Sherman's Ghosts: Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of War by Matthew Carr

Author:Matthew Carr [Carr, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781620970782
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2015-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

“… in their innermost recesses.” Mock German village with observation bunker, Dugway Proving Ground. Courtesy of

the Library of Congress.

In late July 1943, the Eighth Air Force carried out a joint attack with the RAF on

Hamburg, in which explosives and incendiaries generated a firestorm that burned, crushed,

and suffocated between 60,000 and 100,000 people and gutted much of the city. On

February 3, 1945, more than nine hundred B-17 bombers took part in a night raid on

Berlin with the RAF called “Operation Thunderclap,” which was specifically intended to

deal a knockout blow to civilian morale; it killed 3,000 people. On February 13–15, 1945,

the Allies carried out an even more destructive raid on Dresden, which killed at least

35,000 people and transformed the city into what one British pilot called “a sea of fire

covering in my estimation some 50 square miles.”

In all, some 305,000 German civilians were killed and 780,000 wounded in raids that

destroyed or partially destroyed fifty cities and made 7.5 million German civilians

homeless. Civilian casualties were often obscured by euphemistic bureaucratic language in

which the success of such operations was measured by lists of factories or bridges

destroyed or numbers of workers who had been “dehoused.” The impact on German

morale was more difficult to measure. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey that followed

the Allied invasion of Germany found that the population “showed surprising resistance to

the terror and hardships of repeated air attack, to the destruction of their homes and

belongings, and to the conditions under which they were reduced to live… . The power of

a police state over its people cannot be underestimated. ”44

Paper Cities

Both the legitimacy and the effectiveness of bombing German cities have continued to be

debated by historians. Regardless of whether or not it “worked” on its own terms, the

strategy of bombing German civilians in order to crush their will to fight or support their

government did not meet with universal favor, even within the U.S. military. Patton

considered the bombing of German cities to be “barbaric, useless and sadistic.” In a

memorandum to General Carl A. Spaatz, commander of U.S. Strategic Air Forces in

Europe, a staff officer declared it “contrary to [American] ideals to wage war on

civilians. ”45 However, although American air-war planners had some reservations about

bombing German civilians, they had a very different attitude toward the Japanese. During

the 1930s, Mitchell and other American airpower advocates identified flammable Japanese

“paper cities” and “teeming bamboo ant heaps” as natural targets in the event of war.

These recommendations were realized to terrible effect during the massive B-29 raids on

Japanese cities in 1945 that followed the promotion of General Curtis LeMay (1906–90)

to lead the Twentieth Bomber Command in the Mariana Islands in December 1944. In

February 1945, LeMay was ordered to experiment with incendiary bombings of selected

Japanese urban centers. On February 20, his forces carried out their first incendiary raid,

on the city of Kobe.

This was followed by the massive raid on Tokyo on the night of March 9–10, in which

334 bombers flew as low as 4,900 feet and created an inferno without historical precedent.

At least 83,000 people were burned, boiled, or suffocated to death in a conflagration that

transformed much of the city into a wasteland. LeMay considered this raid a resounding

success and vowed to continue to “bomb and burn them till they quit.” Throughout the

summer, Japan’s largest cities were relentlessly bombed, and operations analysts began

preparing for a bombing campaign against “all urban areas with a population greater than

30,000 peoples” that would have included 180 towns in total, and involved spraying rice

paddies with oil, defoliants, and biological agents in order to starve the population.

As in Germany, operations analysts talked of “man-hours lost” and “dehoused”

workers in ostensibly targeting Japan’s factories and wartime cottage industries, but the

broader intentions behind LeMay’s campaigns were summed up approvingly by an editor

of the Atlanta Constitution, despite the city’s history of wartime destruction, who observed

that it was “shocking to think of the thousands who must be burned to death” in such

attacks but nevertheless concluded, “If it is necessary, however, that the cities of Japan are,

one by one, burned to black ashes, that we can, and will, do.” Such approval was fueled by

racist depictions of the Japanese as a bestial and subhuman enemy and also by the belief

that the bombing of Japanese cities would “save lives”—meaning the lives of American

soldiers. At least 806,000 Japanese civilians were killed or wounded in nine months—

more than all the Japanese soldiers killed during the whole war—in a campaign that one of

MacArthur’s key aides described in a confidential memorandum as “one of the most

ruthless and barbaric killings of civilians or non-combatants in history.” 46

If the scale of destruction exceeded anything in the history of American warfare, it was

not always carried out within clear strategic parameters. “It was not necessary for us to

burn every city, to destroy every factory, to shoot down every airplane or sink every ship,

and starve the people. It was enough to demonstrate that we were capable of doing all

this,” observed the writers of the Strategic Bombing Survey after the war.47 In an account

of the Tokyo raid in the New Yorker, LeMay’s public-relations officer compared LeMay’s

actions to “a decision like Grant’s when he let Sherman try to march through Georgia. ”48

In an interview after the war, LeMay defended his actions, saying, “There are no innocent

civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight

an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called

innocent bystanders.” Asked about the morality of such methods, LeMay replied,

“Actually I think it’s more immoral to use less force than necessary, than it is to use more.

If you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run because you are merely

protracting the struggle. ”49

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