Commemorating the Bombing of Tokyo

12 March 2020

Among images of the horrors of war the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima are gold standard. Each of these bombs caused many tens of thousands of casualties. Beside their destructive power the horror of other weapons seems to fall into insignificance.

In March, however, we commemorate the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Tokyo in which over 300 planes stacked with incendiary weapons followed each other at regular intervals for three hours and killed an estimated 100,000 people — as many as those killed by either of the nuclear weapons in Japan.

Crew members on the later bombers wore facemasks to deal with the smoke from burning flesh. So large a number of people died because the bombing targeted a very highly populated mainly residential section of Tokyo in which low income workers and their families lived in flimsy and flammable houses highly vulnerable to firestorms. It was technically a very successful operation, causing many deaths, many casualities and massive homelessness, with the loss of only a few planes.

As we reflect on the bombing today it is hard not to be overwhelmed by sadness at the wound to our common humanity laid bare by the bombing. That so much human planning, such ingeniousness in the making and deploying of weapons, such careful calculation of the effect of napalm and phosphorous on wood, paper and human flesh, and such relentlessness in the starting, feeding and renewing of fires, should be expended in the destruction of people as a demonstration of the power to kill, and so to inspire the enemy to surrender, might make us ask what kind of human beings could devise such things.

In contrast to the muted criticism later of the use of the nuclear bombs, there was little critical response at the time of the Tokyo bombing. That silence invites reflection because those who justified the bombing appealed in such crude terms to the end that justifies the means. The claim could not have survived any full description of the means used in the bombing. The real principle at work was that in war anything is justifiable, or perhaps more precisely that anything done by our side is morally acceptable.

So many of the population and of those responsible for prosecuting the war implicitly accepted this principle that potential critics either questioned their own misgivings or thought it more prudent not to voice them.

INTERNATIONAL

Commemorating the Bombing of Tokyo

Subscriber login