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GENERAL CURTIS LEMAYS B-29S OVER JAPAN

Discussion in 'Air War in the Pacific' started by gusord, May 27, 2012.

  1. LRusso216

    LRusso216 Graybeard Staff Member

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    I wonder what the result of the firebombing would have been if the Japanese had any kind of trained firefighters? I read somewhere, but I can't remember where, that there was very little fire fighting equipment available. There was also a severe shortage of people whose main mission was fighting fires. I suppose LeMay's decision to firebomb Tokyo wouldn't have made much difference on the ground, but it's another thing to think about.
     
  2. Takao

    Takao Ace

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    There was and there wasn't. By 1944-45, the equipment was in a poor state of repair, with an average of 20% being out of service at any given time, and with no back-ups to replace out-of-service equipment. Having more equipment would not have helped, since with the ongoing fuel crisis, fire trucks were only given about 2 hours worth of fuel - later this was increased to 5 hours, but even still, it posed quite a problem. Many trucks were lost simply because they had run out of fuel and could not be moved out of the path of the approaching fires. So more equipment does not necessarily translate into Japanese fire companies being able to more effectively fight fires.

    Training too, posed a problem, the numbers of Tokyo's firefighters had quadrupled from a peacetime level of 2,000 to over 8,000 during the war(with almost 3,000 being junior firemen). Efforts were made to raise this level to 12,500, but manpower shortages prevented that.

    If your interested, look into acquiring a used copy of "Fire and the Air War: A Compilation Of Expert Observations On Fires Of The War Set By Incendiaries And The Atomic Bombs, Wartime Fire Fighting, And The Work Of The Fire Protection Engineers Who Helped Plan And The Destruction Of Enemy Cities And Industrial Plants." by Horatio Bond. It covers British, German, and Japanese firefighting efforts and equipment during World War II.
     
  3. PA.Dutchman

    PA.Dutchman recruit

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    Check this site out and read all the entries our opinion of the Japanese as a civilized cultural country will change. My father was at Hickam on 12/7/1941 lost a number of friends seconds into WORLD WAR TWO IN THE PACIFIC.

    http://home.comcast.net/~winjerd/Page01.htm#Index

    My father told us how they were shown smuggled films from Nanjing China and what the Japanese did to the POWS and citizens of China. They were told THIS IS WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT AND WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE WE ARE GOING INTO THE PACIFIC TO FIGHT. Two Japanese LTs had a contest to see who could cut the most POWS head off, one tried to split the Chinese POW down the middle and damaged his sword. Pop said how they tied up Chinese POWs and used them for live living bayonet dummies. Many were buried alive to save on bullets, burned alive and on and on. Women from 8 to 80 were raped to death even younger.

    A quiet honesty records a World War II atrocity

    Thomas Easton

    Tokyo Bureau of The Sun

    Published on Sunday, May 28, 1995 (C)1995 The Baltimore Sun

    FUKUOKA, JAPAN -- "I could never again wear a white smock," says Dr. Toshio Tono, dressed in a white running jacket at his hospital and recalling events of 50 years ago. "It's because the prisoners thought that we were doctors, since they could see the white smocks, that they didn't struggle. They never dreamed they would be dissected."

    The prisoners were eight American airmen, knocked out of the sky over southern Japan during the waning months of World War II, and then torn apart organ by organ while they were still alive.

    What occurred here 50 years ago this month, at the anatomy department of Kyushu University, has been largely forgotten in Japan and is virtually unknown in the United States. American prisoners of war were subjected to horrific medical experiments. All of the prisoners died. Most of the physicians and assistants then did their best to hide the evidence of what they had done.

    Fukuoka is midway between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which are planning elaborate ceremonies to mark the devastation caused by the United States dropping the first atomic bombs. But neither Fukuoka nor the university plans to mark its own moment of infamy.

    The gruesome experiments performed at the university were variations on research programs Japan conducted in territories it occupied during the war. In the most notorious of these efforts, the Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731 killed thousands of Chinese and Russians held prisoner in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, in experiments to develop chemical and biological weapons.

    Ken Yuasa, now a frail, 70-year-old physician in Tokyo, belonged to a military company stationed just south of Unit 731's base at Harbin, Manchuria. He recalls joining other doctors to watch as a prisoner was shot in the stomach, to give Japanese surgeons practice at extracting bullets.

    While the victim was still alive, the doctors also practiced amputations.

    "It wasn't just my experience," Dr. Yuasa says. "It was done everywhere." Kyushu University stands out as the only site where Americans were incontrovertibly used in dissections and the only known site where experiments were done in Japan.

    Today, the anatomy building at the university sits on a weedy lot, almost lost on an austere, modern campus of concrete and brick. No marker tells what the building is or what it was. A thick layer of dust covers the floors inside.

    All memory of what occurred here in the waning days of the war might have decayed with the lab were it not for a small number of people who have kept its history alive.

    One of them is Dr. Tono. As a medical assistant, he took part in several of the human vivisections, and he spent the 1960s and 1970s examining records and roaming the hills to piece together a full account. Against the advice of his colleagues, he published his findings in a book he entitled "Disgrace."

    "Doctors asked me, 'Why did you have to disclose it?' " Dr. Tono says now. "You weren't supposed to admit what happened during the war."

    On May 5, 1945, an American B-29 bomber was flying with a dozen other aircraft after bombing Tachiarai Air Base in southwestern Japan and beginning the return flight to the island fortress of Guam.Kinzou Kasuya, a 19-year-old Japanese pilot flying one of the Japanese fighters in pursuit of the Americans, rammed his aircraft into the fuselage of the B-29, destroying both planes.

    No one knows for certain how many Americans were in the B-29; its crew had been hastily assembled on Guam.

    But villagers in Japan who witnessed the collision in the air saw about a dozen parachutes blossom.

    One of the Americans died when the cords of his parachute were severed by another Japanese plane. A second was alive when he reached the ground. He shot all but his last bullet at the villagers coming toward him, then used the last on himself.

    Two others were quickly stabbed or shot to death, according to Toshio Kai, a high school teacher who has spent years following up the leads in Dr. Tono's book.
    At least nine were taken into custody.

    B-29 crews were despised for the grim results of their raids. So some of the captives were beaten.

    The local authorities assumed that the most knowledgeable was the captain, Marvin S. Watkins. He was sent to Tokyo for interrogation, where he would be tortured but would nonetheless survive the war.

    The doctor and the colonel

    Every available account asserts that a military physician and a colonel in a local regiment were the two key figures in what happened next. What happened can not be easily explained. Perhaps caring for the Americans was an impossible burden, especially since some were injured. Perhaps food was scarce.

    Whatever the reason, the colonel and doctor decided to make the prisoners available for medical experiments, and Kyushu University became a willing participant.

    Teddy J. Ponczka was the first to be handed over to the doctors and their assistants. He had already been stabbed, in either his right shoulder or his chest. According to Dr. Tono, the American assumed he was about to be treated for the wound when he was taken to an operating room.

    But the incision went far deeper. A doctor wanted to test surgery's effects on the respiratory system, so one lung was removed. The wound was stitched closed.

    How Teddy Ponczka died is in dispute. According to U.S. military records, he was anesthetized during the operation, and then the gas mask was removed from his face. A surgeon, Taro Torisu, reopened the incision and reached into Ponczka's chest. In the bland words of the military report, Torisu "stopped the heart action."

    Dr. Tono remembers events differently. The first experiment was followed by a second, he says. Ponczka was given intravenous injections of sea water, to determine if sea water could be used as a substitute for sterile saline solution, used to increase blood volume in the wounded or those in shock. Dr. Tono held the bottle of sea water. He says Ponczka bled to death.

    Then it was the turn of the other Americans.

    The Japanese wanted to learn whether a patient could survive the partial loss of his liver. They wanted to learn if epilepsy could be controlled by removing part of the brain. There were further intravenous injections of sea water, and every time the result was the same. All the Americans died.

    "There was no debate among the doctors about whether to do the operations -- that is what made it so strange," Dr. Tono says. It was, he says, the mood of the times.

    The remains of the soldiers were at first preserved in formaldehyde, the better to be studied by anatomy students. There were second thoughts when Japan surrendered to the United States in August 1945.

    Some of the people involved began to worry about the consequences of having performed the experiments. The body parts were disposed of, records destroyed and stories concocted to mask what had been done.

    But word of the experiments eventually leaked out, apparently through foreign students who had been at the university. There were arrests. In 1946, one of the surgeons killed himself in jail.

    Thirty people -- some military, the others from Kyushu University -- were brought to trial by an Allied war crimes tribunal in Yokohama, Japan, on March 11, 1948. Charges included vivisection, wrongful removal of body parts and cannibalism -- based on reports that the experimenters had eaten the livers of the Americans.

    Of the 30 defendants, 23 were found guilty of various charges. (For lack of proof, the charges of cannibalism had been dismissed.) Five of the guilty were sentenced to death, four to life imprisonment. The other 14 were sentenced to shorter terms.

    A loss of interest

    But the attitude of the American occupation forces began to change -- largely because of the start of the Korean War in June 1950. The United States had less interest in punishing Japan, an enemy-turned-ally.

    Thus, in September 1950, U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, as supreme commander for Allied Forces, reduced most of the sentences.

    By 1958, all of those convicted were free. None of the death sentences was carried out.

    Faculty members at Kyushu University had meanwhile met several times to examine the school's role in the experiments. After the court proceedings in 1948, the university declared that "even if the events occurred as has been said," it was in no way responsible because its facilities had been used without permission and under military jurisdiction.

    By the mid-1960s most of the medical notes, photographs and tissue samples had been destroyed, hidden or lost, according to Shoji Kawazoe, a former faculty member.
    Mr. Kawazoe prepared a 700-page school history that was published in 1967, in which he devoted three pages to describing the wartime experiments. Even that was apparently considered too detailed: A subsequent edition, published in 1992, distilled the three pages to one.

    Dr. Tono continued his research, in archives and in the grasslands and hills surrounding Fukuoka, until he found the sites where the B-29 and the Japanese fighter had crashed, in a lightly populated area east of the city.

    Hanako Kobayashi was a young women in 1945 when she found on her family's land the wreckage of the fighter and the body of the pilot, Kinzou Kasuya. She wiped the blood from his face. She remembers his seeming unmarked. She watched as men carried him away on a stretcher made from a door.

    A simple monument

    In 1976 some of the survivors of his squadron came to with her and her neighbors. They persuaded her to erect a simple stone monument on her land to honor Kasuya.
    Fumio Kudo, a farmer living five miles away, owns the land where the B-29 crashed. There is a stone monument there, too.

    Mr. Kudo decided on his own to build the monument and engrave it with the names of the Americans said to have died: John C. Colehower, Leon E. Czarnecki, William R. Fredericks, Robert C. Johnson, Charles M. Kearns, Leo C. Oeinck, Dale E. Plambeck, Teddy J. Ponczka, Robert B. Williams and Howard T. Shingledecker.

    But those identities remain in doubt; the archives in Japan are silent about many details. According to the records of the military tribunal, there was no Johnson, Kearns, Oeinck or Shingledecker on the B-29. There were instead Jack M. Berry, Billy J. Brown, Merlin R. Calvin, Irving A. Corliss, Jack V. Dengler and Charles Palmer.

    A Japanese researcher suggests there was at least one more flier, identity unknown.

    Whatever the true number of victims, they are honored collectively each May 5.

    The commemorative service at the monument to the Americans began this year at 10 a.m
    .
    Seven friends of Kinzou Kasuya attended the ceremony. "Time passes quickly -- I'm an old man of 74," said Haru Takamure, a former pilot in Kasuya's squadron. "I'm beginning to forget, to forget Kasuya. Compared to me and my friends, those who died left a memory of being young and courageous."

    The mayor of Takeda City, the village closest to the crash site, spoke briefly. The memorial, he said, was intended to transcend hatred.

    "War does not necessarily come from outside," he said. "It can come from inside ourselves."

    Behind him were banners in English and Japanese: "Dedicated to a young Japanese soldier and the crew of the B-29 which crashed here." A picture of Kasuya was placed on the monument, along with a bowl of fruit and sake and -- perhaps in deference to American tastes -- a tray of chocolate chip cookies.

    A second, quieter ceremony was held at the monument to Kasuya. A Buddhist monk went from there into the hills to honor the Americans who died before they ever reached Kyushu University.

    He said a prayer at each of three stones, marking where three of the Americans are known to have died. Finally, at dusk, he climbed a steep hill to where another flier had been seen to descend from the sky.

    In darkness, he said a prayer for the last of the dead.

    THOMAS EASTON/SUN STAFF PHOTO: Stone marks the former grave site of a U.S. soldier who was shot to death after parachuting from his crashing B-29. FUKUOKA
     
  4. Poppy

    Poppy grasshopper

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    Nice work Dutch. Ran out of kudos.
     
  5. PA.Dutchman

    PA.Dutchman recruit

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    Prisoner of War Camp #1
    Fukuoka, Japan

    OVERVIEW

    I recently found this link and it has a great deal of information and documentation of the War Crimes against American and Allied forces. Just terrible unbelievable stories and examples.

    http://home.comcast.net/~winjerd/Page01.htm#Index

    Here is another link with example after example of the terrible War Crimes the Japanese performed against anyone they called an enemy.

    http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres_pacific.html#Pacific

    This is the last link I have currently have, a horror writer could not write anything to compare with some of these crimes.

    http://compunews.com/gus/massacres.htm#pacific

    This is another example found on more then one site,

    PALAWAN
    (October,1944)

    One hundred and fifty American prisoners of war, working on the construction of an airfield on the island of Palawan in the Philippines, were herded into an underground shelter when an air-raid alarm sounded. The Japanese guards then proceeded to pour petrol into the bunker and set it alight. Eight prisoners managed to escape through a door at the rear but 142 others were either burned to death or shot down as they tried to escape out the entrance.
     
  6. Poppy

    Poppy grasshopper

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    I have a book, that I thought would describe Pacific battles. Which it did, but it also contained detailed info on the forced marches, imprisonment, torture by the Japanese. It was too hard to read those reports, and as a result I only really read 2/3rds of the book. It is important we don't forget what happened, but is it necessary to read the details in order to honour those who endured?
     
  7. SymphonicPoet

    SymphonicPoet Member

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    I'm going to duck off the topic of Curtis LeMay for a moment. Borrowing a convention from elsewhere on the forums I'm going to take the liberty of posting the stuff not directly germane to this thread in blue. Specifically, we seem to be going down the war-crimes path. I'm going to talk about war-crimes for a moment, as I very much don't approve of them. And I'm also going to talk about racism, bigotry, and xenophobia since these are inextricably linked to our capacity to commit war-crimes. If you don't want to hear my thoughts on these subjects put on some blue goggles and skip past the now invisible part in blue print.

    It is a terrible fact of history that human beings are capable of the most brutal atrocities. In general, it seems to me as though these sorts of behaviors are more common when the enemy is seen as more distant, more of an "other", and they are also more distant in pre-industrial and industrializing societies. (Or perhaps more accurately in societies that don't as yet have a well established network for the free exchange of information.) You can see horrors aplenty more or less throughout history. You can find them told as stories to frighten children. You can find them glorified as righteous in religious texts. (Jericho, anyone?) There's plenty of them in the colonization of North America and the later U.S. conquest of the West, the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, the Civil War, the Mongol Invasion, Rome's wars, any war you pick much before the present. Germany's crimes stand out as somewhat unusual because this was an "enlightened democratic" (which could also be read as industrialized white) power doing the unthinkable. So it makes it pretty darned obvious that the West as a culture is much the same as every other: petty, violent, racist, and quite capable of treating human beings as though they were not. I don't mean to justify war crimes, but let's all face the fact that every culture on earth is guilty of them. Once you start finger-pointing it can get pretty ugly. And neither philosophy, culture, politics nor religion offers any real guarantee against this kind of poison.

    The Japanese committed plenty of horrors during the war. Brutal, terrible horrors well beyond anything I believe the U.S. did at that time. It needed to be stopped. But let's be remarkably honest, the U.S. didn't go to war to stop Japanese atrocities in Nanjing, unit 731, or anything else Japan did anywhere not on American soil. And there's really nothing they did that we didn't do ourselves at one time or another, so this isn't about good culture/bad culture or civilized/culture barbaric culture. You can spare all of us the racist claptrap. We're all damned barbarians when we start killing each other. Don't fool yourself. You're no better. And I don't care who you are or what unicorn you think vomited you into this cheerful world. Virtually every one of us is capable of this if the conditions are right and that should scare us all. But with training and remarkably hard work we are also all capable of better.

    There, now that this is off my chest let's move back to Lemay and the facts of his campaign . . .

    I do, however, grow weary of the condescending attitude I often run across in the U.S. that comes out roughly like this: "Japanese atrocities were incredibly brutal and justify . . . " the atomic bombing, fire bombing, what have you. Not only is this quite possibly false on several levels, but it leads to a bad analysis of military objectives and whether or not a given strategy or tactic makes a useful contribution to the overall objectives.

    First, not only did your mother tell you that two wrongs don't make a write, but my limited understanding of international law and the Geneva conventions would suggest much the same thing. If country A commits a war-crime that does not give country B license to do the same, even in the defense of country C. War-crimes must be evaluated separately, just like any other crimes. All is not, in fact, fair in love or war, and there are good reasons for this.

    Second, we should be using a strategy to accomplish specific military objectives, not as a form of retribution. Let the courts deal with the retribution part after the war is over. The job of the military should be simply to make sure the war ends as quickly and efficiently as possible with the given desired outcome of the state that sent the military into that war, within the reasonable limits provided by the above-mentioned international conventions.

    So Japanese war-crimes have absolutely no bearing on this question. We can evaluate LeMay on his own merits. I'm no expert, but my impression is In that the bag is a little mixed. It is often argued that strategic bombing shortened the war by this, or reduced enemy production by that, but the results are surprisingly difficult to measure. Germany and Japan both kept producing weapons right until we marched in the door. What we can measure is the amount of raw materials flowing to Japan. We can say with some certainty that LeMay's mine blockade had a profound impact based on the number of hulls sunk. Damage to infrastructure, which tends to the seaborne in island nations, is fairly measurable. You can count bridges, locomotives, ships, dams . . . it's more measurable and more direct than houses burned down or even civilians killed. After all, many of the civilians killed will have been outside the workforce. If your worked no longer has to care for her ailing grandmother she can work more efficiently. And she'll be mighty inspired too. So civilian deaths can actually be counterproductive to your military objectives. (They so often seem to be. But we always forget what that means when it's the other guys civilians getting killed and not ours.)

    And firebombing might not do you much good when the factories don't burn because they've been moved underground (as many in Japan were before the end of the war) or because they're relatively fireproof (being masonry structures less often sharing common walls with the rest of the urban infrastructure than Aunt Jo's house, and often having larger "yards" surrounding them and acting as firebreaks.)

    So it seems to me just possible that B-29s sent on firebombing missions are not, in fact shortening the war, but are instead making it longer and more vicious by hardening the enemy and diverting precious military resources from useful military objectives and wasting them on bad PR. I'm not much inclined to like LeMay when he wanted to have Nimitz court-martialled for diverting bombers from his firebombing campaign to bomb airfields on Okinawa just prior to L-Day. (LeMay must have felt urban houses were more useful military assets than runways and airframes.)

    I won't claim to have a definitive answer as I've not made a careful study of the numbers, but I do think there's reason to believe LeMay might have been wrong. (There's also reason to believe he was a racist prick, but that's altogether normal of our military commanders in the Pacific. Kick all the racist pricks out and the war gets awfully short awfully fast, as there's not much of a military left anymore on either side.) Blue goggles. Get the blue goggles back out. Sorry about that.

    On the other hand, if I'd been in LeMay's shoes I cannot say I wouldn't have felt much the same. In medicine the surgeon always seems to recommend surgery, the radiation-encologist radiotherapy, and the chemo-encologist drugs. (Don't ask me how I know this, but it's solid anecdotal fact.) I suspect the strategic bomber guy sees the war as a target for free-fall experiments from twenty thousand feet. (Until he dreams up a very savvy low-level tactic to solve his free-fall problems.) If I were a strategic bomber guy I might think the same. As it happens I can't fault his (or Truman's) final war-ending logic. The numbers would seem to bear him out pretty clearly on that one.

    But if you want to make a real judgment on his leadership you have to do so in isolation from the emotional "well I know I'm a war criminal but so are you!" factors. They just cloud the issue. Tough job to do, but that's the only way to make a useful evaluation: did it help accomplish the larger military objective?

    For my money? Some yes, some no, and a lot of how the heck should I know.
     
  8. lwd

    lwd Ace

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    That's only partially correct. At least some of the conventions allow retaliation in kind (I think the one on poisonous gasses did/does). Also implied is the point that if violation allows a significant military advantage retaliation in kind can be expected. There's also the question of what happens when technology out runs the laws. Submarine warfare in WWII pretty much ignored the conventions on both sides because operating according to them was not really practicle any more.

    Which for the most part it was.

    That depends a great deal on what the question is. If the question is: " Was it militarily justifyable at the time?" Then you are correct. If you are asking: "Was it morally justified?" then they may indeed have some bearing.

    Cannot the same be said of almost anything though? Perhaps the exception being occupying the opposing capital and capturing or killing any leaders not willing to surrender. Of course things like strategic bombing come to play there as well don't they?

    Conversely if they have no comfortable place to sleep or stay and food and water are in short supply then they may not be working at their most efficient. It's worth noteing on this issue that the US dropped considerable numbers of warning leaflets on the cities to be bombed warning civilians to leave.

    Which ignores the fact that many Japanese factories depended on parts produced by small (often family run) parts shops. These were often located in residential areas, indeed essentially next door to the residence of the owner operator. There's also the question of how much was known of these underground factories during the war.

    It's possible I guess but the probability was vanishingly small. The firebombing for one thing brought it home to the people of Japan that they were loosing the war. Now absent the fire bombing would they have surrenedered at the same time given the atomic bombing? I guess that's possible but when the firebombing campaign was started few knew anything about the atomic bombs and they were still an open question. And of course the firebombing was hitting military objectives.

    Indeed why restrict yourself to the Pacfic. There's an incident I have read (perhaps apocraphal) of that is both relevant and relativly positive in this regard. It seems a unit composed mostly of black soldiers was attached to one of Patton's formations. He was not particuarly happy about it when he got the word. However after they had been in action for a relativly short period of time he was asking if there were any more where they came from. Racism was indemic at the time but it was something that could be overcome and indeed some of the greatest strides in overcoming it were due to WWII and its immediate aftermath. All of which is off topic and probably deserves a thread of its own.
     
  9. TiredOldSoldier

    TiredOldSoldier Ace

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    A war a crime is a war crime, "did it help accomplish the larger military objective" or not is irrelevant. Tactics outlawed by treaties should not be used and deliberate attacks on the civilian population were outlawed.
    IMO there is little doubt LeMay was targeting civilians, and the number of deaths was in the hundreds of thousands, calling that "collateral damage" is ridiculous, a more accurate appraisal would be that any hit on a true military target was incidental.
    BTW the statement that the more advanced B29 was "inaccurate" from high altitude casts some significant doubts about claims to "precision bombing" by the 8th and 15th AF B17 and B24.
    IMO aerial bombing with 1940 technology was a blunt instrument of doubtful effectiveness if the victims managed to get over the initial shock, It could be decisive if they didn't, like at Warsaw, Belgrade and Rotterdam, and of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but interestingly none of those involved massive bomber raids.
    Douhet had it wrong, but his theories dovetailed nicely with the air force commanders desire for independence in western democracies (in Italy and Germany they didn't need it as Goering and Balbo made sure the air force would get what it wanted at the expense of the navy and army that were a lot less supportive of the regime). The result was a massive investment in a horrible and not particularly effective form of warfare, a huge percentage of the British war effort went to bomber command and IIRC the B29 was the second most expensive US programme (after the Manhattan project), and that doesn' even count the B24 and B17.
    Only the A Bomb finally changed the picture, the USN attempts to carve itself a role in the nuclear deterrent before the advent of the polaris submarines finally gave it one that made sense makes for interesting reading.
     
  10. George Patton

    George Patton Canadian Refugee

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    To add to the excellent points lwd made;

    I'm guessing your sole grounds for this is that he was Wallace's running mate in 1968. There's substantial reasons to believe he was NOT a 'racist prick'.
    1. LeMay was opposed to a segregated air force
    2. LeMay turned down Wallace's inviations to be his running mate 3 times before he finally accepted, primarily due to his social platform (see Warren Kozak's 'LeMay' for more on this).
    3. LeMay contradicted Wallace's pro-segregationist stance on the campaign trail (here's an article from 1964: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1964&dat=19681027&id=frE1AAAAIBAJ&sjid=V7YFAAAAIBAJ&pg=3945,8528272)
     
  11. Takao

    Takao Ace

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    George,

    Just because Lemay was not prejudicial towards African-Americans does not necessarily mean that he was not prejudicial towards the Japanese. A subliminal prejudice against the Japanese in particular was rather strong in the American military throughout the 1930s through December 7, 1941. Hence, the widely held belief that the Japanese would never attack Pearl Harbor & the great surprise when the did, then later that the American "military might" would quickly finish the war against the Japanese. All of the widely held beliefs of the "stereotypical" Japanese were shattered by the hard truth of reality. A few authors have tried to make a case concerning "racism" towards the Japanese, but I can't say that any have really proved their case. Not to mention that there are a vast many practical factors that can explain the shift from "pin-point" bombing to "area" bombing. The simple fact that the Americans had already investigated and concluded, in late '42 & early '43, that the use of "fire bombing" against Japan would be the most effective way to bomb their Home Islands. Outside of a few "test" incendiary raids against secondary targets in late 1944, a full scale fire bombing campaign against Japan did not begin until March, 1945. Another factor was the long sluggish start to the "pin-point" bombing campaign against Japan.

    I will leave you with two quotes I made over on AHF long ago


    and


     
  12. George Patton

    George Patton Canadian Refugee

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    I just assumed that the comments were alluding to LeMay being on the Wallace ticket -- something that makes many, many people believe he was a racist. I never thought that they might deal with the anti-Japanese mentality shared by almost every Pacific War commander. SymphonicPoet -- if your comment was dealing with the latter, my mistake.

    However, I've read quite a bit about LeMay and I haven't seen evidence that his tactics were motivated by racism against the Japanese. If in doubt refer to his memoirs -- he goes into great detail about how he physically derived (from math and physics) the most effective way to attack Japan from the air, and a lot of the more 'controversial' aspects of the raids came down to common sense. For example, you are attacking a country with dispersed military industry in which the majority of its structures are made of wood. What is the logical (don't confuse this with ethical) thing to do? Firebombing. LeMay did what others were hesitant to do (go in at low altitude and heavy bomb loads) and got results.
     
  13. steverodgers801

    steverodgers801 Member

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    I believe it was 1944, the Japanese launched an offense in Chine they described as the three all"s. Kill all, burn all, loot all.
     
  14. Takao

    Takao Ace

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    I think you are confusing the Japanese Operation Ichi-go(1944) with the Japanese "scorched earth" policy waged against the Chinese Communists in Northern China that was begun in mid/late 1940, in an effort to deny the Chinese Communists their traditional places of succor. As an aside, the Japanese "Three Alls" policy was not much different from Chiang Kia-Shek's prior "scorched earth" policy that he used against both the Japanese and the Chinese Communists.
     
  15. SymphonicPoet

    SymphonicPoet Member

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    ^George Patton

    No, I was unaware of LeMay's political ambitions. I was referring to his remarks on the Japanese, which were pretty much par for the course. This was ultimately one of my several points. Racism, while ugly and unproductive, is rather normal in war. Further, I think Western racism vis a vie Asian people was one of the (generally unacknowledged) principal causes of the tensions that ultimately precipitated the war. I was rather livid that I saw Japan being tarred as this horrid benighted land of inhuman brutality and I'm afraid I exploded in a bit of blue ink for my first point. Sure, the Japanese did lots of terrible things. We've done most or all of the same ones at one point or another, we just did most of it earlier and whitewashed it more successfully. And I will gladly admit that there was racism in all theatres on all sides. (I believe this is self evident enough I'll just leave it at that. If someone really doubts German, American, British, Russian, Japanese, Italian, or indeed Chinese racism we could start a thread about that, but I think we're all in agreement that all of our respective countries have committed this sin; generally early and often.) I don't wish to minimize the Japanese crimes, I simply wished to put them in perspective by demonstrating the sheer terrifying ordinariness of it all. Not so different from smallpox blankets or the Spanish Inquisition. War crimes are, by another definition, absolutely typical acts of war. But that kind of led into the second point . . .

    I consider it somewhat more interesting to wonder whether LeMay's tactics were useful than whether they were right or wrong. It was a war. War is wrong. So I suppose to me LeMay is off scott-free if his tactic saved more lives than it cost. (This is a terrible math, but such is war.) The argument is there. I don't honestly know the answer and I've not done careful research to figure it out, though perhaps it's possible.

    ^lwd

    I think the Japanese war crimes have some real bearing on whether the war was justified. (I tend to believe that it was, as it happens.) I don't think they have any bearing on what constitutes reasonable treatment of Japanese civilians, and fire bombing is a big ol' treatment of Japanese civilians. So how do we determine if it's a reasonable (if gruesome) treatment? You have to do the math. If it works out in more innocent people being alive and relatively unharmed at the end of the war then yes, it's reasonable. (And your own soldiers, while accepting the risks of this war, are assuredly "innocents" for our purposes.) This very simple calculus may well exonerate LeMay. But it's worth considering. There is some very good reason to believe it does not. I tend to think strategic bombing is one of those things in life that, like torture, looks great on paper and makes you feel like your accomplishing something, but might well actually be counterproductive to your larger goals, since the PR ramifications are so dramatic and the same benefits could very probably be achieved more cheaply by other means. (Surprisingly similar questions, really. Should we torture for information? Should we carpet-bomb?) But again, I don't have the time or information to give the question the consideration it deserves right now, I simply wanted to point out that there IS a question there, thus I pointed out a few counterarguments in situ. I must needs leave it to others to dig them out properly and decide if they stink. If I gave the impression that I knew the answer please accept my humble apology. No matter how much I might suspect, I do not know on that one. And again, if I were in LeMay's shoes I might well do precisely what he had done. (I also might not have. Don't really know.)
     
  16. lwd

    lwd Ace

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    Your collor changes for some reason got me thinking you were quoteing someone else but as I considered the following more closely I thought it also deserved a reply.
    The first part is technically correct because the atrocities in Nanjing had already occured. However they played an important part in America's road to war with Japan. As for Unit 731 the US didn't know about so again correct. However the US involvment in the war was decided well before the attack on PH and it had little or nothing to do with Japan attacking the US. Look at the Gallup polls. It was clear that the will was there by early 41 if not before (working from memory it was clear in 1940 and perahaps earleir). Indeed it was known that the oil embargo was pretty much going to force the Japanese to go to war or back down and culturally the latter was regarded as extremly unlikely.
     
  17. lwd

    lwd Ace

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    It's not at all clear to me that it is unproductive. For one thing it is much easier on your troops if they don't consider their opponets to be just like them. Whether the benefits outweigh the costs is a good question but I suspect they do. In part because most of the veterans eventually (and many not long after the war is over) loose some and perhaps all of the image that was generated in this way.

    But the counter is also true. Asian racism was a major factor as well and perhaps even greater than its western counter part.

    I disagree. The acts stand out in the history of war. Nothing similar happened in WWI or the Russo Japanese War, or the Crimean war, or the Napoleonic war, etc. Certainlly similar events have happened but they are not the norm unless you go back a signficant distance in time. Even then it's questionable. Brining up the small pox blankets (one recored case by a local commander by the way) or the Inquisition is IMO rather out of context. Now if I were being picky and perhaps I should be I would suggest that they shouldn't be referred to as "Japanese crimes" but "crimes of the Japanese governement". Japan had an exemplary reputation during both the Russo Japanese War and WWI as far as this sort of thing goes. What happend to the government after WWI is a fasinating and poorly understood process. Some how a monstrosity evolved and one that even today many simply don't understand. Rectifying that should perhaps be one of our principle aims.


    For one thing one has to look at the calculus of the time. From what I've read lives were prioritzed pretty much as follows
    1) Allied civilians and neutrals.
    2) Allied miiitary
    3) Enemy civilians (this could go either way depending on the time and the individual)
    4) Enenmy military.
    LeMay's tactics were designed to save allied military lives for the most part. Although ending the war more rapidly helped cut down on civilian losses on all sides. We get into what if territory if we try to guess what happens without the fire bombings but my guess is that the war last longer and famine takes a much higher toll.

    The target was Japanese military industry. They even dropped hugh quantities of leaflets warning the Japanese civilians in the cities that they would be bombed. This is and was covered by the conventions and was allowed. So I'm not sure that this has much merit.

    I'm not sure you can do the math. It's certainly not simple. There's even a question of what is an "innocent"? For instance the Japanese newspapers reported on the contest by two Japanese officers to see who could kill the most Chinese with their swords. Obviously this ment that many/most(?) civilians knew about at least some of the atrocities in China. In the absence of any significant public outrage can they be considered truly "innocent"? It's also extremly difficult to say what the losses would have been like in the absence of the fire bombing. Are you still alowing for conventional bombing? What about the atomic bombs? Does the US invade or do they just let Japan "wither on the vine?

    I don't see the PR ramifications being all that negative and indeed there are also some positive ones that I think outweigh the negative by a fair amount that's without getting into the military effects. In the cases of both Germany and Japan just look at the effort put into defence against such bombing it was huge and that's without considering the direct impact. I simply don't see any way to achieve anything similar by other means much less more cheaply by other means at least in period. Today I guess we could use smarat bombs.

    I don't see them being all that similar. It's know that a good interogater can often get good information more quickly without torture than he could obtain questionable information with torture. There may be isolated cases where the reverse is true but it's so seldom I'm reluctant to advocate much leeway here. As for carpet bombing, in WW2 it could be quite effective and useful depending on the target.
     
  18. steverodgers801

    steverodgers801 Member

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    There have been attacks on civilians through out history, its just the means to go after so many at once that changed. Hitler was inspired by the American conquest of the Indians for his treatment of Slavs and Jews. The Romans razed Carthage to the ground, enslaved all of the survivors and salted the ground around the ruins.
     
  19. SymphonicPoet

    SymphonicPoet Member

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    ^LWD,

    I'm not really in a position to argue this issue one way or the other, nor do I wish to. I want to point out that there is a debate, which might well be self evident, and to at least gloss over a few of the arguments presented on the other side.

    I actually agree with much of what you said and even nearly said some similar things myself ere deleting them, thinking they just complicated the issue. (I tend to agree with the U.S. math "enemy soldier, enemy civilian, own soldier, own civilian" since I believe civilians as a group are to some extent responsible for the actions of our governments. (Though I think it's forgivable to not dissent too loudly against a government that would likely torture or kill dissenters. In that case speaking out is a close analogue to volunteering to join an active military. It might even be more statistically risky, since loud dissenters tend to be heavily outnumbered in dictatorships by guys with guns. Not universally, but often.)

    I don't know that I agree with your assessment of the impact of carpet bombing, but that's the whole point, I suppose. If you're right, then LeMay did the right thing. I fully agree that there were at least some military targets distributed throughout Japanese cities. Takao suggested that the cottage industrial contribution to Japanese heavy industry largely ended even before the fire-bombing. I can't personally say anything about this, but I tend to accept what he says as it's dead on when I have a way to measure it and he clearly knows more about this than I do. That said, as Takao pointed out, it does make a difference if LeMay knew this, which he well may not have. It's perfectly okay to attack what you reasonably believe is a military target. It's messy and often tragic when you're wrong, but not a war crime so far as I am aware.

    Yes, you're right that atrocities in the west were mostly (mostly) earlier. But they weren't all earlier. (Note German crimes going on just then.) And some of them were only slightly earlier. (Wounded knee? The internments and atrocities of the Philippine-American War? The Long Walk of the Navajo or the Cherokee Trail of Tears? Earlier, but not centuries. And that's only the United States. I'm sure those familiar with English, French, Belgian, Italian, or anyone else's history could come up with a quite similar laundry list.) But one of the fundamental points here is that the Japanese were just emerging from their own industrial revolution. In some fundamental ways, Japanese political and social institutions in the 30s and 40s were surely going through the same messy growing pains as their analogues in the western empires fifty to a hundred years before. (They were catching up very quickly, but they weren't quite there yet. Just takes time to build the physical and institutional infrastructure.) Does this exonerate the guilty? No. It just puts it in perspective. I do think war crimes are sadly normal. Even now. They are growing fewer as we teach people better and learn compassion and ethics, but it's a VERY long and slow process. (Wars are also growing fewer. Perhaps this is related.)

    As to your implied questions about the atomic bombs, I almost hate to address them as they tend to inflame people. (Pun recognized, but probably unavoidable.) I am hardly unbiased. I tend to think they saved one of my forbears. It's hard for me to say bad things about them. I figure they were justified precisely because they scared Japan into quitting. And while you might suggest that the fire-bombing "prepared" Japan for them psychologically I'm not at all sure it's necessary. They're . . . if you ever watch footage of one you know they're special. There is no preparation for that. It's armageddon from a clear blue sky. If Japan knows that we have x-thousand B-29s and we just wiped out a city with three? I don't see how the fire-bombing is even relevant to that. That's an absolutely clear demonstration to the recipient that you are completely out of your league and you have no time left to catch up. It's just over. And frankly, if they hadn't given up it would have been over. Those darned things demonstrate the capability to wipe out entire civilizations almost without risk to American lives. It's really difficult to argue with that.

    There's an odd phenomenon with risk: human beings by and in large weigh and asses risk fairly well as earthly creatures go, but we accept risk we believe we understand much more readily than risk we do not believe we understand, even if we should be conscious of the numbers. (And risk we believe we control in some degree much more than that.) I suspect many of us would be much more leery of eating raw beef than going outside in a storm, even though the latter is demonstrably much more dangerous than the former. Fire-bombing is a known danger. Nuclear bombs? To many of us they're just magic. I doubt that fire-bombing played an appreciable role in the decision tree after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I could be wrong, but I'd want to see the minutes from the meeting, or accounts of it, or something fairly compelling. "You know, esteemed council members, they've already burned nine tenths of our cities down with firebombs. This nuclear bomb thing is just the last straw." and not "Holy f***, where did Hiroshima and Nagasaki go? They can do that?"
    I tend to think the second is a closer approximation of what would be going on in my head, and I tend to think even the Divine Imperial head is more like my own head than different from it. (Could be a mistake on my part.) Interesting question, anyway. Perhaps someone can dig those minutes out and we can gain some insight into whether the fire-bombings played into the surrender decision.

    Please forgive my impetuousness, gentlemen. I don't want to hang LeMay as a war criminal. I wouldn't personally call him one. What he did was in a grey area, maybe, but I don't actually think he did anything clearly wrong given the information he probably had and the general conditions of the war. I just think it's worth examining the larger context of strategic bombing on it's military merits. Does it actually work? How can we tell? What can we measure? How does it bear on the other sides ability to wage war in the short term, the medium, the long? What kind of war do we expect? Etc.

    Thank you for your patience.
     
  20. lwd

    lwd Ace

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    Actually the evidence is pretty clear that he was indeed attacking milityary targets. The pamphlets warning of the bombing attacks are IMO a key piece of the evidence but the understanding the US had of Japanese industry of the time is also critical. PLS also note that there were targets that were not hit that could well have increased the casualties. Also note the concern about Japanese civilian casualties that preceed the decision to use the atomic bombs.

    Not really. The primary problem B29's had bombing from high altitude was that they were up in the jet stream and the wind velocity changes between there and the ground were extreme. B17s and B24s didn't bomb from as high up so they didn't have that problem. They did have a bit of an accuracy problem though. The Norden bomb site was tested in the deserts of New Mexico from what I've read and it worked very well there. It didn't work so well in Europe.

    I'm not at all sure that is the case. At least some of the things I've read indicate the USN at least in some circles considered the IJN to be quite competent. The PH raid was a surprise because even 6 months earlier the IJN was simply not capable of launching it. The Japanese took considerable pains to keep their new capabilities secret.


    There were a few things in the above that I considered addressing but after thinking about it I concluded that they would be nitpicking of marginal value (an observation I proably should make more often). So I'll leave this with the simple comment of: Well stated.
     

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