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On the night of March 9-10, 1945, the United States dramatically shifted tactics late in its war with Japan. No longer would it place any emphasis on precision bombing of its enemy’s territory. The new strategy that replaced this would intentionally be vastly more lethal.
On the night of March 9-10, 1945, the United States dramatically shifted tactics late in its war with Japan. No longer would it place any emphasis on precision bombing of its enemy’s territory. The new strategy that replaced this would intentionally be vastly more lethal.
That evening, 334 U.S. aircraft flew in low over Tokyo, where they dropped an enormous quantity of incendiary bombs that destroyed 16 square miles in the heart of the capital. In this one assault, 1 million people were rendered homeless and as many as 100,000 Japanese people were killed.
The United States knew exactly what it was doing. Afterward, its mastermind, Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay (who would go on to advocate for Washington’s enormous aerial bombing campaigns during the Vietnam War), stated that the citizens of Tokyo who lost their lives in incendiary raids had been “scorched and boiled and baked to death.”
In moral terms, at least, LeMay wasn’t the only high-ranking officer within the U.S. military to provide an assessment. Three months later, Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers called the Tokyo air raids “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history.”
I learned the details of this campaign as a correspondent in Japan in the early 2000s, where I developed a passion for the history of 20th-century Asia. As an American reporter, I felt compelled to wander the districts hardest hit by U.S. firebombs and write about an inadequately known event for a general readership. Later, I would do the same with the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the United States applied the same war strategy of indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations, only with even more ghastly and devastating weapons: newly invented atomic bombs.
This story remains tremendously relevant to our world today. I would start with the fact that just seven years before it firebombed Tokyo, the United States voiced disbelief and outrage over imperial Japan’s bombing of Chinese cities in its attempt to put down China’s efforts to free itself from colonial rule.
How can a nation travel so quickly from extreme condemnation of atrocities committed against civilians to commissioning similar atrocities itself, sometimes even accompanied by exultation? This question has long fascinated me. In the case of the United States’ war against Japan, the deepest roots of the answer seem to lie in Japan’s own atrocities. To be clear, what followed is no excuse. But Washington’s almost exterminatory approach to the war found its public justification and incitement in the most notorious and even evil acts of Japan itself.
As the eminent historian of........