Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

Even now, in the late stages of a war of unprecedented brutality, American leaders were loath to admit that they had abandoned their policy against terror bombing. Firebombing Japanese cities demanded a plausible military pretense. USAAF target selectors argued that much of Japanese industrial production occurred in residential districts, where a cottage industry of small “feeder” or “shadow” workshops produced components for major plants. These were said to be the real target of the mass incendiary raids. But after the burning of Dresden, which occurred just three weeks before the first big firebombing raid on Tokyo, the moral objections seemed rather quaint. If the Germans had invited such retribution, so had the Japanese. Later, LeMay acknowledged that Japanese war crimes had provided a justification, at least in his own mind: “I was not happy, but neither was I particularly concerned, about civilian casualties in incendiary raids. I didn’t let it influence any of my decisions because we knew how the Japanese had treated the Americans—both civilian and military—that they captured in places like the Philippines.”56 It was no coincidence that the world learned of Japanese atrocities in Manila just two weeks before the start of the firebombing campaign.