The large-scale use of mass bombing – a core tactic in the European theatre – was only possible against Japan in the last two years of World War II. This was when B-29 Superfortress bombers came within range of the mainland from sites across the northeast Pacific in the summer of 1944.
This strategy was viewed as a legitimate and effective use of air power. Such bombing against Germany was not possible from the Soviet Union, or used against Japan from bases in western China, as detailed in Caroline Alexander’s Skies of Thunder.
But when the firebombing of Japan began in March 1945, the war was all but over. Hitler had been defeated in Europe, and the conventional view was that Japan’s surrender would be accelerated by using newly developed atomic bombs. It would save thousands of Allied soldiers’ lives without the need for a land invasion. But the cost would be the lives of thousands of Japanese civilians. Ethical and other considerations have been raised in the post-war debate over the effectiveness and morality of bombing campaigns.
Rain of Ruin examines these issues: why was indiscriminate firebombing used in Japan when US commanders had criticised its use by Britain on German cities? Was the use of atomic bombs a military ploy to intimidate the Soviet Union in a subsequent Cold War? Did the Japanese surrender because of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or were there other explanations? Was the bombing campaign morally justified, or justifiable? Was it a war crime?
The answers provided by British military historian Richard Overy are informed by greater knowledge of Japanese perspectives, and American sources that reveal ways to contain Japan as a military power went back to 1906. Plan Orange arose from Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905 and was updated through to the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
“The doctrinal shape of the future bombing campaign … was already developed long before there was any capability of achieving it,” Overy states. Britain had a “Singapore strategy” that involved a strengthened naval base to protect its Empire against Japanese expansion.
Pearl Harbor destroyed that hope, as well as complacency about the war remaining in Europe. On December 8, Japanese forces invaded British Malaya. Within a month, in one of the fastest chains of conquest in military history, Japan seized the Philippines, Hong Kong, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, Portuguese Timor and a scattering of Pacific islands. Singapore fell on February 15, 1942.
Two years later, the tide had turned and bombing raids began. Precision bombing of military and industrial targets from high altitudes was abandoned for low-altitude raids using incendiary devices such as napalm.
The results were devastating to the wooden residential buildings and urban areas. By April of 1945, 40% of Tokyo had literally burnt to the ground. There were few bomb shelters. Steel bridges melted in the firestorm.
After inspecting the damage of a raid on March 9, Emperor Hirohito told a confidant he was contemplating “ways to end the war” – a promise he later fulfilled. This was just five months before atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki three days later.
The human toll in Japan had already reached one million by June, according to the New York Times, and brought little negative response in America, where wartime atrocities were still fresh in the public mind.
Overy provides an excellent account, familiar to viewers of Oppenheimer, of the Manhattan Project. But he has a very different take on how the atomic bombs were viewed in Japan. The bureaucracy was divided between the militarists’ opposition to capitulation and the Emperor’s “sacred decision” to terminate hostilities and end his people’s suffering. The Allied occupiers suppressed Japanese public knowledge of the atomic bomb fallout until the 1952 peace treaty, downgrading their role in bringing this war to an end but alerting the world against their future use.
