Bombing Civilians by Yuki Tanaka & Marilyn B. Young

Author:Yuki Tanaka & Marilyn B. Young [Tanaka, Yuki & Young, Marilyn B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2010-08-03T11:00:00+00:00

Although Chongqing’s buildings and streets were reduced to heaps of debris, the military and civilians worked together to bore into the sandstone beneath the city to build an enormous and sturdy underground tunnel where they could take shelter. The people continued their resistance and maintained their will to fight in spite of the massive civilian casualties inflicted by the bombings.

Japanese military commanders thought that a “terror from the sky” bombing campaign would break the will of the enemy and lead them to surrender. This type of thinking proved false in the case of the Chongqing bombings, and also in other aerial bombings. We can see the futility of attempting to bomb people into submission by studying the reactions of those whose cities were bombed in World War II and later wars. During the Korean War, people in North Korea were hit with more napalm and incendiary bombs than were dropped on Japan in the Pacific War, but they still did not give up. Also during the Vietnam War, the people fought back after the massive “north bombings,” which again proved that the bombing of cities does not crush the will of the people.

Eventually the “boomerang” of strategic bombing hit back at Japan with redoubled ferocity in the bombings of Japanese cities. The initial air raid was in June 1944 when the northern part of the island of Kyushu was hit by B-29 bombers, which took off from a U.S. air base near Chengdu, in the same province (Sichuan) as Chongqing, under the direction of the U.S. Air Force headquarters in Chongqing. This was one of the most hard-hitting illustrations of cause and effect in the history of war.

What can we learn from the Chongqing bombings? Let’s turn once more to In Search of History, by Theodore White:More people were killed [in the first night’s bombing] than ever before by bombardiers. But what was most important about the killings was their purpose of terror. Nanking and Shanghai had already been bombed; those, however, were military bombings. There was no military target within the old walls of Chungking. Yet the Japanese had chosen, deliberately, to burn it to the ground, and all the people within it, to break some spirit they could not understand, to break the resistance of the government that had taken refuge somewhere in Chungking’s suburbs. I never thereafter felt any guilt when we came to bomb the Japanese; when we bombed, we bombed purposefully, to erase Japan’s industry and war-making power; no American planes swooped low to machine-gun people in the streets, as had the Japanese.19

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