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Terror from the Sky
\Indiscriminate Bombing from Hiroshima to Today
@
@Hiroshima Peace Institute held an international symposium in Hiroshima
on Aug.2, 2003. The symposium, which was open to the public, was entitled gTerror from the Sky - Indiscriminate Bombing from Hiroshima to Todayh.
@Five panelists including overseas experts participated.
@
Panelists:
| Ronald Schaffer |
Professor, California State University at Northridge |
| Tetsuo Maeda |
Professor, Tokyo International University |
| Marilyn Young |
Professor, New York University |
| Eric Markusen |
Professor, Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies |
| Yuki Tanaka |
Professor, Hiroshima Peace Institute |
Date and Time: August 2(Sat), 2003@@ 1:30p.m.-5:00p.m.
Venue: "Himawari"Room, second basement floor (B2),
@@@@@@International Conference Center, Hiroshima
@@@@@@(Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, 1-5 Nakajima-cho Naka-ku, Hiroshima,
@@@@@@730-0811, Japan)
Host: Hiroshima Peace Institute
Collaboration: Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation
Program:
Ronald
Schaffer is professor emeritus of history at California State University, Northridge. He has a Ph.D. from Princeton University and specializes in the history of
strategic bombing.
Indiscriminate Bombing in World War II: Prologue to a Counterfactual Study
This
presentation sought to identify ways in which the very large number of civilian
casualties generated by strategic bombing in the Second World War might have been
reduced. It described the origins of
strategic bombing theory and its salient ideas, among them the notions
that bombing could secure victory by destroying an enemyfs economic
infrastructure, that attacks from the air could break an enemyfs will to resist
and cause its people to rise up against its government, and that the use of air
power against an enemy society would reduce onefs military casualties,
providing a desirable trade-off between the lives of enemy civilians and those
of onefs own armed forces. Theorists and practitioners of aerial bombing argued
that, by ending wars quickly and efficiently, the bomber would actually prove
to be a humane weapon.
At first, the
British, the Americans, and the Germans attempted to employ their bombers against what they considered to be essentially
military and industrial targets, but all eventually turned to attacking
areas inhabited by civilians. Under actual combat conditions, it proved
difficult to hit targets with precision and extremely costly to their own
forces. All then turned to night attacks, guided by imprecise navigation
and aiming systems. They also increasingly employed incendiary weapons,
sometimes producing enormous conflagrations. Even when improved methods
of locating targets evolved, along with long-range fighter escort to protect
them from enemy defenders, the British continued to deliver massive area
attacks, and the Americans inflicted very large civilian casualties in
raids aimed at military targets within cities.
The American
aerial bombing strategy for the war in the Pacific had from the beginning
contemplated the incineration of Japanese cities. American military and
civilian experts planned incendiary and atomic offensives against those cities
so meticulously that it is misleading to describe the bombing that burned down
almost all of Japanfs largest urban areas or obliterated them with nuclear
weapons as gindiscriminate.h
To indicate
possible ways by which the slaughter of civilians might have been diminished,
this presentation noted elements of irrationality and emotionalism in the
thinking of those who organized the bombing attacks and also ways in which some
of the bombing proved counter-productive. It suggested that some loss of
civilian lives might have been averted by reversing the trade-off of civilian
for military lives implicit in strategic bombing theory (for instance by an
increased amount of low-level precision bombing of Japan). The presentation discussed
whether or not the practice of bombing in World War II vindicated the prewar
theory. It also discussed the proposals for demonstrating the power of the
atomic bomb in much less deadly ways. It concluded that strategic bombing
failed to bring about an uprising of civilians against their leaders in Europe,
but that it may have led Japanfs rulers to feel that such an uprising was
possible, thus contributing, along with the entry of the Soviet Union into the
Asian war and the imminent threat of an American invasion, to Japanfs decision
to surrender.
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Tetsuo Maeda
Tetsuo
Maeda is professor at Tokyo International University. He specializes in military affairs with an emphasis on nuclear weapons.
Inauguration of Indiscriminate Bombing in Asia: Bombing of Chongqing, China, by the Japanese Air Force
To my mind, the essence and
significance of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima may be summarized as follows:
1. It was an attack targeting a city as such, thus amounting in its degree
of inhumanity and cruelty to indiscriminate massacre on a massive scale.
2. It was a mechanical
and insensible act in which the murderer did not see the murdered, thus totally
devoid of a sense of personal involvement.
3. It represented a combination of the strategy of gterror from the skyh
and the 20th-century technology that made that strategy possible, i.e.,
the marriage of nuclear power and the bomber.
It is for reasons to do with these characteristics that Hiroshima must
continue to be talked about and remembered. Furthermore, the fact that the world still remains prisoner to the same
kind of threat calls for the universalization of the Hiroshima experience,
which should be recalled as an event that could happen again any time just
as it once happened. gHiroshimah is not a tragedy of bygone days. Its ideology continues
to haunt mankind in the guise of gstrategy of deterrenceh and gregional war,h
as brought home to peoples around the world from Hanoi to Baghdad.
In order to universalize the significance of gHiroshimah in the context
of these experiences, we must look back to the time before Hiroshima and
study the lead-up to Hiroshima. For we can know neither who we are
nor where we are going without knowing where we have come from.
My interest in the bombing of Chongqing by the Japanese air force derives from the sense of a problem as sketched above.
Within just a few years of 1938,
Japan introduced three
new elements into the history of warfare:
1. The politico-military bombing,
i.e., massive indiscriminate bombing, of Chongqing in Sichuan Province, then the
provisional capital of China.
2. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, or the projection
of power from the sea to land, launched at the outset of the Japanese-American
war.
3. The gspecial attacks,h i.e., suicide bombing, which in effect turned an airplane into a manned missile and which reached its peak during the Battle of Okinawa.
These gfirstsh in the wars of the 20th century, which shared the common characteristic of sudden horror falling
from the sky, were all witnessed in the Japanese operations in the
Asia–Pacific War. Was not what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki
nothing but the ultimate form of this new type of violence? Are not
both 9/11 and the Iraq War events occurring on the same trajectory?
The bombing of Chongqing lasted for two and a half years and killed 11,885 people in a sequence of 218 air raids, which targeted the city itself, relied on air power alone, and aimed to break the citizensf will to continue to fight. Little is yet known of what actually happened, however. It is another role of Hiroshima, I believe, to help prevent what happened there from sinking into oblivion.
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Marilyn Young
Marilyn
Young is professor of history at New York University and director at International Center for Advanced Studies Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict. She earned her Ph.D. at Harvard University and specializes in the Vietnam War.
Sending a Message: the Language of Air Power in Korea and Vietna
World War II ended with the biggest
bang then possible, administered in what was believed to be a righteous cause,
the defeat of Japan. It was the logical conclusion to total
war. Then and since, to many in the
armed forces, particularly the air force, anything short of the massive use of
available force to attain American ends is immoral. Totally secure in the air, able to
attack any enemy at will, Air Force generals like Ira Eaker
and Curtis LeMay felt a sense of irresistible
power. Limited war was an oxymoron.
The only problem the advocates of unbridled air power foresaw was the
timorousness of a civilian leadership unwilling to use its weapons.
In my paper I explore the ways in which the definition of
limited war fought with limited means was, in Korea and in Vietnam, slowly but
certainly transformed into total war fought all-out – though
short
of using nuclear weapons. Starting with Korea and undergoing sophisticated
development in Vietnam, air power was understood as a
special language addressed to the enemy and to all those who might in the
future become the enemy. It was, at
the same time, a language intended to reassure Americafs allies. And it was a language that incorporated
one very crucial silence: behind all the bombs dropped was the sound of the one
that could drop but had notc yet.
What was it about bombing that made
it so attractive to U.S. policy makers as a mode of
communication? The answer begins
with a fallacy: WWII ended in a blaze of bombing, ergo, bombing ended WWII. Although air power had never
fulfilled the promises of its prophets, after WWII the value of strategic
bombing was accepted as an article of faith. There were some that doubted the
efficacy of strategic bombing for limited warfare, arguing that the goal of
such warfare was not the total destruction of the enemy but rather the pursuit
of peace through gair persuasion.h
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, with the experience
of the Cuban missile crisis behind him, developed this idea, convinced, as H.R.
McMaster has written, that gthe aim of force was not to
impose onefs will on the enemy but to communicate with him. Gradually intensifying military action
would convey American resolve and thereby convince an adversary to alter his
behavior.h By 1971, it would
be difficult to see the difference between total war and the limited war the U.S. claimed to be waging in Indochina: from 1965 to 1971, the U.S. dropped on Indochina three times the total tonnage
dropped on Europe, Africa and Asia during WWII.
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Eric Markusen
Eric Markusen is research director at the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and professor at Southwest State University. He received his Ph.D. from University of Minnesota and specializes in genocide studies.
Hiroshima: Culmination of Strategic Bombing, Beginning of the Threat of Nuclear Omnicide
This
presentation was based on a paper, co-authored with Matthias Bjørnlund,
in which we demonstrate that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, while rightfully
regarded as a milestone in the history of inhumanity, was at the same time the
result of thinking and practices that began years before August 6, 1945,
namely, the incendiary bombing of enemy cities. It was also an important point of departure for American nuclear weapons policy at the beginning of the Cold War.
As
the final speaker, I had the opportunity of hearing the presentations made by
Professors Tanaka, Schaffer, Maeda, and Young, as well as the ensuing
discussion. With that in mind, I focused my comments on several points raised in our
paper. I noted that Great
Britain and the United
States both began World War II with a moral repudiation of bombing cities, but
in the course of the war they conducted it at levels far exceeding the
Nazis. A key point, echoing Professor Schafferfs presentation, was the
meticulous planning that guided American incendiary and atomic bombing
of Japanese cities. In March 1945, such planning resulted in
a raid against Tokyo that
killed more than 70,000 people in six hours.
By
August 1945, the political
and military leaders responsible for incendiary attacks embraced the new atomic
bombs. Following Japanfs
surrender, some of the airmen who had been systematically burning the cities of
Japan, e.g., Air
Force General Curtis LeMay, played decisive roles in
developing U.S. plans to
wage nuclear war.
As
hydrogen bombs were integrated into the United
States and Soviet
arsenals, nuclear war plans entailed ever greater levels of destruction. The concept of gnuclear omnicideh was introduced by the philosopher John Sommerville in 1985 in order to convey the
likelihood that a gwarh fought with nuclear weapons would constitute a
categorically new dimension of mass killing, even more destructive and evil
than genocide. The
American nuclear war plan for 1961 anticipated killing as many as 425 million
people in Communist nations, as well as millions downwind from radioactive
fallout. In 1962, when
the United
States discovered
that the Soviet Union had
managed to sneak nuclear-armed missiles into Cuba, the so-called gCuban Missile Crisish brought the world to
the brink of actual nuclear war.
The
end of the Cold War has not ended the nuclear threat. On the contrary, I mentioned disturbing
developments in American nuclear weapons policy following the terrorist attacks
of September
11, 2001: the
nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan; and the
risk of weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of terrorists and
brutal undemocratic regimes.
Despite
the depressing accounts of terror from the sky given by the other presenters,
and notwithstanding the terrible present dangers mentioned above, I tried to
end on a note of hope by briefly surveying several promising international
developments: increasing education and research into war and peace, as
exemplified by work under way at the Hiroshima Peace Institute; a world-wide surge of concern about genocide;
and advances in international law and justice, including the recently-established
International Criminal Court.
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Yuki Tanaka
Yuki
Tanaka is professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University. He
received his Ph.D. from the University of Western Australia. He specializes in comparative analysis of Japanese war crimes during World
War II.
Summing Up
When we examine the history of wars, we see that no
other organizations have committed as much injustice--not
only against foreigners, but against their own citizens--as nation-states. As far as genocide and mass killing are
concerned, state governments generally carry the greatest responsibility for such crimes against humanity.
When
nation-states were engaged in total wars such as World War I and II, it was
always state governments that perpetrated the most serious crimes against non-combatants,
i.e., civilians. This is evident not only from the genocide
committed by the German Nazi government against Jews and other socio-ethnic minority groups, or the numerous massacres committed by the armed forces of Imperial
Japan against whites as well as Asians. It is
also instanced by the thousands of civilians killed by aerial bombardment by the Allied
forces in Europe and the Asia Pacific region, and in particular by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
State violence against civilians, in other words, state
terrorism, has been repeatedly committed since World War II, in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Gulf War,
and the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo. In more recent aerial attacks conducted by the U.S. and British forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, many civilians were again killed or injured as a result of the
bombing of gwrongly identified targetsh by gincorrectly programmed smart bombs,h or as gcollateral damage.h No matter what military jargon is used
to justify attacking civilians, it is clearly
indiscriminate bombing in the eyes of the victims. Such bombing also creates huge numbers of refugees, as seen in Afghanistan where thousands
of people fled their homes shortly before the onset of U.S. bombing. Eventually about one
million Afghan people ended up in refugee camps. Clearly, such aerial bombing,
which inflicts enormous hardship on vast numbers of civilians, is nothing short of state terrorism.
gThe September 11 Attackh was unquestionably an act of
terrorism as it killed thousands
of civilians indiscriminately. This
act, perpetrated by an al-Qaeda group
can be seen as a variation on indiscriminate bombing where civilian planes are used instead of bombers to complete the suicidal mission. One can be certain that al-Qaeda would have used
bombers if that had been an option. Whether indiscriminate bombing is carried
out by an armed group or by the military forces of a particular nation, it
is clearly an act of terrorism from the viewpoint of the civilians who become its targets. Thus it is
necessary to re-examine the history of indiscriminate bombing from the
viewpoint of its victims to understand its real nature. For this, we need to re-experience, by using our imagination, the terror that the victims went through
as well as critically analyze the mentality of the
perpetrators.
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Comments by Some Participants
Participant A
Looking at aerial bombing from the legal point of view, an important question
is on what grounds the policy makers and those who implemented their decisions
justified the bombing. Rules banning the bombing of civilians were established
in the wake of World War I. So, the question is how the aerial bombing
conducted by many states since then has been justified. For example, the
Iraq War is seen and justified as a war against terrorism following the
September 11 attacks. But can the aerial bombing conducted as part of the
war be acceptable and justifiable? If we accept the war against terrorism
as a just war, it might become possible to justify even the use of nuclear
arms.
Bombing
conducted by a state, especially bombing of civilians, raises the problem of
state terrorism, which must be considered in the context of the Hague Rules of Air
Warfare forbidding bombing as a means to terrorize civilians.
Participant
B
As
an atomic bomb survivor (Hibakusha), I remembered the
horror of 58 years ago while listening to your presentations and was deeply
inspired. From a survivorfs viewpoint, nuclear weapons not only kill people,
but also destroy humanity, sully manfs history, and blaspheme God. The atomic bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be tried as
a crime against humanity, but it has not been even as we have entered the 21st
century. It is the United States, which preaches humanitarianism
to the rest of the world, that should be tried first. Only
then, will we be able to begin building solid foundations of global order and
peace. In reality, however, the United States continues to seek
to perpetuate its hegemonic rule by blackmailing the world with nuclear arms in
defiance of the wish of the whole world to abolish nuclear weapons. Japan must repeal the
U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and get rid of all U.S. military bases on
Japanese soil. I believe that only when these goals have been attained, the
victims of the atomic bombing may finally rest in peace.
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