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Historical Indictment

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I hope to have supplied solid and specific evidence across an integrated case that stands like a tripod on three points: 1) That the United States, in knowing violation of existing international law and the principles declared by the United States's leaders as late as 1939, developed air war tactics and strategies that hinged on large-scale attacks on civilian populations; 2) That the U.S. Army Air Force, under the command of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, General George C. Marshall, General Henry Harold "Hap" Arnold, and General Curtis LeMay, did, with malice aforethought, carry out the most extreme of these doctrines, the Fascist Douhet all-in-one "punishment," "denial" and "decapitation" strategy of destroying entire key cities and all living things in them, and 3) That this knowing leadership, with a visibly guilty conscience, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff though the information control bureaucracy of the Office of War Information and its Bureau of Motion Pictures, did lie about these crimes by intentionally mis-representing them as legitimate military operations. Hollywood's dream factories contributed mightily to the third leg of this tripod.

The indictment presented here places a large part of the blame on the Los Angeles-based propaganda machines that both promoted and covered-up the war crimes, knowingly. And it also tasks the Los Angeles metropolis with a finite portion of this culpability. I leave it now for readers to agree or disagree, with the hope that this discussion will soon escape the pages of scholarly publications like this one, and hundreds produced since Martin Sherwin's landmark text, A World Destroyed, of 1975. But I also should point out that I have departed with several of these scholars, especially by contesting Dower's thesis that World War II was responsible for converting the formerly unthinkable to the thinkable. I contend that the unthinkable was already being planned as early as the 1920s, and that the United States embraced the inhumane doctrines of fascist states when it began to plan urban area bombing as a war-winning strategy. These crimes have only been denied and covered up. Even Robert McNamara's confession is insufficient, grounded as it is in the dangerous lie that commanders lost their moral compass. Those responsible have not been called to account, and until they are the spirits of the dead will be restless and those of the living will never enjoy a just peace.

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