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Target Tokyo: Los Angeles and Accountability for U.S. War Crimes in Europe and Japan, 1943-1945

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This essay recounts the role and accountability of Los Angeles in the aerial bombardment attacks on civilians during World War II.  It is about an appalling episode in the city's rise to global power.  The greatest evil of the twentieth century was the mass killing of civilian noncombatants, in genocides that range in form from the Nazi Holocaust, to Stalin's famines, to the UK's terror-bombing campaign against German cities. The United States committed its own version of these atrocities in the firebombing and atomic bombing of Japanese cities from 1944-1945.  All cases of mass civilian slaughter demand detailed historical investigation, as international tribunals, truth and reconciliation commissions, and Holocaust and genocide studies have made clear.  In this case, an urban history of Los Angeles is also an indictment for a war crime: the deliberate killing of more than one million noncombatant civilians using incendiary and atomic weapons. (Acknowledgments). 

This essay is integral to Ghost Metropolis, and also a contribution to to the documentation of a particular U.S. war crime.  It argues that Los Angeles contributed to the atrocities committed against the cities of Japan in three direct ways: 1) The fury of Los Angeles's own race wars and spatial apartheid generated a major source of racial hatred. Home to the U.S. mainland's largest Issei and Nisei Japanese communities, Los Angeles's ruling regime practiced extreme race hatred within a California-wide Anti-Japanese movement that dated from at least 1906;  2) Los Angeles took the lead in the production of cinematic propaganda to support a veritable race war.  Los Angeles's "pulp fascism," was a major source of American racist ideology that justified aerial genocide in Japan. Specifically and directly, U.S. Government censorship officials, with the collusion of Hollywood writers and producers, knew about, but suppressed the truth about civilian targeting and manufactured a cover-up story; and 3) Los Angeles led in the production of the very warplanes that carried out the attacks on civilians.  But this, the most obviously "direct" contribution, was actually the least culpable. Workers have no control over the military uses of the equipment that they produce.  The choice of target by commanders is culpable, and the choice to lie about the crime is culpable.

The aerial anti-civilian attacks on Japan were intentional war crimes, committed with malace aforethought and accomplished by many key, indispensable actions that took place in Los Angeles. Southern Californians contributed very significantly to this outcome. If not for the actions of Angelenos, the war crime may not have been committed.   As with any crime, its moral after-effects have lingered ever since, haunting the living downstream with upstream injustices.

 

This page has paths:

  1. Air , Space, and Cinematic Power: Los Angeles the Military-Industrial Capital of the 20th Century Phil Ethington

Contents of this path:

  1. The Air War Crisis of 1936-1939
  2. The War Crime, 1944-45
  3. Fascist and American Air War Doctrine, 1920-1930s
  4. The Doolittle Raid of 18 April 1942
  5. Aerial Bombing with B-17s in Europe, 1942-1944
  6. "New Fire Bombs Created to Burn Jap Villages": U.S. Planning to Burn Civilians Alive with Napalm, 1942-1944
  7. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, 1943-44
  8. The American turn to Terrorism: Curtis LeMay, Carl Spaatz,Jimmy Doolittle, and the RAF Terror Campaign
  9. Urban Ovens: Burning Japanese Civilians on an Industrial Scale, 1944-5
  10. Undefended Cities
  11. "Central Directives": U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) Disinformation Campaign about Area Bombing, 1944-1945
  12. Hollywood's Contribution to the Area-Bombing Cover-up, 1942-1945
  13. "We Kill'em with Fil'm": Target Tokyo, Narrated by Ronald Reagan (OWI-USAAF First Motion Picture Unit, 1945)
  14. War Birds Coming Home To Roost: The Repressed Image of Los Angeles as Aerial Target
  15. Historical Indictment

This page has tags:

  1. Timeline Page Test Aida Jesse Rogers

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