No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
World War II was a landmark in the development and deployment of technologies of mass destruction associated with air power, notably the B-29 bomber, napalm and the atomic bomb. An estimated 50 to 70 million people lay dead in its wake. In a sharp reversal of the pattern of World War I and of most earlier wars, a substantial majority of the dead were noncombatants. The air war, which reached peak intensity with the area bombing, including atomic bombing, of major European and Japanese cities in its final year, had a devastating impact on noncombatant populations.
* The author thanks Noam Chomsky, Bruce Cumings, John Dower, Laura Hein, Gavan McCormack, and Michael Sherry for critical comments, sources and suggestions. The term holocaust used in the title draws on its original meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary provides this definition: “Complete consumption by fire; complete destruction, especially of a large number of persons; a great slaughter or massacre.”
[1] Estimates vary, especially in the Pacific theatre. See, for example, John Ellis, World War II - A statistical survey (New York: Facts on File, 1993); John W. Dower, War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), pp. 294-300; in Roger Chickering, Stig Forster and Bernd Greiner, eds., A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction 1937-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) p. 3, Chickering and Forster estimate military deaths at 15 million and civilian deaths at more than 45 million; Wikipedia offers a wide-ranging discussion of numbers and sources.
[2] Lee Kennett, A History of Strategic Bombing (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982), pp. 9-38; Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 31-42.
[3] “General Report of the Commission of Jurists at the Hague,” American Journal of International Law, XVII (October 1923), Supplement, pp. 250-51.
[4] A valuable synthesis of the literature on war and the noncombatant is Sahr Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity After World War II (London: Routledge, 2006). A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities. The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan (New York: Walker & Company, 2006), subjects the British and American choice of area bombing in World War II in Germany and Japan to rigorous scrutiny from the perspectives of morality, international law, and effectiveness. The terms area bombing, strategic bombing and indiscriminate bombing refer to the wholesale destruction of large areas of cities, frequently with the annihilation of the civilian population. By contrast tactical bombing is directed to discrete military and/or military-industrial targets such as military bases and airfields, bridges, and munitions factories. In practice, given technical limitations, bombs directed at military targets frequently exacted heavy civilian tolls. I address the issues of state terrorism and the targeting of civilians by Japan and the United States in Mark Selden and Alvin So, eds., War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan and the Asia Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
[5] A small number of works have drawn attention to US war atrocities, typically centering on the torture, killing and desecration of captured Japanese soldiers. These include Peter Schrijvers, The GI War Against Japan. American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific During World War II (New York: NYU Press, 2002) and John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986). The Wartime Journals of Charles Lindbergh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) is seminal in disclosing atrocities committed against Japanese POWs. Two recent works closely assess the bombing of noncombatants and the ravaging of nature and society as a result of strategic bombing that has been ignored in much of the literature. A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, provides a thoroughgoing assessment of US and British strategic bombing (including atomic bombing) through the lenses of ethics and international law. Grayling's premise is that Allied bombing which “deliberately targeted German and Japanese civilian populations” and “claimed the lives of 800,000 civilian women, children and men,” “is nowhere near equivalent in scale of moral atrocity to the Holocaust of European Jewry, or the death and destruction all over the world for which Nazi and Japanese aggression was collectively responsible,” a figure that he places at 25 million dead. He nevertheless concludes that the US and British killing of noncombatants “did in fact involve the commission of wrongs” on a very large scale. Pp 5-6; 276-77. Michael Bess, in Choices Under Fire. Moral Dimensions of World War II (New York: Knopf, 2006), pp. 88-110, in a chapter on “Bombing Civilian Populations,” asks this question: “did this taint the victory with an indelible stain of innocent blood?” After reviewing both strategic and ethical issues, he concludes “There can be no excuse, in the end, for the practices of large-scale area bombing and firebombing of cities; these were atrocities, pure and simple. They were atrocities because the Anglo-Americans could definitely have won the war without resorting to them.” It is necessary, in my view, to go further to inquire whether these would have constituted atrocities in circumstances in which the bombing, presumably including atomic bombing, were necessary for securing US victory.
[6] Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 90-91. Grayling goes on to note the different experiences of survivors of the two types of bombing, particularly as a result of radiation symptoms from the atomic bomb.
[7] Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, provides a useful overview of international efforts to protect noncombatants throughout history and particularly since World War II. See also Timothy L. H. McCormack and Helen Durham, “Aerial Bombardment of Civilians: The Current International Legal Framework,” forthcoming.
[8] The question of universality has been the centerpiece of Noam Chomsky's critique of the conduct of the powers, above all the United States, from his earliest political writings to the present. See, for example, the introduction to American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), pp. 4-5; Hegemony or Survival. America's Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), pp, 2-13, 20-23; Failed States. The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), pp. 3-4 and passim. The Taylor quote is from his Nuremberg and Vietnam: an American Tragedy, cited in Chomsky, Failed States, p. 83. John Dower offers trenchant comments on the scales of justice in Embracing Defeat, pp. 451-74; Richard H. Minear, Victors' Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
[9] Quoted in Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, p. 81. The US debate over the bombing of cities is detailed in Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 23-28, pp. 57-59. Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 20-30, I08-9. Gen. Billy Mitchell's contradictory message, which became Air Force doctrine in 1926, was that air attack “was a method of imposing will by terrorizing the whole population … while conserving life and property to the greatest extent.” Quoted in Sherry, p. 30. See also Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, p. 10.
[10] Tami Davis Biddle, “Air Power,” in Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos, and Mark R. Shulman, The Laws of War. Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 151-52. Gordon Wright, The Ordeal of Total War 1939-1945 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 26.
[11] On Casablanca bombing see Charles B. Macdonald, World War II: The War Against Germany and Italy, (Army Historical Series, Office of the Chief of Military History), chapter 22.
The first major British success came at Hamburg in 1943 when firebombing destroyed large parts of the city and took 44,000 lives. Grayling traces British and German shift from tactical to strategic bombing in the early years of the war, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 31-76.
[12] Max Hastings, Bomber Command: The Myth and Reality of the Strategic Bombing Offensive (New York: Dial Press, 1979), p. 139.
[13] Sherry, Air Power, p. 260. With much U.S. bombing already relying on radar, the distinction between tactical and strategic bombing had long been violated in practice. The top brass, from George Marshall to Air Force chief Henry Arnold to Dwight Eisenhower, had all earlier given tacit approval for area bombing, yet no orders from on high spelled out a new bombing strategy.
[14] Interview quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 593.
[15] Schaffer, Wings, p. 97; see also Sherry, Air Power, pp. 260-63. Grayling makes a compelling case for the failure of area bombing of Germany to achieve its objective of breaking morale and causing heavy destruction of cities and military-related industries, thereby forcing surrender, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 106-07. Robert Pape made a similar argument for Japan, stressing other factors including naval blockade, threat of invasion, and the Soviet entry into the war as having far greater significance than the fire bombing. Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). The extensive American debate over Japan's surrender has paid little attention to the firebombing, concentrating on the three issues of the atomic bombs, the Russian entry into the war, and US terms with respect to Emperor Hirohito.
[16] The most eloquent criticism was the writing of Vera Brittain. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 180-86. In the midst of the Dresden debate, On March 28, 1945, Churchill issued a minute questioning the area-bombing strategy and raising the question of whether tactical bombing of key objectives was not more effective. The minute was withdrawn following air force protests. Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939-45 (London: HMSO, 1961), p. 112.
[17] E. Bartlett Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo, (New York: Fine, 1991), p. 145.
[18] Tsuneishi Keiichi, “Unit 731 and the Japanese Imperial Army's Biological Warware Program,” from Hata Ikuhiko and Sase Masanori, eds., Sekai Senso Hanzai Jiten (Encyclopedia of World War Crimes), (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 2002), tr. John Junkerman, Japan Focus, Nov 20, 2005 japanfocus.org/products/details/2194.
[19] Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo, pp. 31-32, 41-44, 52, 71-74. For the October 1944 recommendations of the Committee of Operations Analysts of the Air Force for area bombing, see pp. 83-88.
[20] Michael Sherry, “The United States and Strategic Bombing: From Prophecy to Memory,” forthcoming; Cary Karacas, “Imagining Air Raids on Tokyo, 1930-1945,” paper presented at the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting, Boston, March 23, 2007, pp. 2-5. Sherry traces other prophecies of nuclear bombing back to H.G. Wells 1913 novel The World Set Free. Sherry makes clear that prophecy has the capacity to speak forcefully not only to proponents but also to energize opponents of the envisaged future.
[21] Sherry, Air Power, pp. 272-73, 404-05.
[22] Cf. Stewart Udall's discussion of responsibility for the US shift to area bombing, centering on President Roosevelt, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Air Force Secretary Robert Lovett, and the difficulty of documenting responsibility for the policy shift. Sherry and Schaffer provide the most exhaustive study of the shift in U.S. bombing policy.
[23] United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (Pacific War) (Washington: US GPO, 1946), Vol 1, p. 16.
[24] Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo, pp. 102-03, 108-14, 134-38. The limited success of repeated efforts to destroy the Nakajima Factory and other aircraft factories paved the way for the area bombing strategy.
[25] Rhodes, Atomic Bomb, pp. 596-97; Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Gate, The Pacific: Matterhorn to Nagasaki June 1944 to August 1945. Vol. 5, The Army Air Forces in World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953; 1983 Office of Air Force History imprint) pp. 609-13; Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo, p. 146-50. The low-flying planes, which could save fuel, carry more bombs and better target their sites, were vulnerable to attack by fighter-interceptors. However, US attacks in mid-February destroyed most of the 530 interceptors protecting the Kanto region. Karacas, “Imagining Air Raids on Tokyo,” p. 27. In Japan in spring and summer 1945, as in virtually all subsequent bombing campaigns conducted over the next six decades, the US ruled the sky with virtually no enemy capacity to destroy its bombers.
[26] “Tokyo Under Bombardment, 1941-1945,” Bethanie Institute Bulletin No. 5, translation in General Headquarters Far East Command, Military Intelligence Section, War in Asia and the Pacific Vol. 12, Defense of the Homeland and End of the War, ed., Donald Detwiler and Charles Burdick (New York, 1980); see also Karacas on the imaginative link between the Tokyo earthquake and the bombing in the Unna Juzo novel.
[27] Sherry, Air Power, p. 276. A detailed photographic record, including images of scores of the dead, some burnt to a crisp and distorted beyond recognition, others apparently serene in death, and of acres of the city flattened as if by an immense tornado, is found in Ishikawa Koyo, Tokyo daikushu no zenkiroku (Complete Record of the Great Tokyo Air Attack) (Tokyo, 1992); Tokyo kushu o kiroku suru kai ed., Tokyo daikushu no kiroku (Record of the Great Tokyo Air Attack) (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1982), and Dokyumento: Tokyo daikushu (Document: The Great Tokyo Air Attack) (Tokyo: Yukeisha, 1968).
[28] The Survey's killed-to-injured ratio of better than two to one was far higher than most estimates for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki where killed and wounded were approximately equal. If accurate, it is indicative of the immense difficulty in escaping for those near the center of the Tokyo firestorm on that windswept night. The Survey's kill ratio has, however, been challenged by Japanese researchers who found much higher kill ratios at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly when one includes those who died of bomb injuries months and years later. In my view, the SBS estimates both exaggerate the killed to injured ratio and understate the numbers killed in the Tokyo raid. The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombing (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 420-21; Cf. U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Field Report Covering Air Raid Protection and Allied Subjects Tokyo (n.p. 1946), pp. 3, 79. In contrast to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which for fifty years have been the subject of intense research by Japanese, Americans and others, the most significant records of the Tokyo attack are those compiled at the time by Japanese police and fire departments. In the absence of the mystique of the atomic bomb and the ongoing national and global focus on that event, there was no compelling reason to continue to monitor the results of firebombing attacks on Japanese cities following surrender. And neither the US military nor the Japanese government produced significant records of the destruction during the occupation. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey study of Effects of Air Attack on Urban Complex Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama (n.p. 1947), p. 8, observes that Japanese police estimates of 93,076 killed and 72,840 injured in Tokyo air raids make no mention of the numbers of people missing. Surely, too, many classified as injured died subsequently of their wounds. In contrast to the monitoring of atomic bomb deaths over the subsequent six decades, the Tokyo casualty figures at best record deaths and injuries within days of the bombing at a time when the capacity of the Tokyo military and police to compile records had been overwhelmed. Many more certainly died in the following weeks and months. The bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities has attracted little scholarly attention either in Japan (with the exception of local museums and local studies of the bombing of particular cities) or internationally.
[29] Karacas, “Imagining Air Raids,” p. 22.
[30] Dokyumento. Tokyo daikushu, pp. 168-73.
[31] John W. Dower, “Sensational Rumors, Seditious Graffiti, and the Nightmares of the Thought Police,” in Japan in War and Peace (New York: The New Press, 1993), p. 117. United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report, Vol I, pp. 16-20.
[32] Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, p. 1.
[33] Kerr, Flames Over Tokyo, pp. 337-38.
[34] Two excellent complementary accounts of important dimensions of the geopolitics and political economy of contemporary US empire are Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire. Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), and Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).
[35] The numbers killed, specifically the numbers of noncombatants killed, in the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars were greater, but each of those wars extended over many years.
[36] Mark Selden, “American Nationalism and Asian Wars,” (in progress).
[37] Cf. Dower's nuanced historical perspective on war and racism in American thought and praxis in War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). In Year 501: The Conquest Continues (Boston: South End Press, 1993) and many other works, Noam Chomsky emphasizes the continuities in Western ideologies that undergird practices leading to the annihilation of entire populations in the course of colonial and expansionist wars over half a millennium and more.
[38] Geoffrey Best, War and Law Since 1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) pp. 180-81.
[39] See for example Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America. Fifty Years of Denial. (New York: Grossett/Putnam, 1945), Parts II-IV; Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, pp. 13-16.
[40] Bombing would also be extended from cities to the countryside, as in the Agent Orange defoliation attacks that destroyed the forest cover and poisoned residents of sprayed areas of Vietnam.
[41] I have explored issues of Japan's China war and the Chinese resistance in China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), and in Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). An insightful discussion of Japanese war crimes in the Pacific, locating the issues within a comparative context of atrocities committed by the US, Germany, and other powers, is Yuki Tanaka's Hidden Horrors: Japanese Crimes in World War II. Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) examines the understanding of the Nanjing Massacre in each country. Daqing Yang surveys the contentious Chinese and Japanese literature on the rape of Nanjing in “A Sino-Japanese Controversy: The Nanjing Atrocity as History,” Sino-Japanese Studies, (November 1990), pp. 14-35. For additional studies of Japanese war atrocities and the search for justice for victims, see articles by Utsumi Aiko, William Underwood, Yoshiko Nozaki, Gavan McCormack, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Yuki Tanaka, Mark Selden and others at Japan Focus, http://japanfocus.org.
[42] R.J.R. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima. History Writing and the Second World War 1945-1990 (London: Routledge, 1993). Wide discrepancies remain with respect to World War II casualties and deaths, notably in Asia. Cf. John Dower's compilation and discussion of the basic data, War Without Mercy, pp. 295-300, and “Race, Language and War in Two Cultures,” in Japan in War and Peace, p. 257.
[43] Dower, Embracing Defeat, pp. 443-47; Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, pp. 16-17.
[44] Mark Selden, “Nationalism, Historical Memory and Contemporary Conflicts in the Asia Pacific: the Yasukuni Phenomenon, Japan, and the United States”; Takahashi Tetsuya, “The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine” in Naoko Shimazu, ed., Nationalisms in Japan (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 155-80; Caroline Rose, “The Battle for Hearts and Minds. Patriotic education in Japan in the 1990s and beyond,” in Shimazu, pp. 131-54. The Japanese government has apologized to the military comfort women (jugun ianfu), most notably in the 1993 statement of Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei. But in contrast to Germany's extensive state-financed reparations to Nazi victims, the Japanese government dodged its responsibility by establishing a “private fund” to provide reparations of 200,000 yen to surviving comfort women. For this reason, strong opposition to the program, particularly in South Korea and Taiwan led the majority of survivors to reject the compensation.
[45] Quoted in Noam Chomsky, “War on Terror,” Amnesty International Lecture, Trinity College, January 18, 2006.
[46] Collateral Damage, pp. 18-19. Conway-Lanz traces major US debates since 1945 centered on noncombatant deaths to show that the question of intention, not the scale of noncombatant deaths caused by American actions, repeatedly trumped counter arguments in policy debates over atomic and hydrogen bombs and the targeting of cities and villages for destruction.
[47] General Curtis LeMay, Oral History, 1966, cited in Marilyn Young, “Total War”, conference paper, 2006.
[48] Young, “Total War.”
[49] Bruce Cumings, Origins of the Korean War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990) v.2, p. 755.
[50] Seymour M. Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare. America's Hidden Arsenal, (New York: Anchor Books,1969), p. 18.
[51] Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare, pp. 28-32. See also Ronald B. Frankum Jr., Like Rolling Thunder. The Air War in Vietnam, 1964-1975 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 88-92.
[52] Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare, pp. 131-33. Hersh notes that the $60 million worth of defoliants and herbicides in the 1967 Pentagon budget would have been sufficient to defoliate 3.6 million acres if all were used optimally.
[53] Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare, pp. 134, 156-57. Canadian Dr. Alje Vennema described the symptoms of gas victims at Quang Ngai hospital where he worked in 1967, including two children and one adult who died.
[54] Elizabeth Becker, “Kissinger Tapes Describe Crises, War and Stark Photos of Abuse,” The New York Times, May 27, 2004.
[55] “Bombs Over Cambodia: New Light on US Indiscriminate Bombing,” Walrus, December 7, 2006.
[56] Michael Sherry, The United States and Strategic Bombing: From Prophecy to Memory,“ forthcoming.
[57] Seymour Hersh, “Up in the Air Where is the Iraq war headed next?” The New Yorker, Dec 5, 2005; Dahr Jamail, “Living Under the Bombs,” TomDispatch, February 2, 2005; Michael Schwartz, “A Formula for Slaughter. The American Rules of Engagement from the Air,” TomDispatch, January 14, 2005.
[58] Tom Barry, “The Militarization of Space and U.S. Global Dominance: the China Connection” Japan Focus. December 6, 2006.
[59] Anthony Arnove, “Four Years Later… And Counting. Billboarding the Iraqi Disaster”, TomDispatch, March 18, 2007. Seymour Hersh, “The Redirection. Is the Administration's new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” The New Yorker March 3, 2007. Michael Schwartz, “Baghdad Surges into Hell. First Results from the President's Offensive”, Tom Dispatch, February 12, 2007.
You have
Access
Open access