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Undefended Cities

677

In stark contrast to the heavy losses suffered at the hands of German fighter defense in the Combined Bomber Offensive runs against Germany, the Japanese had so few fighter aircraft that the B-29s were expected to encounter no effective air defense. General LeMay felt so confident about the ineffectiveness of even the ground-based anti-aircraft guns, that he convinced General Arnold to let him strip the B-29s of nearly all defensive armament, in order to achieve a higher payload of incendiaries.

As Craven and Cate write in their official U.S. Army Air Force history of this campaign, test runs had found fighter defense to be "nil" and "the added bomb weight that could be carried in lieu of an average load of 8,000 rounds of machine-gun shells would be about 3,200 pounds, an appreciable increment." (Craven and Cate 1948-51, vol 5: p. 613). The official US Army Air Force history by Wesley Craven and James Cate describes the typical offensive preparation of a B-29 after LeMay's modifications in light of the undefended condition of his civilian targets:

"With planes bombing individually from low altitudes, bomb loads could be sharply increased, to an average of about six tons per plane. Lead squadron B-29's carried 180 x 70-pound M47's, napalm-filled bombs calculated to start "appliance fires," that is, fires requiring attention of motorized fire-fighting equipment. Other planes, bombing on these pathfinders, were loaded with 24 x 500-pound clusters of M69's" Craven and Cate 1948-51, vol 5: 613).

Moral justifications for the violation for the 1907 Hague Convention and of the United State's own declarations against the bombing of civilians in the Air War Crisis of 1937-39, began with the principal alibi used by the perpetrators: that Japanese residential dwellings were also industrial shops. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many familiar ones were added: Truman claimed that he ordered the nuclear attacks in order to shorten the war and save American and Japanese lives. Robert McNamara claimed that all belligerents lost a sense of the rules of war, that in effect everyone turned into a war criminal. His commander, General LeMay, simply admitted that he committed war crimes. The facts gathered in this essay establish several very damning facts: A) That McNamara was wrong: Many American commanders (Doolittle, Eaker) knew quite certainly that urban area bombing was inhumane and wrong; B) That The Joint Chiefs had full knowledge of anti-residential Napalm development. The M-69, and the Bat-Bombs, are intrinsically inhumane and indiscriminate. The officers in charge of the Dugway tests were certainly engaged in malice aforethought: testing incendiaries only against purely residential structures. C) American commanders were fully aware that Japanese cities were undefended. D) As we have seen, the US Strategic Bombing Survey coldly assessed the indiscriminate nature of the majority of attacks by the XX and XXI Bomber Commands, counting 800,000 civilians killed and 8.4 million displaced.

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