I asked the military historian Tami Biddle, who teaches at the Army War College, what she tells her students about the spring and summer of 1945, and she recounted a personal story. “My grandmother Sadie Davis had two children, two sons fighting in World War II. One had been in the Pacific theater for a long time; one had been fighting in the European theater but didn’t have enough points to leave the war prior to what would have been the landing on Kyushu.”
The landing on Kyushu was the planned invasion of Japan in November of 1945, an invasion expected to cost the lives of more than half a million American soldiers, not to mention just as many Japanese. She continued,
He would have been in that landing had it not been for the Americans being exceedingly brutal with the Navy and the blockade, with the air war against Japanese cities, and then, ultimately, with atomic weapons.iii
For her, I’m sure that she was quite prepared for us to be brutal in that moment, because she wanted her sons to come home. Lots of people feel that way in wartime. After the war, you look at the whole situation and the totality of the thing, and you look at what has been wrought, and you look at the lives lost and the devastation and the pictures of Hiroshima and the pictures of the cities that were bombed in Germany. You think, “Dear God, was there some other way? Did we lose our souls? Did we go into a Faustian bargain to win, where winning cost us so much morally?”
Curtis LeMay put the bomb-damage photos of Schweinfurt and Regensburg in the foyer of his house because he wanted to remind himself every day of how many of his men were lost in the course of what he considered a fruitless mission. I would feel better about Curtis LeMay if he had also hung the strike photos from the firebombing of Tokyo—to remind himself, every day, of what was lost in the course of what he considered his most successful mission.iv
As Biddle says,
Those are really unresolvable questions. I hope I never have to face the circumstances that my grandmother faced having two sons in a war and having to maybe hope for the kinds of things that she was hoping for—devastating attacks on an enemy that would finally make the war end so that her boys could come home. I hope I never have to face that in my lifetime. I’m reluctant to judge the people who feel that way.
Footnotes
i Stimson leaves behind a complicated legacy. In private writings, he expresses concern over the potential loss of civilian life and opposes the destruction of cultural centers such as Kyoto. But as historians have noted, Stimson’s delusions around the incendiary bombing campaign seem inexcusable, if not totally implausible. In the eastern front, after a particularly damaging AP report that cited American commanders’ plans to conduct “deliberate terror bombing of the great German population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom,” Stimson sought to spin the narrative in his favor: “Our policy never has been to inflict terror bombing on civilian populations.”
ii In his diary on July 25, 1945, Truman wrote: “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world…This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.”
iii George C. Marshall, the General of the Army, believed that dragging out the war would destroy morale. He argued that the fastest path to victory was an amphibian land invasion of Japan. By contrast, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, who led the Navy, believed that a land invasion risked far too many casualties. Ultimately, these plans were never fully realized. Japan surrendered before the Navy blockade was expanded, and the land invasion, dubbed Operation Downfall, never commenced.
iv In the end, history probably best remembers Curtis LeMay for a remark he made in his memoirs, published just before his retirement, in 1965. LeMay is quoted as saying this about North Vietnam: “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.” This remark was featured in media coverage when LeMay ran for vice president on a third-party ticket with the segregationist George Wallace, in 1968. But a 2009 biography of LeMay by Warren Kozak calls the truth of this famous quotation into question. Kozak writes: “In his autobiography, Mission with LeMay, written with the help of novelist MacKinley Kantor, LeMay gave Kantor his quotes, stories, and ideas, and Kantor helped shape them into written form. The drafts of the book were sent to LeMay for his approval before it was published. The book is very much in LeMay’s voice, and it is well done. But there is one quote on page 545 concerning Vietnam that Kantor invented: ‘My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.’ To this day, when LeMay’s name comes up, most people remember that quote, asking ‘Isn’t he the guy who wanted to bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age?’ Much later, LeMay admitted to friends that he never said those words. ‘I was just [so] damned bored going through the transcripts that I just let it get by,’ he told friends and family. Since he put his name on the book, he was responsible, but the quote most likely stayed with him simply because it sounded like something he could have said.”