The morality of Allied bombing in World War II, cont.

The original entry in this subject seems to have reached the maximum number of words that it can handle, and readers still have things to say, so the discussion continues here.

Alan Levine writes:

I am late coming into the debate about WWII bombing. However, since I have written on this subject in my books, The Strategic Bombing of Germany and The Pacific War, I feel obligated to say something, even if its belated. So…

Tom S. put things very well, he is obviously familiar with the subject. I would add the following points:

1) Area bombing of cities, that is “indiscriminate” attacks on the centers of cities not aimed at particular military targets, were undertaken by the Allies as a second choice, not, originally, voluntarily. The British did so because they could not bomb accurately at night until the development of elaborate electronic guidance and marking systems. The Americans undertook night area attacks against Japan because they could not bomb accurately by day given the jet stream, bad weather, and other factors. Tom S. accurately described the American radar bombing of German cities. In my opinion, since in that case the targets were in fact “precision” targets like oil plants and rail yards, they cannot be considered as quite the equivalent of the others, though they were VERY inaccurate. Even the AAF admitted that more than half those missions were failures. However, they did not cause civilian deaths comparable to the “deliberate” area attacks. It is only fair to add that Sir Arthur Harris became a veritable maniac for area bombing, so RAF area attacks continued at the expense of efforts aimed at militarily important targets.

2) It is not true that German and Japanese war production rose right to the end. German war production began to collapse in the summer of 1944 under the impact of “precision” attacks against oil and transportation targets. Japanese production began to tumble at about the same time, because of the submarine blockade, then because of the urban area attacks. The latter had an enormous impact.

3) While I lack any enthusiasm for area bombing whatsoever, and in that respect am closer to Charles G. than some of our “slaying for the Lord” enthusiasts, it had a considerable effect on Germany in tying up German defenses and causing general damage when the Allies could not have otherwise struck at Germany. It was quite effective against Japan because of the reasons cited by Tom S, though even in that case the Strategic Bombing Survey thought a targeted attack on the Japanese rail system, and minelaying might have been more effective, and more humane.

4) Tom S. is right about the first Tokyo bombing being worse than the later fire attacks, though one reason he does not mention is that the areas attacked were less congested than the part of Tokyo hit on March 9, 1945.

6) The Americans certainly did not announce we would target civilians right after Pearl Harbor. In fact, they were indignant at false Japanese accusations that the Doolittle raid did this. There was a good deal of disquiet, even in WWII, about area bombing, not only by Eaker but by General Hansell and Secretary of War Stimson. The latter, who was no softie, was even a little bothered by the fact that there was not much public protest!

7) It is reasonably certain that the A-bomb speeded up the Japanese surrender by some weeks, but it seems doubtful that the Nagasaki bomb was necessary. The argument that it saved us from invading Japan is a weak one, as blockade and conventional bombing would have had the same effect eventually, and it would seem that the whole idea of invading Japan was downright dumb, as some Navy and AAF commanders argued at the time.

LA replies:

Thanks to Mr. Levine for sharing his knowledge with us. However, regarding his last point, I stick to my point, which I admit is based not on hard information but on what we know about the Japanese attitudes at that time, that given the fanatically gung-ho Japanese spirit, a blockade and conventional bombing would not have made them surrender. It was that second bomb that persuaded the leaders they were done and led the emperor to make his surrender speech, which led to a total turnaround in the Japanese hierarchical mindset, so that the Japanese now regarded the Americans not as hateful sub-humans to be crushed but as their conquerors and superiors whom they would honor. It was this revolution in consciousness—brought on the Bomb, the Japanese leaders’ decision to surrender, and the emperor’s dramatic speech to the nation—that made genuine peace possible.

Steven Warshawsky writes:

LA has it exactly right:

“I think the reason the Japanese became a peaceful, unthreatening country after 1945 was that the U.S. had crushed them. I think anything short of crushing them would have left their crazed, banzai, destroy-all-outsiders mentality intact. That sounds brutal, but I think that’s the reality. America used great violence, in order to achieve real peace. But if the Japanese had maintained any will and capacity to use violence, there never would have been peace.”

Yes, we “crushed” the Japanese and the Germans (with most of the battlefield work done by the Soviets), and the result was pacification and alliance. The real source of this seemingly miraculous transformation was the killing of millions of these nations’ young men. The young men of any society are the fighters and the ideologues. A necessary, if not sufficient, requirement for pacifying a hostile, enemy population is killing as many of its young men as possible, and then imposing your will on the remaining population.

Barbaric? Ugly? Welcome to life on planet Earth. We should be oh-so-thankful that, to date, our people, our society, have had the stomach and the ingenuity to come out on top of this deadly struggle. For that matter, the rest of the world should be even more thankful, because the alternative “hegemons” are unlikely to have been as relatively benign and benevolent as we (and the British before us) have been.

Lastly, I suggest that most of the comments in this thread are based, implicitly or explicitly, on the wrongheaded assumption that “innocent civilians” can be distinguished from “culpable leaders and warriors” when one is talking about total war between nation states or civilizations. I strongly disagree. The “enemy” is not merely a handful of active combatants and their leaders, but the entire society that breeds and inspires and fuels their attacks against us. So long as those attacks continue, the entire enemy population is, and should be, a rightful target.

LA replies:

While I’m glad Steven agrees with me on Japan, I cannot agree with his philosophy of war. As I understand him, he would cast aside any distinction between civilian and combattant and basically would remove any conceivable restraints on the use of force.

Spencer Warren writes:

On the subject of the Nagasaki bomb, please see my analysis which you published at VFR on August 9, 2005, the 60th anniversary of the bombing. In that article I demonstrate that Japan was not prepared to surrender before the second bomb was dropped.

The point made in favor of blockade is not a good one for many reasons, not least the fact that every day the war continued, the torture and suffering of tens of thousands of Allied POWs in Japanese hands continued. That alone justified the A-bombs. In addition, our leaders were concerned that public support for unconditional surrender might weaken as the war was prolonged—perhaps for years under this strategy. Unconditional surrender was seen as vital to punish and break the grip of the militarists responsible for the war and justify all the sacrifice we and our allies had made—to ensure that such a war would never happen again. Further, the idea of blockade would have only strengthened the war party in Japan and have made unconditional surrender more difficult to obtain. There is no basis in historical fact for the blockade argument.

In addition, I have seen a reputable estimate that every day the war continued, thousands of Chinese civilians continued to die at Japanese hands. I may have read this in the Oxford Companion to the Second World War.

Among the best books on the subject are: Richard B. Frank, Downfall (2001); Robert James Maddox, Weapons for Victory (1995), which explodes the dubious use of original sources by the leading revisionst historian Gar Alperovitz and goes through systematically and refutes each of the left’s arguments; Robert P. Newman, Truman and the Hiroshima Cult (1995) and his Enola Gay and the Court of History (2004); J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction (1997); and Thomas B. Allen and Norman Polmar, Code Name Downfall (1995, and a newer edition). These scholars have demolished the revisionist arguments against use of atomic bombs. See also Edward J. Drea, MacArthur’s Ultra (1992), the first book to examine our contemporaneous military intelligence files, which showed Japan was rapidly reinforcing the planned invasion area and was getting stronger as time went on. The revisionists who criticize the dropping of the atomic bombs had never examined this crucial documentation.

With regard to strategic bombing, the widely respected historian, Richard Overy, who has written about a dozen books on the war, wrote in his Why the Allies Won (1995) that our stragetic bombing shortened the war and saved allied lives.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 23, 2007 07:55 PM | Send