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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.
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Remains of captured WWII U.S. airman identified as Cpl. Glenn Hodak
March 27 (UPI) -- Forensics investigators identified the remains of U.S. Army Air Forces Cpl. Glenn Hodak nearly 80 years after his B-29 bomber was shot down over Tokyo in March 1945. Hodak, 23, was from Cambridge Springs, Pa., and a gunner aboard a B-29 Superfortress bomber when it was shot down during a mission over Tokyo, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced Wednesday. Hodak served in the 93rd Bombardment Squadron, 19th Bombardment Group and was listed as missing in action after his crew's B-29 went down. Post-war investigators learned Hodak survived the bombing mission and was held as a prisoner of war until dying in a Tokyo Military Prison fire on May 26, 1945. The U.S. Army Air Force caused the fire when it launched "Operation Meetinghouse" that sent more than 275 B-29 bombers over Tokyo to drop 1,667 tons of incendiary bombs during the largest firebombing mission in the Pacific Theater on March 9, 1945. The raid used 500-pound cluster bombs, each of which contained 38 M69 bomblets containing napalm that was ignited by white phosphorus, reported. The air raid caused the greatest amount of destruction of any bombing raid during World War II, including the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the war. "The chosen areas were saturated, [and] 15 square miles of Tokyo's most densely populated area were burned to the ground" by the resulting firestorm, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey on the Pacific War reported in 1946. The raid killed between 80,000 and 100,000 Japanese people and many POWs, including Hodak. The U.S. Army Air Forces repeated similar raids over Tokyo and other heavily populated Japanese cities. "If we lose, we'll be tried as war criminals," Commanding officer Gen. Curtis LeMay said as the Japan's civilian death toll mounted due to the repeated fire bombings. Hodak's remains were not immediately recovered or identified following Japan's surrender on Sept. 2, 1945, but American Graves Registration Service personnel searched for and recovered the remains of U.S. service members throughout the Pacific Theater. AGRS personnel recovered 62 sets of remains from the Tokyo Military Prison in early 1946 and identified the remains of 25 service members. Hodak's remains were among 39 sets that were unidentified and eventually interred among unknowns at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in 2022 disinterred the remains of the 39 unknowns and subjected them to modern forensics testing, including DNA analysis. Investigators also examined dental records and prison reports compiled in Japan and from the memories of other U.S. military personnel who were transferred from the Tokyo Military Prison prior to its destruction. Hodak's remains were positively identified on Sept. 25, 2024, but the announcement of the discovery was delayed pending notification and receipt of his remains by his family. Hodak will be buried in Spring Creek, Pa., in May and is one of two service members whose remains were identified since 2022, CBS News reported.
South China Morning Post
13-03-2025
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
Activist demands Japan revoke award for US general behind 500,000 deaths in WWII
A peace activist has demanded Japan revoke a post-war honour bestowed on Curtis LeMay, the late US air force chief who masterminded the firebombing of the country's cities that resulted in an estimated 500,000 deaths during the closing stages of World War II. Advertisement Gushiken Takamatsu, founder of the Gamafuya group, submitted a petition to the Cabinet Office in Tokyo on Monday, the 80th anniversary of 'Operation Meetinghouse' involving US B-29 bombers which killed 100,000 civilians in the Japanese capital. 'LeMay's bombers dropped firebombs that killed 100,000 people,' Takamatsu told This Week in Asia. 'I cannot help but ask why the Japanese government later thought it was appropriate to give him an official award.' The officer received the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun accolade in 1964 for helping to rebuild Japan's Air Self-Defence Force in the years after its surrender. Takamatsu, who has for more than 40 years been searching the countless caves in his native Okinawa to recover the bones of about 150,000 victims of the fierce battle for the islands, said LeMay did not deserve the medal and it should be 'taken away'. Advertisement 'No one can understand why he was recognised in this way,' he said. 'Even people in the Japanese military say they cannot understand it. I strongly believe that he should never have been given the award'.
