ALWAYS BURN AND BOIL BEFORE NUKING
By James Ryan Christopher Nolan’s stupendous film, Oppemheimer, opened nationwide on Friday, July 20, 2023. It was symbolically appropriate that each showing hung on the screen for three hours. It is the story of the birth of “The Bomb,” that holds our earthlings captive today. It is the story of Julius Robert Oppenheimer, a genius, the head of the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Bomb’s study group of geniuses. That their motive was Japan is ludicrous. Japan was earlier finished due to the efforts of two men, Robert Strange McNamara and Curtis Emerson LeMay. Their grim story follows. *** McNamara continued his work with LeMay in the Pacific Theater headquartered in the Mariana Islands. So successful were McNamara’s analyses and recommendations regarding low-level bombing campaigns in Europe that they were adopted by LeMay for his pre-atomic-bomb fire-bombing spree on civilian population centers in Japan. War-making through incendiary bombing became a hell for the Japanese. Without McNamara’s work on low-level bombing, the incendiary attacks may not have happened given the wide, inaccurate dispersion of incendiary bombs. Although given the aggressiveness of LeMay, who decades later would propose nuclear first-strikes on Cuba and the Soviet Union, it probably would have made no difference. The bombing campaign began on the night of 9-10 March 1945 with the low-level incendiary attack on Tokyo. (Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, the other three largest cities, also made of wood, would later be set ablaze.) At an after-action interrogation with returning crews, one angry, young captain, concerned about his crew’s safety, rose, faced LeMay and McNamara, and asked, “I would like to know which son of a bitch ordered taking this wonderful airplane (the B-29) down from the 20,000-foot level to the 7,000-foot level?” He added that he had lost his wingman because of the low-altitude approach. LeMay jumped to his feet. He said that the captain was correct. “As we brought the airplane down from high altitude to low altitude, we expected the losses to increase, but the losses were still very low.” Then came the clincher, which was pure McNamara-speak. “But, Captain,” said LeMay, “for the per unit of target destruction, the losses are minimal.”[i] Minimal? McNamara agreed. He thought that even though the percentage loss rate rose to 4 percent compared to 1.5 percent from high-altitude bombing (three times greater), losses were also “minimal.” Minimal was never defined, high per-unit target destruction being the only objective. The downed wingman’s crew of ten wouldn’t really be a factor, nor were the crews of the other fourteen planes that were dropped by a weak, mostly nonexistent Japanese air defense system. It was not just a turkey-shoot; it was an immolation, a holocaust. *** At midnight, 9-10 March 1945, 279 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses dropped 1,667 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo. To assure devastation, they attacked in low-level altitude bands from 5,000 to 7,000 feet. Fourteen planes were lost, 5 percent of the attacking force. It was higher than McNamara’s guesstimate of 4 percent. Nineteen B-29s turned back, an abort rate of 7 percent, low, but still unacceptable by LeMay’s standards. Overall, ninety-six airmen had perished. No “son of a bitch” ever stepped forward to acknowledge even minimal responsibility for the “minimal” loss of life due to the low-level altitude of attack. It is notable that when General LeMay rose to address the young captain who had just lost his wingman, he gave solace by speaking of “losses per unit of target destruction.” This caused McNamara to render another accolade: “This is why I believe LeMay to be the best commander.” Sven Lindqvist’s stunning book A History of Bombing captures the true horror that LeMay and McNamara inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. Robert Guillain, an eyewitness, wrote: The fragile houses immediately went up in flames, and screaming families fled their homes, babies on their backs, only to find the street blocked by a wall of fire. They caught flame in the firestorm, turned into living torches and disappeared. People threw themselves into the canals and submerged themselves until only their mouths were above the surface. They suffocated by the thousands from the smoke and lack of oxygen. In other canals the water got so hot that the people were boiled alive.[ii] Low-attitude attacks—on average 7,000 feet—allowed heavier payloads of incendiaries. Due to the absence of Japanese resistance, and to maximize the incendiary bomb payload, LeMay had removed all machine guns from the B-29s. He continued the attacks throughout Japan for the next five months. Results? Sixty-six cities, mostly destroyed. Tokyo, the most densely populated city, lost 85,000 people in the first ferocious firestorm. Nine thousand tons of incendiaries destroyed thirty-one square miles of the remaining three principal cities—Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe. Overall, the destruction and death from the fire-bombing campaign was greater than that caused by either of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here is LeMay’s proud reaction to his (and McNamara’s) reign of terror: We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.[iii] Nine hundred thousand Japanese people were killed by the American bombing campaign during the last year of the war. More than 9.5 million were injured; over 8.5 million people evacuated the cities. So many bodies, countless, even for statisticians like McNamara’s gang. By now, one might draw an inference about where McNamara got inspiration for his fallacious body-count program, so shamelessly (and hopelessly) applied in Vietnam. But as for burning Japan, he, and his fellow “war consultants” had become hot topics. Having done their job extraordinarily well, LeMay was pleased. As for the war, its end was nearing. As Colonel Cathcart reminded the chaplain in Catch-22, “Your job is to lead us in prayer, and from now on you’re going to lead us in prayer for a tighter bomb pattern before every mission.” Tightening bomb patterns was right up McNamara’s analytical alley. Tightening bomb patterns, that was his statistical prayer. Five months after the fire-bombing of Japan came the total destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the disastrous endgame had ended. So, too, came the apparent end for the bombers and those two premier bombsters, Robert S. McNamara and Curtis E. LeMay. At last, the ravaged curtain fell on another war-to-end-all-wars, as Vera Lynn sang: We’ll meet again / Don’t know where / Don’t know when… And the general and his adoring colonel strode boldly into the wings. LeMay reserved his deadliest exeunt line for twenty years later. “We should bomb them into the stone age.” [iv] Thus came Vietnam. All the bombing, the blood, the fire, the death, the destruction, all those deadly enumerations can hurt a person. Can one’s soul detach from bombing millions of people to their death? Midlife destruction breeds post-traumatic guilt, all the syndromes come, a reflexive mental tic, a tic that can doom minds and let violence reign unchecked in the name of God and country. Not to worry. Now, a generation later, presidents of the United States can direct drones to murder leaders of the assumed enemy in an undeclared, illegal war. Imagine that, the presidents have been committing crimes with their fancy new weapons. And no one has said…BOO! There, I said it. And the United States has coaxed Japan to rearm against another new enemy, China. And let’s not mention Russia. Enough! Parden me but which of us all have failed better? Get it? This is an adapted excerpt from James Ryan’s book What Abides: West Point in Afterthought [i] George M. Watson and Herman S. Wolk, Air Power History, “Whiz Kid: Robert S. McNamara’s World War II Service,” Vol. 50, No 4, Winter 2003, 7-7. [ii] Sven Lindquist, A History of Bombing, Granta Books, London, 2002, 224. [iii] Nicholas D. Kristof, “Tokyo Journal; Stoically, Japan Looks Back on the Flames of War, The New York Times, March 9, 1995. [iv] David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, Penguin Books, New York, 1972. 560.
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