The textbook definition of terrorism is targeting noncombatants to achieve strategic objectives. This is a link to the last Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, defending Israel’s actions in Gaza by admitting that the U.S. commonly targets civilians during war.
Before deciding to launch another war to stop terrorism, perhaps there should be some honest moral reflection about what the word means.
In 1991, the Naval War College researched the question of targeting civilians and produced a work titled, Churchill and the Moral Question of World War II “Area Bombing”. According to the research, Winston Churchill first proposed saturation bombing of civilians as an effective strategy to disrupt Germany in its military campaign against the Soviet Union:
Now, in conference with Stalin, Churchill presented the newest and most fearsome face of Britain's bombing strategy. He did not talk of seeking out factories while accepting German civilian casualties as collateral damage. “We look upon [German] morale as a military target,” he told the dictator. “We sought no mercy and would show no mercy.” “That was the only way,” Stalin replied. Churchill then spoke of shattering twenty more German cities. It is reported that Stalin warmed to his words and finally smiled.
After watching film of one such bombing raid, Churchill is quoted as asking, “Are we beasts?”
The American military avoided on principle saturation bombing of population centers in Germany, as the Royal Air Force was doing with a vengeance in places like Hamburg and Dresden. It would have been difficult, politically, to explain to German relatives living in Brooklyn that the U.S. had just intentionally burned their grandparents.
The same restraint did not exist for the Japanese, who were not a powerful voting bloc and were living in internment camps anyway.
At the outset of the war, military leaders believed America would need a long-range, high-altitude bomber to attack the Japanese mainland. Such a weapon did not exist, except in theory. The most expensive research and development project of the war, at least $1 billion more than the Manhattan Project, was the B-29 Bomber.
When the plane had its first combat mission in June 1944, it was beyond glitchy. The engines, which had a flammable magnesium alloy in the crankcase, frequently caught fire. The huge planes were difficult to fly and to maneuver. The second prototype had crashed and burned, killing the test pilot. When the planes were not catching fire, the engines often just failed.
At high altitude over Japan, bombs dropped from the B-29 had to pass through an unexpected jet stream, and they were inaccurate. The plane was useless for precision bombing against selected strategic targets that its predecessor, the B-17 Liberator, had been used for in Europe.
In his book, Curtis LeMay: Strategist and Tactician, Warren Kozak described the situation:
By 1944, the huge bomber had become a messy political problem. With a total production cost heading into the billions, Hap Arnold knew all too well that the B-29 had to justify its expense. So far, that was not even close to happening. Interservice rivalry exacerbated the problem. The Navy played the dominant role in the Pacific Theater. With all service branches competing for funds and limited materials, the Navy openly questioned this strikingly expensive airplane that was getting top priority in factories, precious metal, and tens of thousands of workers, but had not dented one roof in Japan.
There was pressure to change the airplane’s mission from precision bombing to area bombing of civilians, so at least it would do something. Kozak details how General Haywood “Possum” Hansell, the original commander of the B-29 bombing group in the Pacific, refused to target civilians. He made his position clear to his commanders in Washington, telling them:
[E]ven if the Japanese acted like beasts, Americans shouldn’t do the same. Killing innocent civilians was a matter of moral and ethical consideration. The Hague International Convention made it clear that international law prohibited terror attacks on innocent civilians.
General Curtis LeMay was selected to replace Hansell precisely because he did not bother with moral consequences. Kozak recounts the decision-making process:
At that point, Hap Arnold had no alternative. There was enormous pressure on him from the White House, the Navy, and the War Department – the Joint Chiefs were already planning the invasion of the mainland. The costs of the B-29 program were continuing to skyrocket. ‘He couldn’t wait for Hansell to defeat the Japanese with his theories of civilized precision bombing,’ according to Ralph Nutter.
The U.S. government did not order the military to bomb Japanese civilians. Like Mafia bosses, rulers in a democracy sometimes prefer to remain deliberately ignorant to avoid accountability. Instead, the bureaucrat with authority to conduct the Pacific air war, General LeMay, was shipped both B-29s and incendiary bombs without specific instructions about how to use them.
LeMay’s plan was to send B-29s in low at night, dropping napalm bombs on Tokyo neighborhoods. Instead of flying in formation, they would fly in sequence, one after another. The outer edges of densely populated working-class districts would be lit by a first wave of incendiaries. Subsequent planes would drop their bombs within the illuminated boundaries wherever it seemed darkest.
Essentially, the most advanced military machine ever built would be used to hurl high-tech Molotov cocktails at people’s homes.
When LeMay announced his plan during a senior staff meeting, one intelligence officer asked, “Aren’t firebomb attacks on cities the type of terror bombing used by the RAF that our air force has been trying to avoid?”
According to Kozak, LeMay answered: “I know there may be some who call it uncivilized warfare. But you simply cannot fight a war without some civilian casualties. General Norstad tells me the press has been howling at the civilian casualties caused in Dresden. We didn’t start this war, but the quicker we finish it, the more lives will be saved – and not just American.”
On March 10, 1945, the United States targeted and killed massive numbers of Japanese civilians in a night-long bombing raid on their Tokyo homes. Noncombatants were intentionally terrorized by firestorms and then burned to death. More died in the Tokyo firebombing than from either of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki a few months later. Some pilots who flew near the end of the attack complained of the smell of burning flesh.
Families would first suffer the terror of an attack from the air and then, at the height of the horror, they would be consumed by flames or heat while those who had not yet succumbed watched, themselves in extreme physical pain.
Measured by the sheer number of civilians intentionally killed in the shortest amount of time, it was perhaps the greatest war crime in history. A French reporter near the scene, Robert Guillain, would later describe what he witnessed in the essay “I Saw Tokyo Burning.”
Under the wind and the gigantic breath of the fire, immense, incandescent vortices rose in a number of places, swirling, flattening and sucking whole blocks of houses into their maelstrom of fire. Wherever there was a canal, people hurled themselves into the water; in shallow places, people waited, half sunk in noxious muck, mouths just above the surface of the water. Hundreds of them were later found dead; not drowned, but asphyxiated by the burning air and smoke. In other places, the water got so hot that the luckless bathers were simply boiled alive. Some of the canals ran directly into the Sumida; when the tide rose, people huddled in them drowned. In Asakusa and Honjo, people crowded onto the bridges, but the spans were made of steel that gradually heated; human clusters clinging to the white-hot railings finally let go, fell into the water and were carried off on the current. Thousands jammed the parks and gardens that lined both banks of the Sumida. As panic brought ever fresh waves of people pressing into the narrow strips of land, those in front were pushed irresistibly toward the river; whole walls of screaming humanity toppled over and disappeared in the deep water. Thousands of drowned bodies were later recovered from the Sumida estuary.
Sirens sounded the all-clear around 5 A.M. - those still working in the half of the city that had not been attacked; the other half burned for twelve hours more. I talked to someone who had inspected the scene on March 11. What was most awful, my witness told me, was having to get off his bicycle every couple of feet to pass over the countless bodies strewn through the streets. There was still a light wind blowing and some of the bodies, reduced to ashes, were simply scattering like sand. In many sectors, passage was blocked by whole incinerated crowds.
The Tokyo raid was repeated over the next few months in 68 other Japanese cities, and hundreds of thousands more civilians would be targeted and killed.
After the war, LeMay went on to high leadership in the newly formed United States Air Force during its destruction by napalm of North Korea’s cities during the Korean War. As a member of President Johnson’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, LeMay advocated for bombing North Vietnam “back to the stone age.” His tough guy, “bomb-‘em-all” pose would be mocked in the anti-war movies that emerged in the 1960s.
He would finish the decade by accepting a spot as vice president on George Wallace’s 1968 segregationist third-party presidential ticket, engaging in a bit of self-parody by advocating for nuclear war in his introductory press conference.
Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, was LeMay’s junior officer assigned to crunch numbers to maximize civilian kill rates. This is a link to McNamara in the documentary The Fog of War (2003), admitting to his role in bombing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, which he describes as a war crime:
What one can criticize is that the human race has not really grappled with the rules of war… Was there a rule that said you should not burn to death 100,000 civilians in a night? LeMay said if we lost the war, we all would have been prosecuted as war criminals, and I think he’s right. He and I would say I were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
Postwar moral reflection in the West has focused on the use of atomic bombs, which were in their own category of brutality. They were created for no tactical purpose other than to bomb civilians. Their use in the war was widely criticized at the time. The most damning criticism was by top military leaders, who judged that they were unnecessary.
Dwight Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs that he had expressed to War Secretary Harry Stimson “grave misgivings” about the use of atomic bombs, “First on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”
Admiral William Leahy, President Harry Truman’s chief military adviser, had similar views. Leahy wrote: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan…. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”
Civilian terror bombing fundamentally changed the just war theory that served as the basis for existing international agreements. As described by Michael Walzer in his book, Just and Unjust Wars, the principle that emerged was, “the greater the justice of one’s cause, the more rights one has in battle.” That is a logical error that nullifies the jus in bello (“right conduct in war”) prong of the dual just war criteria by conflating it with the jus ad bellum (“right to go to war”) inquiry.
The tendency after such a war is to validate everything that was done in it by casting the reasons for war as absolutely righteous and prohibiting any historical inquiry that diminishes the claim. Here the victors have an enormous advantage because they write the history.
World War II was crystallized in the public consciousness as a necessary conflict that pitted good against evil. The war is still cited by leaders in the West to justify questionable military intervention around the world. The result is a trite public morality in which disputes are reduced to cartoonish superficialities.
In a Harvard Gazette interview about her 2022 book, Looking for the Good War, West Point professor Elizabeth D. Samet described the essential problem:
World War II gave us a way to look at the world as an unambiguous contest between good and evil. We have used a vocabulary that was inherited from it: Fascism became Islamofascism, the Axis Powers became the Axis of Evil, the second President Bush’s term to describe a constellation of unrelated adversaries. It also left us with the belief that the exercise of U.S. force would always magically bring about victory and would serve the cause of liberating the oppressed. As a result of that, we find ourselves, after decades of war and loss, having to reckon with the fact that our way of thinking and talking about war and about the world is hopelessly out of date….
Rather than repeat the errors by launching new wars, it is time for the world to grapple with the rules of war and to reset long-needed boundaries. America’s unipolarity made international agreements passé, but even Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared an end to that era. An international prohibition on targeting civilians would be a diplomatic first step to ending terrorism.