world history. Between 1965 and 1968, an average of 32 tons of bombs was dropped on North Vietnam every hour. In total, some 400,000 tons of napalm bombs were unloaded on Indochina, compared with 14,000 tons in World War II and 32,557 tons in Korea.
Unlike World War II or Korea, the bombing of North Vietnam was not intended to inflict massive destruction and loss of life. Though some military officers urged the Johnson administration to conduct an all-out bombing campaign in the North, civilian leaders were anxious that such a campaign might lead to war with China and the Soviet Union. In 1964 the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, rejected a bombing campaign that would “lay the whole country to waste” on the grounds that “there will be nobody left in North Vietnam on whom to put pressure. . . . What we are interested in here is not destroying Ho Chi Minh . . . but getting him to change his behavior.”56 Such aspirations resulted in the “measured and limited air action” known as Rolling Thunder, which began in April 1965 and continued on and off for the next two years.
In two years, American pilots flew 148,000 sorties and bombed an array of targets that included towns, cities, factories, bridges, churches, schools, pagodas, a convent, and private homes. U.S. pilots often complained about the restrictions placed on their operations that were designed to avoid large-scale civilian casualties and the negative political consequences that came with them, but if these raids did not result in the massive urban devastation of the Korean War, they nevertheless inflicted widespread physical destruction on a largely agricultural society. In December 1966, Harrison Salisbury, the deputy editor of the New York Times, visited the town of Nam Định, forty miles southwest of Hanoi, which had been repeatedly bombed for more than a year, leaving “block after block of utter desolation.” Salisbury insisted that Nam Định had no military significance, but the distinctions among military, economic, and political targets were irrelevant in a bombing campaign intended to break the will of the North Vietnamese government by terrorizing its people.
In December 1966 the scientific advisory group JASON concluded that this stop-start bombing campaign had had no measurable impact on North Vietnamese support for the rebels in the South or on the “determination of Hanoi and its people” to continue the war, and that this failure represented a more general failure “to appreciate the fact . . . that a direct, frontal attack on a society tends to strengthen the social fabric of the nation, to increase popular support of the existing government, to improve the determination of the leadership and its people to fight back.”57
Though some U.S. military commanders regarded such reports as an incentive to escalate the bombing, the negative publicity caused by these raids and the lack results led the Johnson government to bring Rolling Thunder to a halt. Coercive bombing returned in 1972 after the North Vietnamese invasion of the South. On several of his secret White House tapes from that year, President Richard Nixon can be heard in conversation with his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, drunkenly threatening to bomb North Vietnam’s harbors and its dike system. In practice Nixon limited himself to the six-month Linebacker I bombing campaign between May and October 1972, followed by Linebacker II, or the Christmas Bombing, of Hanoi and Haiphong in December.58
These campaigns were partly aimed at the North Vietnamese Army in the South, which may have lost as many as 100,000 soldiers as a result of the October raids. But the bombings were also intended to pressure the government in Hanoi to accept American terms at the stalled peace negotiations in Paris. In total 2,200 North Vietnamese civilians were killed and 1,600 were wounded in these raids, whose impact might have been much greater had it not been for the evacuation of much of the population from the targeted areas. From Nixon’s point of view, these operations were a success. On the night of December 27–28, North Vietnam officials sent a note agreeing to return to the Paris peace negotiations, and on January 23, 1973, a peace agreement was signed.
The extent to which these raids contributed to this outcome is debatable, because the North did not alter its negotiating position and was able to keep its army in the South; the chief North Vietnamese negotiator, Hà Văn Lâu, even called the bombing campaign an “aerial equivalent to Dien Bien Phu.” The Linebacker raids nevertheless demonstrated once again the willingness of American leaders to use airpower as a bludgeon of political coercion and intimidation and to extend the “hard hand of war” to civilians in ways that made the burned plantations and Chimneyvilles of the Civil War appear almost quaintly reserved by comparison.