Franklin Roosevelt and Truman Target German and Japanese Civilians
* What: The deliberate military targeting of German and Japanese civilians by Allied bombing. Bombing was primarily by American planes in the Pacific Theater, both American and British air forces in Europe.
* The Body Count: At least 305,000 German civilians and 500,000 Japanese civilians killed, and over seven million Germans and five million Japanese made homeless. Many people of occupied nations were also unintentionally killed, such as 40,000 French and 25,000 Poles.
* Who Also Gets the Blame:
* Winston Churchill began ordering the carpet bombing of German civilians before the US entered the war, by over a year and a half. Churchill deserves a greater share of the blame than Roosevelt. Initially both Britain and Germany agreed to avoid targeting civilians. Churchill did not change his mind because of either the Battle of Britain and German targeting of British civilians, nor because of German targeting of fleeing refugees in countries like Poland and France. Churchill ordered bombing civilian targets in 1942 as a way to placate the Soviets, to say Britain was contributing to the war effort without directly invading Europe yet.
* Thus Churchill ordered the targeting of German civilians as a war tactic, not a response to human rights violations. And he and Roosevelt ordered destruction on a far greater scale than either the Nazis or Japanese fascists. Nine of the ten cities with the highest civilian death tolls during World War II were victims of Allied bombing, not Axis. The argument of some that blames Hitler, the Nazis, Tojo, and the Japanese military for being the first guilty of carpet bombing cities ignores that fact. If anything, the behavior of clearly evil Axis regimes is an argument for precisely why the Allies should have avoided not only imitating their barbarous practices, but doing them on a far larger and more inhumane scale.
* Greatly overestimated technology. So called precision bombing was anything but. Even today, air forces are not able to bomb without causing many civilian casualties, despite the best efforts of military and civilian planners. The ability of bombing campaigns to defeat an enemy or even weaken them is also usually overestimated. Bombing generally does not break an enemy's morale. If anything, it may strengthen their resolve.
* Some writers blame German anti aircraft fire for forcing Allied bombers higher where accuracy was much less. This was not a valid argument in the Pacific Theater, where Japanese anti aircraft fire did far less, almost negligible, damage to American aircraft.
* Some scholars like James Dower argue the war in Asia became a de facto race war. Dower's War Without Mercy documents how the Allies, largely white nations with centuries of white supremacist practices and pseudo scientific racist teachings felt humiliated by being defeated by an Asian or nonwhite power.
* Atrocities in the Pacific Theater by US troops were widespread; execution of POWs; mutilation of enemy dead; massacres of civilians; even the collection of enemy body parts as trophies. One of the more notorious cases was a Japanese skull sent home by a Marine to his fiancee, where she posed with it for the cover of Life magazine. In such an atmosphere, where many Americans even called for genocide, the murder of every last Japanese as revenge for Pearl Harbor, it is appalling but not surprising there were few objections to targeting Japanese civilians.
* British General Arthur “Bomber” Harris and US General Curtis Lemay were the greatest military proponents of massive bombing campaigns in Europe. After the defeat of Germany, Lemay was shifted to the Pacific to direct bombing against Japan. Among Lemay's staff was a young colonel named George McNamara, later to become US Secretary of Defense for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson during the US-Vietnam War.
* McNamara's later assessment of his and Lemay's role in carpet bombing was harsh. In the documentary Fog of War, McNamara stated both he and Lemay were war criminals. Lemay also urged Kennedy to still bomb and invade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis even after the Soviets withdrew from the island, even though it could lead to nuclear war .
* Lemay's final bit of notoriety was his argument to bomb the Soviet Union “back to the Stone Age.” This comment was repeated often when Lemay ran for Vice President in 1968 as running mate for segregationist George Wallace on the American Independent ticket. But in today's culture Lemay may be best remembered as the model for the suicidal General Jack Ripper in the dark comedy Dr. Strangelove.
* For over half a decade before the US entered World War II, Roosevelt had stood strongly against precisely the kind of aerial atrocities he was about to commit. When the Japanese military bombed Shanghai and Nanking, Roosevelt was among those most forcefully condemning them. When Italian fascists used aerial bombing and nerve gas against Ethiopian civilians, Roosevelt again spoke out against the offenders in thunderous tones. When Hitler's troops attacked Polish and other civilians early in the war, Roosevelt said:
* "The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population...has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.... I am therefore addressing this urgent appeal to every Government which may be engaged in hostilities publicly to affirm its determination that its armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations."
* Most observers have come to the conclusion that a series of events led many Americans to increasingly dehumanize Germans and Japanese. First Japanese militarists bombed Shanghai in 1932. Then Mussolini ordered the slaughter of Ethiopians when Italy invaded. Both German and Italian forces killed many civilians in the Spanish Civil War, the most infamous atrocity being the bombing of Guernica. Japan would again bomb Shanghai in 1937, and its soldiers committed many atrocities in Nanking.
* Hitler's invasion of Poland set off a series of spiraling, self reinforcing cycles of barbarities. Both FDR and Churchill called on Hitler to cease attacks on civilians. Hitler agreed and appeared to stop. Then the British Cabinet actually approved indiscriminate bombing of Germany in May 1940, three months before Churchill approved retaliation for the bombing of East London during the Battle of Britain. The German bombing was purely accidental, but even had the British government known that, there is little reason to doubt they would have acted any differently. Each government responded in kind with one bombing in retaliation to the others.
* Churchill in May 1941 spoke of “exterminating attacks” on Germans. Famed American reporter Edward Murrow described attacks on Berlin as “orchestrated hell,” yet did not speak against the actions. For the British, one can make the argument that the slaughter of German civilians was pure revenge. But obviously one cannot make that same claim for Americans. Except for the loss of merchant seamen, no US civilians were killed by the German military.
* Even if one accepts American carpet bombing of both Germany and Japan as misplaced anger over the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attack was on a military target. Contrary to what most Americans thought at the time, it was not an undeclared “sneak” attack. Japan had sent a declaration of war shortly before the attack. Only delays in translation caused it to appear to have been sent after.
* In the name of being willing to do anything to win the war, Roosevelt not only approved targeting civilians. He also began the Manhattan Project to build an A-bomb and the stockpiling of biological weapons, botulism and anthrax. Roosevelt also was unwilling to spare any US bombings to try and save Jews from the Holocaust. (See Section Two.)
* It is important to note that while Roosevelt acted on the advice of the military, their opinion was far from universal on the matter. Lemay did say, “To worry about the morality of what we are doing...nuts.” Lemay carpet bombed Japan on such a wide scale that toward the end of the war, he was running out of cities to target. Lemay even considered the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “anti climatic.”
* At the same time, General James Doolittle, famed for his early raids, opposed targeting civilians as, “Terrorism, without any justification on military grounds.” He argued for, “Military targets only... There is absolutely nothing to be gained by attacking residential areas.”
* The German cities of Kassel, Darmstadt, and Pforzheim were all flattened by British bombers over a period of months. But the Polish city of Swinoujscie was crushed by American bombers in a single day, March 12, 1945, killing as many as 23,000 Polish civilians. Berlin lost up to 50,000 civilians killed by British, American, and Soviet bombs.
* Dresden and Hamburg suffered the worst of any German cities. Incendiary bombs created a firestorm in each city. The burning cities fed on themselves, causing much of the oxygen in the area to be exhausted. Though both cities used extensive subway tunnels as bomb shelters, many residents hiding out below died from suffocation. Yet the bombing of civilians were not much of a public issue until author Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five described the firestorms in Dresden he survived while a POW.
* Most scholarship has not focused on the immorality of targeting civilians. Instead the writing has been primarily from military historians asking the question: Was it an effective tactic? The first survey performed by the US military concluded bombing German civilians did not work. In fact it may have strengthened their resolve to fight on.
* Most media looking at British civilians in both world wars concluded the same thing. Nearly every commentator noted British “pluck” and “reserve.” In both countries, as well as when the Soviet Union was targeted by German bombing, attacks on the cities served as a rallying point. Experiencing hardship together made civilians more patriotic, hostile towards the enemy, and determined to keep fighting the war.
* Did killing huge numbers of German civilians hurt their war effort in other ways? Obviously the loss of skilled workers hurt the economy, and many more people made homeless ties up resources that otherwise may have gone to the war effort. Some analysts concluded it did hurt defense industries, especially oil production. Yet others point out the real blow to Germany was the loss of Romanian oil fields to Soviet armies.
* Did targeting Japanese civilians break their resolve and hasten the end of the war? Here the problem was that Japanese industries were more decentralized. Traditionally much of their economy was based on small artisans in homes or shops rather than large factories.
* Here also is where those insistent that the dropping of the A-bombs broke Japan's will to fight face a quandary. Japan faced more devastation and shock from conventional bombing than the A-bombs ever wrought. Yet Japan showed no sign of surrender.
* There also remains the other logical inconsistency. Often the claim is that the A-bombs were necessary to force a supposedly very fanatic population to surrender. Yet if Japan's population was truly so fanatic and would always fight to the last man, seemingly neither conventional bombing nor A-bombs should have brought surrender.
* The problem with these claims is their parochial nature, assuming that the US was the only enemy Japan was facing. Japan had fought the British, French, and Dutch as well, and China far longer than any others. China showed no sign of being defeated and had tied up most Japanese military resources, both men and material.
* And Japan would shortly face a far more devastating enemy. The Soviets joined the war against Japan very late. Yet in less than five weeks, attacking with a million and a half men on a wide front, the Soviets took more Japanese-held territory than the US did in four years.
* Much like in Europe, it was the Soviets who played the key role in defeating Japan. It was the Soviets' late entry that utterly demoralized a fading Japan and caused its surrender, much like the US's late entry into World War I insured a much faster German defeat.
* Were there other tactics that could have been used, not only more effective but not horrific and morally reprehensible? Japan is an island nation, one with no oil or iron ore. Obviously a blockade would have been both a more practical and a more humane choice than targeting civilians with either conventional or A-bombs.
* To defeat Germany, obviously a sooner invasion of mainland Europe would have been a better choice. But Churchill obviously had an ulterior motive for delaying D-Day as long as possible, one that Stalin and everyone else knew. Churchill hoped that Hitler would weaken Stalin as much as possible, since he suspected Britain and America would be facing off against the Soviet Union after war's end. But as a tactic, this also made the Cold War more likely.
* Harry Truman, a virtual nonentity unknown to most Americans before his nomination as Vice President, became President after Roosevelt's death. Business interests insisted that the second most popular politician in America, Vice President Henry Wallace, be replaced since Wallace was too far to the left for their taste. Truman was originally a small town hat maker elevated by one of the most corrupt, ruthless, and violent political machines in US history. He was utterly inadequate for the job of President, and by many observers' estimation, incompetent, stumbling from crisis to crisis without adequate training or understanding.
* Truman's reputation today is largely built on admiration for the underdog, as he certainly was. But his lack of understanding also led him to never adequately question the targeting of civilians, either conventionally or by atomic weapons. Truman's fumbling would also lead him to use fear to gain public support, since he did not have either Roosevelt's popularity or his charisma. And that harvesting of fear would be a major reason much of the world was trapped into the Cold War that Truman largely began. (See Section Four.)