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Gen. Lemay's actions/orders concerning the fire-bombing of Imperial Japanese cities was TOTALLY justified. Revisionists and the unlearned need to understand what the Jap mindset was at that time in history. The Imperial command structure needed everything they received from General Lemay; as did the Emperor,the common folk, and the men at the sharp end. I could go on and on ad nauseum, but the simple answer remains a simple: YES.
I don’t think so.
The history of human conflicts shows that destructive campaign would not give any results in breaking down the hard enemy wills to fight on.
Let’s look at the Soviet Union’s towns in 41-43, the German cities in 44-45 and ask: did the destruction scare the enemy war administration or give chance for the propaganda machine to run hot. Once the war administration (militarists in case of the WWII Japan) didn’t care much about its own people, so what the US air bombing can ?
Except for hundred of thousand of innocent civilians, most of them women and children, burned alive each night in napalm, what result of the campaign counted ?
“Would the US lost the war, we would have been convicted war criminals” – something like this was said by W. McNamara.
I feel LeMay's fire bombing was justified. In the long run, lives were saved. Between the fire bombing and the nukes, we saved many U S soldier lives. My feelings are, beings I'm a Viet Nam Vet, we should go back to the WW II mentality, annihilate our enemies. The radical, Muslim terrorists have no qualms about their type of warfare, why should we. Bring them to their knees, destroy them, then, help rebuild them, as we did Japan and Germany. I might be viewed as some kind of kook, but, I don't care. We should be more concerned for OUR TROOPS safety, rather than be POLITICALLY CORRECT. You fight a WAR to win, not to fight to a draw.
This is a joke, right? Has to be.
No one who knows anything about the nature of Japanese industrial organization would ask such a question. Further, no one familiar with the lengths that the Japanese leadership was willing to go to to get what they wanted would ever even think of such a thing.
"Justified" a half century later is using history to lay blame, not learn about people and why they do what they do.
I believe that the fire bombings were justified. The nature of the manufacturing industry in Japan was similar to that in Germany at the time. There were large manufacturing plants but these were supplied with parts made in home-run industries. They were located in residential areas of the associated cities. The main building material used in Japan at the time was wood and paper.
The destruction of large residential areas, with associated home
industries, certainly hurt the Japanese war effort.
As well, the number of displaced persons would have to be supported by the government which would drain the war effort.
All of this contributed to seriously weakening the Japanese effort and contributed to ending the war sooner.
A piece of history worth remembering …
One of the most notorious cases of human experimentation occurred in Japan itself. At least nine out of 12 crew members survived the crash of a U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 bomber on Ky?sh?, on May 5, 1945. (This plane was Lt. Marvin Watkins' crew of the 29th Bomb Group of the 6th Bomb Squadron.28). The bomber's commander was sent to Tokyo for interrogation, while the other survivors were taken to the anatomy department of Kyushu University, at Fukuoka, where they were subjected to vivisection or killed.
I am in agreement with Mr. Beatty
One of my friends wrote a few years ago that bombing the Hamburg ,Drezno ,Berlin etc at 1944 and 1945 got an important pedagogical aspect .None of German cities was destroyed during WW 1st ( French ,Polish,Russian,Belgian cities were ) ,so they just didn't understand what the war really means .
Thanks for the aerial bombings of WW2ND Germans understood that war doesn't mean that they could kill other people , burn their homes and steal their property , they learned that during the war German people could be killed also , German cities could be burned , German property could be annihilated or stolen .
Propably the same thing was explained to Japanese by firebombing .
BTW as we are talking about "poor" Japanese cilivians under US napalm ,maybe we ought to talk a little about sacco di Shanghai or about death march at Bataan ? Maybe about mass murds and rapes after the fall of Singapore or something ,but only a little, about Birman railroad ?
Justified ? Well destroying their manufacturing was justified. But I have big problem with burning kids !
To Blackwidow :
Who started to burn kids during WW2nd ?Germans&Japanese or Yankies&British ?
P.S.
Knights from Luftwaffe bombed maternity hospital at Polish town Wielun at the dawn of 01.09.1939 .
My Dad did that in his B29. was not a thing he would ever talk about.
Raids on his Saipan base and the bubble blow outs, he did tell me 'abit.
Wish I could have learned more.
Roger
To answer whether or not this action was justified 60 years later requires looking at the context in which the raids were undertaken. It is easy to judge in hindsight . It is not so easy to put oneself in the positon of Lemay, or his crews, or the millions of allies embroiled in catclysmic conflict dominated by unprecedented leaps in military technology , fervently believing they fought to save their world from abject tyrrany and brutality. Strategic bombing was still in its infancy, although its doctrine was several decades old in 1945. Bombing offered a way to strike decisively at enemy capacity to wage war; high altitude selective bombing could not guarantee a decisive level of damage; there was less distinction between combatants and civilians who aided the war effort in economies slaved to total war. Furthermore ,Japan fought without compromise,and many a blood drenched island and executed POW attested to the unrlenting ferocity of its brand of war.. I think there was plenty of justification for the fire raids. The question is whether or not they were tragic and horrific. Of course they were, as is all war. But, one need not look far to find their justification.
Yes it was needed. I did a paper on the A-bombs stating that you could NOT look at the facts based on research done in '46 and latter, but instead, you had to look at what was known, or "known" at the time.
The IJNavy, and Army total disregard of the Geneva (and the Hague) Conventions. The fact that the message sent too late on Dec. 7 did NOT declare war (just braking off of negotiations), and the litteral rape of several cities helped everyone feel that since they threw out the rule book, then sowed the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind.
The fact that there were so many small "feeder" shops, and to totaly disrupt all lines of communication, plus production….Yes It was justified. Also, I believe that a lot of higher ups were getting scared of a house to house fight on each and every Japanese Island, for the whole length of that island. made it even more vital to bring the warlords to their knees, by any means possible. (Look at how many of the IJN's ships were sunk, so heavily damaged as to be out of service, but still their navy fought on). Tim
It may have been a sad necessity, but justifying the use of napalm on civilian population centers in terms of Japanese actions does nothing to support our contention of moral or ethical superiority. If we're supposedly the good guys, aren't we supposed to hold ourselves to the higher standards? In short – a sad chapter, probably a necessary one, but not one to ever be celebrated
Not to minimize anything, but I have never heard of B-29s employing napalm. After achieving poor results from high altitude with high explosives, LeMay went to incendiaries from low altitude. This proved most effective.
While I respect the people of modern Japan, the leaders of WWII had demonstrated on numerous occasions a total disregard for civilized standards. They felt that nothing was prohibited for them. Ask the hundreds of thousands brutally murdered in Nanking (to pick one of many dozens of instances of Japanese barbaric behavior) if they felt the treatment of "innocent" citizens under B-29s was inappropriate.
After enduring the militaristic and ruthless examples of the leaders sacrificing their own people in futile defensive battles at great cost to the US, I would have been comfortable with using whatever number of A-bombs it took to get unconditional surrender. No invasion saved millions of Japanese and Allied lives.
The incendiaries used contained a version of napalm
Those of you who think these attacks were justified should remember what Brigadier General Bonner Fellers said about them. He described the air raids as "one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of noncombatants in all history." That was his assessment, and he was one of MacArthur's most valued and trusted colleagues. If you think the "ruthless and barbaric killing of civilians" is justified, Al Queda has a job for you.
One should not be blind to one of the most bitter historical ironies imaginable: the Japanese are now underwriting the very crimes for which Japanese officials were executed in 1948. As Arthur Schlesinger wrote in the LA Times during the invasion of Iraq, the initiation of aggression against the people of Iraq on March 19, 2003 is another "day that will live in infamy." The US is now contemplating aggressive war against Iran, based on false pretexts similar to those used in the Iraq crime. We are now an aggressive pariah state that arrogates to itself the right to attack other countries at will — and we are a far more significant threat to the people of the world that Japan was in 1941. By justifying the firebombing of Japan's cities on the basis of Japanese behavior, you are by inference justifying mass casualty attacks on the United States. The detonation of a nuclear device in an American city is justified in your view as a matter of elementary logic.
Your passion for dennograting the U.S. is certainly noticable and one sided for the most part. My guess is that you are a liberal politically. You certainly have the right to your opinion, but I also have the right to disagree with your accessment and believe you are wrong. Please allow me to appologize in advance if I seem offensive, but I feel very strongly about what I am about to write.
The U.S. has to my knowledge never engaged in offensive action against anyone without due provocation. Even Vietnam was an engagement that started because of the aggressive actions of a communist regeme.
Japan and Germany started WWII by engaging in horrific actions against their neighbors. The U.S. tried to stay out of it, but was forced by circumstance to engage. We had to…the world would have spiraled into a darkness the likes of which we might not ever have been able to correct and it would have cost many more millions of lives to do so. What happened to Japan and Germany was a horror that they brought onto themselves.
America is the most generous and peace loving peoples in the history of civilization, but when provoked, we will defend ourselves and have every right to do so. Everytime we've been forced to do so, is because liberal leadership stuck their heads in the sand and allowed our defenses to dwindle to the point of stagnation where others beleived we didn't want to or were afraid to fight. That is their most lasting legacy.
To be quite honest, I'm sick and tired of hearing the revisionist view of history as though the U.S. was the evil that started it all. Just think about that statement for a moment. What has the middle east contributed to the world in the last 100 years…absolutely nothing except hate, fear, war, and strife. Their own political climate is what has kept them from progressing into the future…they approach everything from an ideological point of view…only it's their view that counts and no one else's. Quite frankly, its amazing to me just how patient the U.S. and West in general has been toward these poeple. While they rave and rant about death the America, death to Britain…we sit idly by and watch with patient confidense. Unfortunately, sooner or later, we are going to be provoked again into an unwanted war where a lot of people are going to die.
It's the revisionist liberals who believe the U.S. is at fault for everything that is going to set the stage for that to happen…then, like liberals often do, never take responsibility for what they allowed to happen and deflect blame toward those who tried to prevent it from happening.
Does the Rape of Nanking ring a bell? Bataan Death March? To cite civilian suffering is not a consideration of the Japanese government or soldiers, or populace, nor should it have been one for our government. The most important considerations that we had were:
1-Limit American Casualties- Mission Accomplished
2- Keep Stalin from taking a big bite out of Japan (Like he did to Poland at the beginning of WW2) Mission Accomplished
I teach at a community college and one of my students, a middle aged woman of Japanese descent and I were talking before class about WWII. She said if it had not been for the atomic bomb, she wouldn't be here today. She believed the bombings, atomic and fire, were justified because if we had invaded Japan, her father, an army officer, would have died at the front and her mother, a school girl at the time, was being trained, along with every other school boy and girl, to resist invading soldiers with sharpened poles. It is something that shouldn't be glorified nor condemned. It had to happen. If we had not bombed Japan as we did, how many of us wouldn't be here? On Okinawa, we had casualties in excess of 50,000 killed and wounded. Conservative estimates for the invasion of Kyushu, (Operation Olympic) were put at 500,000 dead and wounded. Operation Coronet estimates were as high and since this would have been mainly an American operation, those were our fathers.
Another thing to think about is that if we had in fact invaded, the Soviet Union would have been involved at some point on Japan proper and Japan, like Korea and Viet Nam, would have been divided north/south for administrative purposes and a different world situation would have been put in place. The fire bombings were horrific, but the alternative would have been much more horrible for both sides.
That is a tough one…morally, it's never justified to killed innocent civilians…in times of total war…it happens, it just can't be helped. The Japanese were no stranger to dishing out that sort of action…just ask the Chinese. By the time the fire bombings occurred, Japans industry was pretty much burned out as it was.