On the Winning Side
by
Mickey Z.
Dissident Voice
March 4, 2003
Last
month, within the context of impending US/UK war crimes in Iraq, I wrote about
the 58th anniversary of the Allied firebombing of Dresden (Feb. 13-14). This
month marks another grim reminder of just how far the US is willing to go: 58
years since General Curtis LeMay, head of the Twenty-first US Bomber Command,
brought his brand of hell into the Pacific theater.
Acting upon General George C.
Marshall's 1941 idea of torching the poorer areas of Japan's cities, on the
night of March 9-10, 1945, LeMay's bombers laid siege on Tokyo. Tightly packed
wooden buildings were assaulted by 1,665
tons of incendiaries. LeMay
later recalled that a few explosives had been mixed in with the incendiaries to
demoralize firefighters (96 fire engines burned to ashes and 88 firemen died).
One Japanese doctor recalled
"countless bodies" floating in the Sumida River. These bodies were
"as black as charcoal" and indistinguishable as men or women. The
total dead for one night was an estimated 85,000, with 40,000 injured and one
million left homeless. This was only the first strike in a firebombing campaign
that dropped 250 tons of bombs per square mile, destroying 40 percent of the
surface area in 66 death-list cities (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The
attack area was 87.4 percent residential.
It is believed that more
people died from fire in a six-hour time period than ever before in the history
of mankind. At ground zero, the temperature reached 1,800° Fahrenheit. Flames
from the ensuing inferno were visible for 200 miles. Due to the intense heat,
canals boiled over, metals melted, and human beings burst spontaneously into
flames.
By May 1945, 75 percent of
the bombs being dropped on Japan were incendiaries. Cheered on by the likes of
Time magazine-who explained that "properly kindled, Japanese cities will
burn like autumn leaves"-LeMay's campaign took an estimated 672,000 lives.
Radio Tokyo, on the other
hand, termed LeMay's tactics "slaughter bombing" and the Japanese
press declared that through the fire raids, "America has revealed her
barbaric character... It was an attempt at mass murder of women and children...
The action of the Americans is all the more despicable because of the noisy
pretensions they constantly make about their humanity and idealism... No one
expects war to be anything but a brutal business, but it remains for the
Americans to make it systematically and unnecessarily a wholesale horror for
innocent victims."
Rather than denying this, a
spokesman for the Fifth Air Force categorized "the entire population of
Japan [as] a proper military target." Colonel Harry F. Cunningham
explained the US policy in no uncertain terms: "We military men do not
pull punches or put on Sunday School picnics. We are making War and making it
in the all-out fashion which saves American lives, shortens the agony which War
is and seeks to bring about an enduring Peace. We intend to seek out and
destroy the enemy wherever he or she is, in the greatest possible numbers, in
the shortest possible time. For us, THERE ARE NO CIVILIANS IN JAPAN."
On the morning of August 6,
1945, before the Hiroshima story broke, a page-one headline in the Atlanta
Constitution read: 580 B-29s RAIN FIRE ON 4 MORE DEATH-LIST CITIES. Ironically,
the success of LeMay's firebombing raids had effectively eliminated Tokyo from
the list of possible A-bomb targets. There was nothing left to bomb.
LeMay's was later US Air
Force chief of staff from 1961 to 1965 when he immortalized himself by
declaring his desire to "bomb [the North Vietnamese] back into the Stone
Age." LeMay also served as vice presidential candidate on George Wallace's
1968 ticket.
When asked about his role in
the Tokyo firebombing, he remarked: "I suppose if I had lost the war, I
would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning
side."
Mickey Z. is the author of
The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet (www.murderingofmyyears.com) and an editor
at Wide Angle (www.wideangleny.com). He can be reached at: mzx2@earthlink.net.