Latest news with #CurtisLeMay
Scoop
4 days ago
- Politics
- Scoop
Who, Neither Politician Nor Monarch, Executed 100,000 Civilians In A Single Night?
Answer: Curtis LeMay, American Air Force General, in the wee hours of 10 March 1945. While authorised by his immediate superior, this firebombing of Tokyo was a decentralised military operation which received subsequent popular approval. It was called 'Operation Meetinghouse'. While Japanese civilians were aware that they had become a collateral target to the encroaching American military machine, these victims had no prior idea of the murderous danger they faced that night. Le May went on to execute at least another 120,000 Japanese civilians in the next five months and five days; from 10 March until 15 August. The method of execution was to burn people alive. LeMay's inflammatory instrument was napalm. The politicians approved, but did not fully comprehend. They had been softened up by bureaucratic-speak, and they did not see burning people on their TV screens. (In that August there was an additional couplet of mass executions; nuclear executions. This parallel military operation was not under the command of LeMay, but used the same airfields and the same B29 aircraft type. Contrary to impressions given that the atomic bomb was planned for Germany, pilot Paul Tibbets was chosen in 1944, and was doing test manoeuvres from Cuba at the end of that year. And there were five cities LeMay had been asked not to firebomb, and did not bomb, knowing that these were 'reserved' targets. An additional 120,000 people were summarily executed by the untested 'Little Boy' [Hiroshima] and the New Mexico tested 'Fat Man' [plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki], with thousands more suffering lingering executions. These bombings – rubber-stamped by President Truman – were arranged by technocrats and military bureaucrats. The American authorities were preparing to give a repeat larger dose when more 'Fat Men' would become available towards the end of 1945.) In the middle centuries of the last millennium, one particularly appalling form of execution was to burn 'heretics' and 'witches' at the stake. These executions peaked in the sixteenth century. The most renowned perpetrator was Bloody Mary, Queen of England during the 1550s. Her tally, those burned while she was queen, was about 500 people. Unlike the citizens of Tokyo, most of Queen Mary's victims had options, albeit unsatisfactory options, to escape their fates. We think of such executions-by-fire as the epitome of terror. (And we note that some Holocaust victims, in places such as Belarus, were burned in wooden buildings locked by their Nazi executioners.) It is 200 kilometres from Auckland to Tauranga via SH2. (For an international example, try London to Cambridge.) Just imagine 20,000 stakes, faggots at the ready, 10 metres apart, all the way along the highway between those two cities. Now imagine a family being burned at each of those 20,000 stakes. That is, in essence, what General Curtis LeMay achieved in one spring night, in central Tokyo. (And, as we have noted, he was only warming up. His total civilian kill count was 'limited' because putative victims, now forewarned, were more able to take measures to save their lives though not their homes. He firebombed literally hundreds of Japanese cities.) Did we remember this event in March this year, its 80th anniversary? No. This literal holocaust was barely remembered, even in Japan. Indeed, in the 1960s, political leaders in the new Japan presented him in 1964 with a prestigious accolade for his supposed sine qua non role in making the new Japan possible. 1945 was not LeMay's first participation in megadeath; not his first rodeo. He earned his stripes in the European 'bombing theatre' in 1942 and 1943, where he took on board the 'atrocities may be more effective' approach of the British RAF. He also operated out of Bengal in 1944, during the Bengal famine which resulted from food being diverted away from millions of Bengali civilians to facilitate war objectives, in an earlier attempt to bomb Japan via India and China. In addition to starving Indians – a somewhat wretched people, in LeMay's view – the American military was willing to sustain huge American losses, eg flying over the Himalayas, for minimal military success. A mitigating factor for LeMay, then, was that he was implementing other people's plans. On 10 March 1945, Operation Meetinghouse was his scheme. Why? What was the purpose of this mass execution, this collective punishment of civilians who happened to live in a country that was losing a war? Japanese civilians were neither fascists nor communists nor anti-semites nor anti-hamites nor anyone else 'deserving' of immolation. Their government was however guilty of good old-fashioned imperialism, and the usual atrocities that come with conquests of other people's lands. There were two officially-stated arguments used to justify these executions. One was that, as civilian victims of such suffering, they, demoralised, might somehow convince their political masters to end the war sooner. The second justification was that the civilian victims were either workers in factories producing military goods, or were involved in 'cottage industries' which contributed to the production of military goods; this really amounts to some kind of 'revenge' justification masked as 'normal warfare'. And this second justification is uncannily like the 'Hamas' argument used at present by the Israeli government to justify executions of civilians in Gaza. The American bombing culture in Europe had been more reserved than that of the British. The Americans, including LeMay, witnessed the British firebombing of German cities during 1942 to 1944 – especially in the west of Germany where Nazi support was the least – which had conspicuously failed to create conditions facilitating popular revolution in Germany. Dead people tended to be passive, and survivors tended to channel their despair towards the perpetrators of their anguish. Indeed, among victimised communities, murderous bombing campaigns generally reinforced propaganda perpetuated by the victims' governments. Further, despite calling their tactic 'morale bombing', the British already knew that the morale narrative was false, having been able to closely evaluate the morale effects of comparatively small amounts of German bombing in 1940 upon British civilians. Overall, it comes across that the main reason for the executions was some kind of 'impunity'; they did it because they could. The more they failed to bring the war to an end, the more they persevered in doing the executions that hadn't achieved their stated goals. Just one more city. And then another. And another. The impunity argument was augmented by the 'scientific' rationalisations. Applied scientists developing ever more efficient methods of execution would never be satisfied unless they could see the success of their own apparatus 'in the field'. Sky-executions this century: Iraq from 2003, Afghanistan, and Gaza from 2023 In the last decade (or so) of the twentieth century, most people believed that humans – except perhaps a few terrorists (who indeed perpetrated a sky-execution in 2001) – could never repeat such atrocities upon civilians. Then we saw, in 2003, based on false claims about 'weapons of mass destruction' held by Saddam Hussein, executions similar to those of WW2 were perpetrated upon the civilians of Iraq. And a huge bunker bomb – the Mother of All Bombs"the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever used" – was dropped on a village in eastern Afghanistan in 2017. (A comment to this recent Al Jazeera news clip says: "Americans tested their weapons on innocent civilians' villages". And see BBC: The Mother of All Bombs: How badly did it hurt IS in Afghanistan? 27 April 2017.) These executions were seen to be a mix of 'revenge' and 'impunity', although once again cloaked as being part of a higher purpose; in this case the higher purpose being the export of western-style 'Democracy'. We saw in Iraq that the main consequence of western sky-executions – the 'shock and awe' bombing campaign – was the formation of terror-group ISIL, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on for twenty years before the eventual humiliation of the United States in Afghanistan in 2021. Since 2023 in Gaza we have seen a constant stream of airborne executions of civilians; mostly people who by fate were born into that occupied or encircled ghetto; a piece of real estate, densely populated by the descendants of refugees, coveted by the descendants of comparatively recent European colonisers making bizarre historical claims of entitlement. The young people of this world were shocked to see that their political leaders were indifferent, and that many were actually prompting these executions; executions by explosion and fire. Admittedly the scale of what is happening in Gaza is much less than the scale of Curtis LeMay's murderous firebombs. But otherwise it is much the same. Our elders, some of whom protested against the Vietnam War, by and large couldn't care less. This indifference is facilitated by the fact that the victims' fates are simply too graphic to show on television. There is no lack of footage; it's just too horrible. But now, there is footage that's less horrible – though still very horrible – of emaciated starving children. I don't think that those western elites who were indifferent to the live burnings are really any less indifferent to the starvations perpetrated, not by Jews, but by the state of Israel. But the elites are sensitive to the impact of detrimental optics on their ability to garner political support from non-elites. G-Hats and B-hats It must be hard for young people to explain why there is so much indifference among their elders, especially their elite elders, towards the sky-executions that appear on daily news feeds (though commonly at about 6:25pm – after two sets of advertisements – on the nightly six o'clock news). My explanation is this. We put hats (ie labels) on various groups of people. Especially 'Goody' and 'Baddy' hats. Hats labelled G (for good or for God), and hats labelled B (for bad, or evil). Sometimes there is a D-hat; western liberal 'Democracy', the imperialism we most see today. Following westerners' contrition for The Holocaust, the first people in line to be awarded G hats were the Jewish citizens of the newly created state of Israel. We gave out many G and B hats to various other people of course. And, of course, just about every identity group issues themselves with G-hats, reserving B-hats for distinct others. One of the problems with the human brain is that it reacts badly to contradiction. Neural pathways short-circuit when we see people with G-hats doing B (bad) – often very bad – things. Most observers will resolve the contradiction in favour of the hat rather than in favour of the observed action. So, if a G-hatted person or institution sky-executes some people, then we rationalise this dissonance by ignoring the action or by presuming that the victims must have been B (effectively converting a grotesque action into a good action). We expect our societal leaders to rise above these forms of neural conflict. Through this kind of dissonance, we both excuse the bad actions of the Good, and fail to acknowledge the good actions of the Bad. (An example of the latter is that, in many contexts, colonisers and their descendants are given B-hats by the descendants of the colonised; and any genuine achievements which may have arisen from a colonised setting are devalued, deamplified, or disregarded.) On the matter of cognitive dissonance, for which my hat explanation is an example, see Social Atrophy on the Rise, France24 26 May 20125, featuring Sarah Stein Lubrano, author of Don't Talk about Politics (published this month). She says: "When people are given new information or new arguments about something about which they already hold beliefs – especially strong beliefs – they experience cognitive dissonance, they feel discomfort between the contradiction between new ideas and existing ideas and this often causes them to re-entrench, to double-down on their existing ideas." Conclusion Some things are so horrible - including inflammatory executions – we cannot compute them. That's no excuse to repeat them. ------------- On Curtis LeMay, my three main sources have been: Richard Overy (2025), Rain of Ruin Malcolm Gladwell (2021), The Bomber Mafia James Scott (2022), Black Snow ------------- Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand. © Scoop Media Keith Rankin Political Economist, Scoop Columnist Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s. Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like. Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.
Asahi Shimbun
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Asahi Shimbun
Hidden motive to honor LeMay, who ordered air raids on Japan
Tokyo lies in ruins after the U.S. firebombing on March 10, 1945. (Asahi Shimbun file photo) In under two decades, U.S. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay went from being called a "brute" in Japan for his actions during World War II to being honored by the Japanese government for his post-war efforts. More than 60 years later, LeMay is back in the news, with a citizens' activist group calling for revocation of his Japanese medal. U.S. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay (From the U.S. Air Force website) LeMay orchestrated the series of massive indiscriminate bombings of Japanese cities near the end of the war. The deadliest was the March 10, 1945, firebombing on Tokyo that claimed an estimated more than 100,000 civilian lives. But LeMay, who was demonized by Japanese media during the war, was awarded a top medal by the Japanese government only 19 years later. Ironically, the reason was for his role in developing Japan's postwar Air Self-Defense Force. DERIDED AS 'BRUTE' LEMAY LeMay was assigned to take charge of the strategic bombing campaign against Japan in January 1945 after he had led bomber missions over German cities. He initially continued with the high-altitude, daytime precision bombing runs targeting mainly military-related targets, including munitions manufacturing facilities, as his predecessor did. But he soon realized that these missions were ineffective due in part to the strong jet stream and poor weather conditions over Japanese islands, carrying bombs away from their intended targets. LeMay switched to indiscriminate low-altitude night bombings by choosing densely populated areas of major cities as targets, causing large numbers of civilian deaths as a consequence. In justifying the massive firebombings, LeMay told his commanders that no war would be winnable without causing deaths among civilian populations, a former U.S. military member who worked for him wrote in a memoir. LeMay, the memoir continued, also said that Japanese civilians working at munitions production facilities were part of their country's war machine. In the Great Tokyo Air Raid, a fleet of some 300 B-29 Superfortress bombers were deployed for the attack that began in the early hours of March 10, raining down a variety of incendiaries on the Japanese capital. Under LeMay's command, his bombers also decimated Osaka, Nagoya and other major cities until Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, 1945. The overall death toll of civilians from these air raids is estimated at 500,000, including those who perished in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and Nagasaki on Aug. 9. Robert McNamara, who served under LeMay during the bombing campaign against Japan and later became U.S. secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, said LeMay's conviction was that a war must be won no matter the cost. In the 2003 documentary 'The Fog of War,' McNamara quoted LeMay as telling his crews following the Tokyo air raid, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' LeMay became a household name among the Japanese population as being the villainous mastermind behind the air raids. 'Brute LeMay, Japanese will not be intimidated by massive bombings' blared the headline of a front-page story on the Tokyo air raid in The Asahi Shimbun's March 13, 1945, edition. In the story, the newspaper called the general a 'man of abnormal character.' In a June 7 article, the Asahi, running his mug shot, said LeMay 'must be licking his lips and be in a frenzy of ecstasy as Tokyo is in flames.' HONORED IN MIDST OF VIETNAM WAR After the war, he rose to chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, the top position of the military branch. Maintaining his hard-line approach in the Vietnam War, LeMay also pushed for a sustained strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam. His decoration by the Japanese government came when he visited Japan in December 1964, two months before his retirement from the military. He was presented the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun at the ASDF's Iruma Air Base in Saitama Prefecture on Dec. 7, 1964. Prime Minister Eisaku Sato's Cabinet approved honoring LeMay three days earlier. According to media reports from the time, Minoru Genda, a member of the Upper House, spearheaded efforts to officially recognize his postwar achievement. Before turning to politics, Genda was a prominent presence in Japan's armed forces. As an Imperial Japanese Navy pilot, he helped plan the attack on Pearl Harbor and subsequently became chief of staff of the ASDF. Senior officials with the then Defense Agency acknowledged LeMay's contributions in terms of the transfer of radar sites and fighter aircraft to Japan after the U.S. occupation ended in 1952. The officials defended the government gesture by citing similar examples of praise, such as for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander for the Allied Powers who presided over the occupation forces in Japan, and other U.S. military senior leaders involved in Japanese affairs. The Japanese media and the Japanese public were largely silent about the matter of honoring LeMay. But the opposition party raised the subject in the Diet. On the very day he was decorated, Hiroichi Tsujihara, a member of the Japan Socialist Party, took the floor of the Lower House Budget Committee to question the government's motives. '(LeMay) was in charge and directly responsible for air raids against our country,' he said. Tsujihara also said LeMay also commanded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 'What is the reason for honoring him, although it runs counter to Japanese people's vehement opposition to nuclear and hydrogen bombs?' he said. In response, Sato remarked: 'The past is the past. It is now natural to leave it behind and recognize his accomplishment in a new situation.' Junya Koizumi, director-general of the Defense Agency, weighed in with support for Sato. 'It is meant to give credit to a host of remarkable contributions he made in the postwar years to the ASDF,' said Koizumi, father of future Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. 'This should be separated from the war-related issues.' The defense chief continued: 'LeMay did not have direct oversight for forces dropping the atomic bombs as he was assigned to a new task prior to the atomic bombings.' LeMay died at the age of 83 in 1990. CENSORSHIP LESSENED PUBLIC OUTRAGE Against the backdrop of the government's controversial award is that in the postwar years, both Tokyo and Washington had tried to gloss over the atrocities committed by the U.S. military against Japanese civilians, according to Nobuo Kamioka, professor of American literature at Gakushuin University. Kamioka published a biography on LeMay, 'Tokyo Daikushu wo Shikishita Otoko Curtis LeMay,' (Curtis LeMay, the man who orchestrated the Great Tokyo Air Raid), in February. The General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers imposed a press code during its seven-year occupation. Japanese news media were strictly forbidden to print or broadcast reports critical of the U.S. authorities and other allied powers, as well as the U.S. military's brutalities. The heavy censorship, as a result, took survivors of the wartime horrors many years to become fully aware of the Japanese government's responsibility for the destruction and suffering and translate their anger into a crusade calling for state compensation and relief measures. Hibakusha formed the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Suffers Organizations as late as in 1956 after the horror of nuclear weapons was thrust into public consciousness anew by the tragedy of the Japanese No. 5 Lucky Dragon tuna boat. The boat, with 23 fishermen aboard, was exposed to the radioactive fallout from a U.S. hydrogen bomb test conducted at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in March 1954. One crew member died of radiation sickness six months later while others were admitted to hospitals to treat symptoms of acute radiation syndrome. The confederation, known as Nihon Hidankyo, received the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. More than a quarter-century after they were victimized, firebomb survivors set up the Japan air raid victim liaison committee to press for state compensation in 1972. While LeMay directed and implemented the incendiary attacks against Japanese cities, his role in the nuclear attacks was simply to see the bombing forces take off to the targeted cities. LeMay, however, was condemned in Japan as the mastermind of the atomic bombing rather than the air raids. It is partly because Japanese at the time did not realize the full extent of the devastation caused by the firebombings. 'In consequence, since the air raids did not spark a huge controversy in Japan, it enabled the U.S. military to launch heavy aerial bombing campaigns in the Korean War and Vietnam War,' Kamioka said. He said decorating LeMay may have sent the wrong message to the world. 'It could have been taken by the international community that Japan accepted his wartime actions and is grateful,' he said. But the question of honoring LeMay was revisited recently by a peace advocacy group. The group, called Gamafuya, submitted to the government a petition calling for revocation of the honor on March 10, the 80th anniversary of the Great Tokyo Air Raid. 'Decorating LeMay by the Japanese government is tantamount to endorsing the massacre of its own people,' said a representative of the group, which is based in Okinawa Prefecture. An official with the Cabinet Office, which has jurisdiction over laws related to the selection of honorees, replied that the official record cites LeMay's contributions to the ASDF and nothing else. 'Unless new facts emerge to challenge the basis for the citation, there will be no further debate on the issue,' the official said.
Wall Street Journal
13-03-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
‘Rain of Ruin' Review: Fire From the Skies
Of the lingering controversies of World War II, perhaps the most intensely debated is America's bombing of Japan's cities. The two most dramatic forms—the firebombing raids in the spring of 1945, which killed more than a quarter-million civilians, and the better-known atomic bombings that summer—pitted morality against necessity as both sides groped for a way to end the war on acceptable terms. The air campaigns have been covered from many angles in recent books. Malcolm Gladwell's 'The Bomber Mafia' (2021) focuses on the apostles of strategic bombing, notably Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, the chief architect of the firebombings. James M. Scott's brilliant 'Black Snow' (2022) balances America's drive to end the war against heartrending stories of ordinary Japanese citizens caught in the bombsights. Max Hastings's 'Retribution' (2007) frames the bombings in the context of the wider war for Asia. In 'Rain of Ruin' Richard Overy, a British historian whose books include 'The Dictators' (2004), distills the atomic bombing campaign—and its precursor, the incendiary strikes—into a single moral issue. As he writes, 'The question asked is usually 'was it necessary?'; the question, however, should really be 'why was it thought to be necessary at the time?'' The strategy of scorching densely populated cities wasn't the initiative of a single, bloody-minded general of the Strangelove stripe. 'Area bombing' of urban centers—a shift from pinpoint bombing of factories and military targets—had been studied by the U.S. Army Air Forces since 1943. The Office of Strategic Services analyzed Japan's urban demographics to find areas most vulnerable to fire. Air Forces analysts dissected the results of Britain's carpet bombing of German cities, and a replica village of typical Japanese homes was erected in a Utah desert to test the effects of napalm attacks.
