Opinion: 75 Years On, Remember Hiroshima And Nagasaki. But Remember Toyama Too

НОВОРОССИЯ.RU
01 Авг 2020, 15:36

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A photograph showing Toyama, Japan, aflame after the U.S. attack on Aug. 1, 1945. Most of the city’s population was left homeless.

U.S. Army Air Forces

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U.S. Army Air Forces

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An aerial view of Tokyo shows destruction after American bombardment in 1945.

Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

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Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

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A U.S. map from Impact, a wartime government magazine produced for the Army Air Forces, highlights the extent of destruction to Japanese cities by showing dozens of American cities with comparable populations.

Impact via Curtis LeMay Papers/Library of Congress

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Impact via Curtis LeMay Papers/Library of Congress

In total, 8,000 sorties dropped roughly 54,000 tons of incendiary bombs on 66 cities, killing (by conservative estimates) about 180,000 people. The attacks burned 76 square miles of urban Japan to the ground.

To bring home the extent of the destruction, one postwar report by a government magazine included a U.S. map showing dozens of American cities with comparable populations, asking the reader to imagine (as in the case of Toyama) the incineration of 96.5% of Chattanooga, Tenn.

Still, there were sensitivities to potential criticism from the American public, so AAF officials commonly used sanitizing language to mask the fact that they were targeting entire cities for destruction. Press releases described attacks not on cities, but on «industrial urban areas.» Tactical reports set their sights not on densely populated neighborhoods, but on «worker housing.»

In the privacy of briefing rooms, AAF officials made no bones about the fact that they were targeting residential areas and civilian populations. Publicly, however, they went to great pains to cast Japanese cities as singularly military or industrial in composition.

Toyama is a case in point. Although planners highlighted the city’s industrial sites, maps distributed to flight crews led directly to the residential city center. By dawn, Toyama’s schools, shrines, hospitals, and neighborhoods lay in ruins. Left unscathed were the war-related factories just outside the city.

Carl Spaatz, the commanding general of the newly christened U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, handwrote an amendment to a press communique on the bombings of Toyama and three other small cities to emphasize that bombers struck «industrial areas» rather than the entirety of each city.

While the scale of Toyama’s destruction was extraordinary, the planning and prosecution of this raid was business as usual. In the parlance of American flight crews, the firebombing of this city was just another «milk run» — an act by then so commonplace it was akin to a local neighborhood delivery.

With major newspapers and magazines regularly running stories detailing such urban destruction, the American public on the eve of the atomic bombings had come to see the burning of Japan’s cities as part and parcel of the war.

If this firebombing campaign shaped public perceptions of what constituted an acceptable target, it also played a part in bringing the war to an end. While historians have rightly emphasized the atomic bombings and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan as decisive inflection points, we should not forget that incendiary raids continued until the penultimate day of the war.

The Japanese state had utterly failed to protect its urban population. As the number of homeless ballooned into the millions, officials feared widespread domestic unrest. A multitude of interlocking factors figured into the calculus of Japan’s surrender, and the cumulative effects of these incendiary raids were among them.

This August, remembering the incineration of Toyama and other smaller Japanese cities allows us to arrive at a fuller understanding not only of the course of the Pacific War, but also the evolution of American air power at the dawn of the nuclear age.

We also find a reminder of the ease with which proclamations of the intent to protect civilians during war can mutate into an embrace of attacking the cities in which they reside.

Barely five years after the surrender of Japan — during the Korean War — the U.S. once more abandoned its stated commitment to refrain from attacking civilians, designating North Korean cities and towns as «main bombing targets.»

As the world pauses this month to reflect on the past, present and future of nuclear weapons, we might also take a moment to think more critically about how cities are rendered into targets.