Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Roosevelt’s appeal for decency and morality had no effect. The city of Warsaw was soon destroyed by German aircraft and artillery, then London was attacked from the air. The British retaliated by bombing Berlin. New theories of airpower were applied on an unprecedented scale. Unlike “tactical” strikes aimed at an enemy’s military forces, “strategic” bombing focused on transportation systems and factories, the economic infrastructure necessary for waging war. Strategic assets were usually found in the heart of cities.

At first, the British refrained from deliberate attacks on German civilians. The policy of the Royal Air Force (RAF) changed, however, in the fall of 1941. The Luftwaffe had attacked the English cathedral town of Coventry, and most of the RAF bombs aimed at Germany’s industrial facilities were missing by a wide mark. The RAF’s new target would be something more intangible than rail yards or munitions plants: the morale of the German people. Bombarding residential neighborhoods, it was hoped, would diminish the will to fight. “The immediate aim is, therefore, twofold,” an RAF memo explained, “namely, to produce (i) destruction, and (ii) the fear of death.” The RAF Bomber Command, under the direction of Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris, unleashed a series of devastating nighttime raids on German cities. During Operation Gomorrah in July 1943, RAF bombs started a fire in Hamburg with hurricane-force winds. The first “firestorm” ever ignited by aerial bombardment, it killed about forty thousand civilians.

American bombers participated in Operation Gomorrah and the subsequent RAF attack on Dresden, where perhaps twenty thousand civilians died. But the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) opposed the British policy of targeting residential areas, known as “de-housing.” Instead of the RAF’s nighttime “area” bombing, the strategic doctrine of the USAAF called for daytime “precision” bombing. Relying on the Norden bombsight — a device that combined a telescope, a mechanical computer, and an autopilot — the USAAF tried to destroy German factories, ports, military bases, and lines of communication. Precision bombing was rarely precise, and the vast majority of bombs still missed their targets. Nevertheless, American aircrews risked their lives conducting raids in broad daylight to avoid killing German civilians.

In the Pacific War a different set of rules applied. The Japanese were considered racially inferior, often depicted as monkeys or vermin in American propaganda. The Japanese had attacked the United States without warning. They had treated Allied prisoners of war with brutality, employed slave labor, and launched suicide attacks instead of surrendering. They had forced as many as two hundred thousand Korean women to serve as prostitutes in military brothels. They had killed almost one million Chinese civilians with chemical and biological weapons. They had killed millions of other civilians in China, Burma, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, war crimes driven by the Japanese belief in their own racial superiority.

At first, the United States conducted only precision bombing raids on Japan. But heavy cloud cover and high-altitude winds made it difficult to hit industrial targets. On the night of March 9, 1945, the Army Air Forces tried a new approach. American planes struck Tokyo with two thousand tons of bombs containing napalm and jellied gasoline. Although a major industrial area was destroyed, the real targets were block after block of Japanese buildings made of wood, paper, and bamboo. Within hours the firestorm consumed one quarter of the city. It killed about one hundred thousand civilians, and left about a million homeless. This was truly, in the words of historian John W. Dower, “war without mercy.”

The firebombing of Tokyo wasn’t condemned by President Roosevelt. On the contrary, it was soon followed by the firebombing of Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Kawasaki, and Yokohama. By the middle of June, the United States had laid waste to Japan’s six leading industrial cities. Then American planes launched incendiary attacks on dozens of smaller cities. The level of destruction varied considerably. About one quarter of Osaka was destroyed by fire, one third of Kawasaki, more than half of Kobe. Toyama, a city on the Sea of Japan with chemical plants and a population of about 125,000, was hit the hardest. After a nighttime raid by B-29 bombers, the proportion of Toyama still standing was an estimated 0.5 percent.

As Japanese cities vanished in flames, Leó Szilárd began to have doubts about the atomic bomb. He had been the first to push hard for its development in the United States, but he now opposed its use against Japanese civilians. In June 1945, Szilárd and a group of scientists at the University of Chicago sent a report to the leadership of the Manhattan Project, asking that the power of nuclear weapons be demonstrated to the world at “an appropriately selected uninhabited area.” A nuclear attack upon Japan, they contended, would harm the reputation of the United States, make it difficult to secure international control of “this new means of indiscriminate destruction,” and start a dangerous arms race. But the die had been cast. A committee of presidential advisers had already decided that a public demonstration of an atomic bomb was too risky, because the weapon might not work; that Japan should not be given any warning of a nuclear attack, for much the same reason; that the bomb should be aimed at a war plant surrounded by workers’ housing; and that the goal of the bombing would be “to make a profound psychological impression” on as many workers as possible.

The ideal target of the atomic bomb would be a large city that had not yet been firebombed, so the effects of the new weapon could be reliably assessed. The first four choices of the president’s Target Committee were Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura. Secretary of War Henry Stimson insisted that Kyoto be removed from the list, arguing that the city had played too central a role in Japanese art, history, and culture to be wiped out. Nagasaki took its place. The day after the Trinity test, Szilárd and more than sixty-eight other Manhattan Project scientists signed a petition, addressed to the president. It warned that using the atomic bomb against Japan would open the door “to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale” and place American cities in “continuous danger of sudden annihilation.” The petition never reached the president. And even if it had, it probably wouldn’t have changed his mind.

Franklin Roosevelt had never told his vice president, Harry Truman, about the Manhattan Project or the unusual weapon that it was developing. When Roosevelt died unexpectedly, on April 12, 1945, Truman had the thankless task of replacing a beloved and charismatic leader during wartime. The new president was unlikely to reverse a nuclear policy set in motion years earlier, at enormous expense, because a group of relatively unknown scientists now considered it a bad idea. Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb was influenced by many factors, and the desire to save American lives ranked near the top. An invasion of Japan was scheduled for November 1. Former President Herbert Hoover warned Truman that such an invasion would cost between “500,000 and 1,000,000 American lives.” At the War Department, it was widely assumed that American casualties would reach half a million. During the recent battle of Okinawa, more than one third of the American landing force had been killed or wounded — and a full-scale invasion of Japan might require 1.8 million American troops. While meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in June 1945, Truman expressed the hope of avoiding “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.”

Unlike most presidents, Truman had firsthand experience of battle. During the First World War, half of the men in his infantry division were killed or wounded during the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Standing amid piles of dead American soldiers, the sergeant of his platoon had yelled at the survivors: “Now… you’ll believe you’re in a war.” Truman took no pleasure in the deaths of Japanese civilians. But he preferred them to the deaths of young American servicemen. Atomic bombs, he decided, would be dropped on Japan as soon as they were ready.