| content | sioc:content | This set of linked stories maps the sources, execution, and cover-up of the most serious war crime committed by United States forces during the Second World War: the anti-civilian incendiary firebombing campaign against undefended Japanese cities from February of 1944 to August of 1945. Each of the short segments comprising this essay is a focused examination of the interlinked episodes that together explain a very large political-military-industrial-propaganda operation. The essay begins with an indictment of the final phase of this war crime, and then re-winds the clock to the 1920s, when American "air war doctrine" was first developed, narrating key steps along the way that led to the ruthless, genocidal campaign against urban areas: the deliberate targeting and killing at least 500,000 noncombatant civilians through the use of napalm incendiary weapons on a gargantuan scale, long before, and for days after, the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These actions were made knowingly in defiance of the 1907 Hague Convention, to which the United States is a signatory, and knowingly against widely-recognized standards of civilian immunity--standards that President Roosevelt affirmed in 1940 in his appeal to all belligerents not to bomb urban centers after the Nazi invasion of Poland, when the Nazi invasion of France became immanent. The decision to firebomb civilians was made in rejection of appeals by Generals Eisenhower and Doolittle when the operational plans became clear to them in late 1944. The unthinkable crime of slaughtering civilians indiscriminately with jellied gasoline become thinkable and operational under the command of President Franklin Roosevelt, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General of the Air Force Henry Harley "Hap" Arnold, and General of the 20th Bomber Command, Curtis LeMay. All Americans must come to terms with these actions, and hold their nation in some way accountable, just as it insists on bringing war criminals of later times to justice today. Until we do, the United States will remain severely
I undertook the historical indictment presented here as a result of investigating the role of Los Angels in the military victories of the Second World War. As the headquarters of both the aircraft industry and the propaganda operations of the United States in the 1940s, I set out to map the overall contribution of this one metropolis to the war. As this essay seeks to show, the massive war-production center of Los Angeles produced some of the most successful and effective warplanes on the battlefronts of the global war: especially the B-17 heavy bomber and the P-51 Mustang fighter. The B-29, which was much more advanced technologically than the B-17, carried out the firebombing attacks and dropped the two atomic weapons on Japan, was not built in Los Angeles, although much of its technology had been developed there. While the Los Angeles-built B-17s contributed mightily to the defeat of the Axis powers in Europe, the city's leading contribution to the final phases of the Pacific War was that of Hollywood, in the knowing fabrication of false propaganda to cover-up the war crimes agains Japanese civilians. |
