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Malcom Gladwell did a great segment on his podcast Revisionist History about this. He talks about the schools of thought in the US military about who and what t
by q_andrew 5y ago
Malcom Gladwell did a great segment on his podcast Revisionist History about this. He talks about the schools of thought in the US military about who and what to bomb that lead to these campaigns. It is extremely tragic that these citizen-heavy areas were absolutely pulverized. There's evidence that the US military used similar techniques in the Korean war.
- trasz 5y agoIt's extremely tragic that American war criminals never got punished.
- q_andrew 5y agoYes. There's even some evidence that chemical warfare via bombing was done in Korea, something they really should have known was a terrible thing to do.
- dundarious 5y agoI'm quite excited for the Blowback podcast season 3, coming out this summer. The new subject is the Korean war. Season 1 and 2, on the Iraq wars and the Cuban missile crisis respectively, are my favorite podcasts.
- throwaway984393 5y agoVictors never do. But they do write history books.
- refurb 5y ago
- Ancapistani 5y agoThe most egregious war criminals among the Japanese - who obviously lost the war - weren’t even punished. Shiro Ishii, the leader of Unit 731, among them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirō_Ishii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirō_Ishii
- trasz 5y agoThat’s true - some of those went unpunished. Even then, at least Japan stopped committing further atrocities.
- dijksterhuis 5y agofrom the wiki page > there was no international treaty or instrument protecting a civilian population specifically from attack by aircraft at the time reference https://web.archive.org/web/20130425044944/http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/57jpcl.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20130425044944/http://www.icrc.o...
- trasz 5y agoHolocaust was legal too. And yet the allies succeeded at prosecuting main offenders.
- InTheArena 5y agoSo just curious - the Japanese (unlike every other industrialized power) moved their factories into their urban and rural areas to protect them - What alternative would have you suggested that would still eliminate the ability of the Japanese to build machines of war? From wikipedia: "Over 50% of Tokyo's industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city's output in half." If a single raid in Germany had cut the total Ruhr's capacity by 50%, allied bombers would have tried to do that every day of the war. That Japanese did this decentralization even though it cost them the ability to scale up their production. This is why Japanese production completely collapsed as the war moved forward, unlike the Germans, Soviets and Americans who all had their production skyrocket throughout the war. That's how committed they were to using their population as shield to protect it from the inevitable bombers. So tragic it was - but let's remember that this program was deliberate by the Japanese leaders - a deliberate effort to use their own population as civilian shield to continue their rape and massacre of the rest of Asia.
- ptha 5y agoYes, I believe he did multiple RH podcast episodes on this. He has also released a book: "The Bomber Mafia: A Story Set in War". [1] I think the first I heard of the Tokyo firebombing during WWII was in the Errol Morris documentary: "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara". Robert McNamara was an officer under Curtis LeMay. He says LeMay once said that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been tried for war crimes, and agrees with this assessment. [2] [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bomber-Mafia-Story-Set-War/dp/0241535867/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bomber-Mafia-Story-Set-War/dp/02415... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War#In_The_Fog_of_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War#In_The_Fog_of_W...
- adolph 5y agoI found "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara" to be an interesting lens to understand the US leadership context at depth. Another interesting viewpoint is taken by the below Foreign Policy article "The Dangerous Illusion of Japan’s Unconditional Surrender" A restive public and increasingly assertive political leaders questioned if victory, defined as Japan’s unconditional surrender, could be achieved at a tolerable cost. The atomic bombs and Soviet entry into the war against Japan cut short that debate and produced swift decision where none had seemed likely. That sudden reversal of fortunes obscured for later generations the extent to which U.S. strategy had been unhinged by Japanese resistance and the splintering of unity at home. It also made the ceremony in Tokyo Bay seem inevitable and reproducible. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/13/vj-day-the-dangerous-illusion-of-japans-unconditional-surrender/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/13/vj-day-the-dangerous-il...
- boomboomsubban 5y ago>There's evidence that the US military used similar techniques in the Korean war. By our own army's admittance, we conducted similar bombing of basically every North Korean city and town. We dropped 160,000 tons of bombs on Japan, 635,000 tons on North Korea.
- Ancapistani 5y agoTonnage doesn’t tell the whole story. While I’m unsure of the makeup of the bombs dropped on NK, a large part of the bombs dropped on Japan were incendiaries. Japanese construction was uniquely suited to the creation of “firestorms”, and the vast majority of the effect of US bombing Japan is WW2 was caused not by the bombs themselves, but through the fires set by them.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoWe dropped over 30,000 tons of napalm on North Korea as well. Our firebombing was more effective if anything, here's Air force General Curtis LeMay's words on our actions. >We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too."
- panick21_ 5y agoMalcom Gladwell is a popular journalist, I highly recommend reading books on this topic from actual historians. Gladwell wrote on all kinds of stuff and its nowhere near as well researched as what actual historians bring to the table on these questions. He repeats poplar myth type stories. Learning about Japan, go to something like The Pacific War Trilogy by Ian Toll. It is new and well researched with lots of original research.
- cushychicken 5y agoGladwell's and Toll's accounts of the firebombing of Tokyo don't differ in any radical way. Hell, if anything, Toll and Gladwell reinforce each others' point. Toll also goes on to explain that the same thing that happened to Tokyo happened in Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, and pretty much every other major Japanese city.
- panick21_ 5y agoI don't know about that specifically as I have not read Gladwell's book, I have just read a number of comments from people I tend to trust critical of some of his claims.
- tpowell 5y agoI thoroughly enjoyed his Revisionist History podcast on this and the book it bore that received the same audio treatment: https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/the-bomber-mafia-a-dream-a-temptation/id1560431588 https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/the-bomber-mafia-a-drea...