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CounterPunch
March 5,
2003
On the Winning Side
Curtis LeMay's
Brand of Hell
By MICKEY Z.
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 Saving
Private Power: The Hidden History of "The Good War"
on which this article is based. He can be reached at: mzx2@earthlink.net.
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