TY - JOUR
AU1 - Garon,, Sheldon
AB - Abstract How did it become ‘normal’ to bomb civilians? Focusing on the aerial bombardment of China, Germany, Britain, and Japan in 1937-45, this essay spotlights the role of transnational learning in the construction and destruction of ‘home fronts’. Belligerents vigorously studied each other's strategies to destroy the enemy's cities and ‘morale’, while investigating efforts to defend one's own home front by means of ‘civilian defence’. The inclusion of Japan, as bomber and bombed, contributes to a more global, connected history of the Second World War. Japan's sustained bombardment of Chinese cities not only reflected emerging transnational ideas of strategic bombing and total war, but also imparted new ‘lessons’ to Western air forces. Moreover, the devastating US firebombing of Japanese cities in 1945 challenges widely accepted judgments that bombing was generally ineffective, serving only to stiffen civilian morale. Why Japanese cities were bombed, and how they were bombed, was not an exceptional story, but was intimately connected to what the Allies had learned from bombing European urban areas. We had on the one side this crazy nation and this demon in Germany … and these funny people who didn’t know what the Western world was about, who tackled the United States. I. I. Rabi, physicist on the Manhattan Project1 The over-all picture of civilian defense in Japan is not a happy one. It is hard to conceive of a nation’s undertaking a major war and paying so little heed to the protection of its vital industries, to the continuance of its essential economic life and to the safety of its people, for without them no war effort can be brought to a victorious conclusion. Of course the argument can readily be advanced that saturation bombings were never expected, but skillful national planning must provide for the unexpected and this the Japanese failed to do — just one more error of many committed by the little men who planned to rule the world, or at least a great part of it. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, 19472 Transnational or global history aims to transcend nation-centred historiographies by spotlighting the movements of ideas, institutions, peoples and practices across borders and oceans. A growing number of works explore the formation of global orders and anti-imperialist movements that followed the two world wars. However, few of the new transnational histories re-examine the wars themselves by connecting developments in the conduct of these conflicts.3 This omission is curious, considering that the world wars were strikingly competitive affairs in which states devoted unprecedented resources to investigating, emulating and improving on the tactics of enemies and allies.4 The circulation of knowledge occurred not only among the European and North American belligerents but also between the European and Asian theatres of war. Transnational learning, moreover, shaped the war efforts at home. The Second World War was a global experience, yet histories of the home front remain confined to individual nations and national mythologies. In the run-up to the war, strategists among the various belligerents knew better. They systematically studied each other’s preparations for what they commonly termed ‘total war’. The coming war, they believed, would be won (or lost) not only on the battlefield but also on the home front. Accordingly, planners worried about the common challenges of total war. Civilians must continue to produce; they must be fed in the face of blockades; they must save money and pay taxes for the war effort; and their morale must not collapse. No nation, regardless of its exceptionalist rhetoric, could afford to ignore the latest developments in home-front mobilization in other countries. These imperatives had already surfaced in the First World War, but the Second World War witnessed an unparalleled menace to the home front. Technological developments in aerial warfare opened up the possibility of flying over the battle-front and striking at the enemy where they lived and worked. It became possible to kill non-combatants by the thousands, even to destroy whole cities. At the same time, a strong offence required a formidable defence. By the start of the Second World War, every belligerent recognized the need to protect its civilians and factories from aerial bombardment. Japan was no exception. Yet this Asian nation remains marginalized in efforts to write a more global history of the Second World War. In his magisterial book The Bombing War, Richard Overy compares and connects the national histories of aerial bombardment within Europe. Japan, by contrast, merits a mere handful of entries, despite its central role as both bomber and bombed. Thomas Hippler’s ‘global history of aerial bombing’ similarly excludes Japan’s sustained bombing of China in 1937–41, while barely mentioning the massive US fire-bombing of Japanese cities in 1945.5 In other accounts, when wartime Japan does appear, Japanese officials are typically represented as ‘fanatics’, cut off from the Western world, who gave no thought to protecting their own people.6 In actuality, wartime Japan was much more connected to global currents than we commonly think. Many of those officers and civil bureaucrats were methodically investigating home-front tactics among allies and enemies alike. Inclusion of the Japanese story would powerfully contribute to a more global understanding of total war and the home fronts in several respects. This is not simply a matter of covering the world outside the Euro-American ‘core’. Modern Japan has been one of the world’s most self-conscious transnational learners. Japanese sources thus enable us to ‘see’ the global circulation of war-related knowledge in new ways.7 We discover that the Japanese were hardly alone, for example, in emulating European innovations in the nationwide organization of civilian defence against bombardment. Germans, Italians and Britons were simultaneously investigating ‘best practices’ in Europe and elsewhere. The devastating fire-bombing of Japanese cities also calls into question Overy’s conclusion that ‘the bombing offensives in the Second World War were all relative failures in their own terms’.8 Moreover, air raids did not necessarily stiffen enemy morale, as the conventional wisdom would have it. In the Japanese case and others, I argue, non-nuclear bombing shattered civilian morale and played a significant role in the decision to surrender. Finally, a truly global approach challenges deeply held beliefs that racism motivated Americans to target Japanese civilians with incendiary bombs as they would never have done against Germans.9 As this article demonstrates, US strategy and tactics against Japanese urban areas relied heavily on what the Allies were learning from the concurrent bombing of Germany. Historians today may not be able to connect the European and Asian theatres of war, but the bombers surely did. I the origins of strategic bombing How it became normal to destroy cities is an intensely transnational story. Nations began experimenting with military uses of aeroplanes just a few years after the Wright brothers’ famous flight in 1903. The First World War dramatically accelerated these developments. Although the conflict took place primarily in Europe, one of the first instances of aerial bombardment occurred halfway round the world in autumn 1914 when Japanese aeroplanes repeatedly bombed the German base of Qingdao in China (Japan was part of the Entente).10 Besides employing aircraft to attack troop positions, European powers embarked on bombing targets far behind the front lines. On 22 September 1914, British naval planes launched the first attack on German soil by raiding Zeppelin bases in Düsseldorf and Cologne. The German military became the first to target urban areas in 1915 and 1916. Zeppelins bombed English port cities and London. Germany again made history in 1917–18 by deploying aeroplanes — twin-engine Gothas and four-engine Giants — to bomb English cities. Zeppelins and aeroplanes killed some 1,239 people in Britain and another 267 in Paris. The British and French mounted their own aerial offensives against industries in western and south-western Germany from October 1917, killing 746 people.11 These early episodes of bombing established ideas and practices that would shape strategy in many nations. Influential military experts became convinced that bombing cities and factories might well be decisive, particularly because of what the British called the ‘moral effect’. The First World War saw the discovery of the concept of ‘civilian morale’ as governments sought to contain growing war-weariness on their home fronts.12 To many pioneer airmen, on the other hand, morale represented a new object of attack. The German bomber offensive dropped incendiary bombs on densely populated areas in London, aiming to create panic and terrify ‘the morale of the English people’. The hope was that the British government would feel compelled to withdraw from the war.13 Leaders of the newly formed Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1918 went further, theorizing that bombing was more likely to diminish German war production by terrorizing the workers than by seriously damaging the factories. Brigadier-General Cyril Newall, commander of the brigade attacking Germany’s industrial heartland, conceded that the ‘material effect’ of bombing vital industries ‘has not been very great … but the moral effect has been considerable’. Terrified workers were producing less or no longer showing up for work. Reporting to the War Cabinet, the chief of the Air Staff, Major-General Frederick Sykes, clarified that the objective was not only to attack German factories but also ‘the wholesale bombing of densely populated industrial centres’, which ‘would go far to destroy the morale of the operatives’.14 Following the First World War, military men around the world formulated doctrines of ‘strategic bombing’. They distinguished strategic bombing from tactical bombardment, in which air power was deployed in support of ground troops or naval operations. The proponents of strategic bombing wished to use aircraft independently of armies and navies. Independent air forces, they prophesied, might win wars quickly by attacking the enemy’s cities and industries. The most influential of these theorists was a former Italian air corps officer, Giulio Douhet. In 1921 Douhet published Il dominio dell’aria ( The Command of the Air).15 The term ‘total war’ would not be widely used until the publication of Erich Ludendorff’s Der totale Krieg (1935).16 Nonetheless, French publicists and leaders were already advocating guerre totale and guerre intégrale in 1917–18.17 Douhet agreed, remarking that the First World War had given war the character of ‘national totality — that is, the entire population and all the resources of a nation are sucked into the maw of war’. The aeroplane further erased the ‘legal distinction made between combatants and noncombatants’. Air power extended the battlefield to the entire nation, and ‘all of their citizens will become combatants, since all of them will be exposed to the aerial offensives of the enemy’. Douhet proposed that air forces strike even before war was declared, concentrating their attacks on ‘very large centers of civilian population’. Aeroplanes, he prophesied, would also drop poison gas and bacteriological weapons. Bombers would thus ‘envelop a great city like London or Paris’. With ‘a proportionate number of explosive, incendiary, and poison-gas bombs it would be feasible to destroy completely great centers of population, because the poison gas would make it impossible to put out the fires’.18 We look back on Douhet’s scenarios with horror. Yet he insisted that aerial bombardment would make war more ‘civilized’ by ending hostilities quickly with a minimal loss of life. Air raids on cities would shatter civilian morale. Terrified workers would flee bombed factories, and demoralized civilians would rise up and demand that their governments surrender. This, he observed, was similar to what happened to Germany in 1918 when mothers, workers and soldiers mounted anti-war protests: the ‘people began to give [up]’, and the regime was forced to sue for peace. Douhet was sickened by the carnage of trench warfare in the First World War that had killed millions of soldiers. If a nation were to bomb cities and workers mercilessly, he believed, it might achieve victory in the first few days without sacrificing any of its own soldiers in ground campaigns. In 1928 he provocatively questioned why ‘people weep to hear of a few women and children killed in an air raid’ yet are ‘unmoved to hear of thousands of soldiers killed in action’. After all, ‘a soldier, a robust young man, should be considered to have the maximum individual value in the general economy of humanity’.19 If Douhet’s logic seems perverse, let us note the longevity of this transnational idea. Following the Second World War, many Americans similarly justified the two atomic bombs on the grounds that killing tens of thousands of Japanese women and children was necessary to save the lives of American soldiers. Douhet’s ideas of strategic bombing were studied by military and civil officials globally. His doctrines circulated among air forces during the 1920s and 1930s in France, the United States, Germany, Britain, Japan and the Soviet Union. Douhet was in fact one of many such advocates. In 1922 the French army aviation expert Marcel Jauneaud similarly advised Japan’s Army Aviation Department to build long-distance bombers that could burn the enemy’s capital, destroy its industries and demoralize the populace. In Britain, too, Major-General Hugh Trenchard, chief of the Air Staff, in 1919 reaffirmed his commitment to ‘morale bombing’ of industrial targets, asserting that the psychological effects of bombing outweighed the material damage at a ratio of twenty to one.20 In the next great war in Europe, he predicted, air forces would use their power ‘to destroy the morale of the nation’. In this ‘contest of morale between the respective civilian populations’, the people of the nation which ‘suffered most from air attacks, or which lacked in moral tenacity’ would ‘bring such pressure to bear on their government as to result in military capitulation’.21 The circularity of these ideas was as clear to the strategists as it is obscure today to historians, who all too often seek a single origin. During the late 1920s, German military writers quoted Jauneaud, Douhet and British thinkers to conclude that other nations regarded their bomber forces as ‘first and foremost a means to attack the morale of the enemy’s civilian population’. The British Air Staff, in turn, bolstered its case for bombing cities by reporting that the French, Italian and US air forces, plus leading German officers, had already embraced strategies to ‘terrorize’ civilian populations in the next war.22 Inter-war air forces were incapable of delivering the degree of destruction envisioned by Douhet and Trenchard. Nonetheless, the colonial powers widely applied the new theories in their empires. Spain and France sent aeroplanes, some loaded with gas bombs, to suppress uprisings in Morocco in 1924–5. Japanese pilots also dropped gas and other bombs on rebellious aborigines in colonial Taiwan in 1930. The British developed these practices the most systematically. In 1919 Trenchard proposed that the RAF could defeat Muhammad Abdille Hassan (the ‘Mad Mullah’) of Somaliland at a fraction of the cost of sending ground troops. The RAF claimed success, and a new doctrine was born that air power could produce ‘control without occupation’ in sparsely populated British territories. Subsequent air policing in Iraq, Aden, Sudan and Afghanistan targeted insurgents and their food supply, often resulting in the indiscriminate bombing of non-combatants. RAF leaders insisted that air raids effectively crushed the ‘morale’ of tribesmen, just as they had claimed in Europe.23 These episodes have moved some historians to argue that ‘colonized peoples were the targets of the first air attacks’ and that ‘bombing was experimented with and perfected on the periphery’ before being used to destroy European cities.24 Such arguments, however, confuse cause and effect. Europeans were already bombing each other’s civilians in 1915–18, before the heyday of colonial bombing. Douhet himself envisioned the advanced economies as the optimal targets for strategic bombing: ‘An aerial action is ineffective, or nearly so, against a nomad people living in the desert; but it would be very effective — terrifying and dreadful — against a highly civilized people living in large centers of population’.25 Unlike colonial bombing, the widely reported bombardment of cities in the Spanish Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War shocked the general public globally. In 1937–8 German and Italian pilots repeatedly attacked Barcelona and Madrid, as well as the town of Guernica. At roughly the same time, Japanese bombers raided Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou (Canton) and other Chinese cities. Together with Italy’s aerial gas attacks against Ethiopia in 1935, these episodes spurred governments to upgrade their civil-defence systems in anticipation of conflict in Europe.26 Strategists, however, were captivated by the aerial offensives themselves. The RAF was especially keen to draw ‘air lessons’ for future bombing. From October 1938 to February 1939, the subcommittee on air warfare of the Cabinet-level Committee of Imperial Defence investigated the bombing campaigns in both Spain and China. Britain’s Air Ministry expressed interest not only in aerial warfare against industry and internal communications but also in the ‘psychological effect of bombing on [the] civil population’. It is notable that the subcommittee discerned few air lessons from the bombing of Spanish cities. German and Italian aircraft had not systematically attacked economic targets and the urban ‘nerve centres’. British investigators were more curious about Japanese efforts to disrupt and demoralize China’s civilian populace.27 The Luftwaffe, too, monitored Japan’s air war in China.28 Indeed, Japan emerged as the world’s leading practitioner of strategic bombing before the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. This was somewhat ‘accidental’, as Overy has similarly argued for the bombing campaigns in Europe.29 Although Japanese officers studied the tenets of Jauneaud and Douhet in the 1920s, the air forces of the army and navy did not initially embrace the strategy of bombing cities. The army’s air force planned for war with the Soviet Union and envisioned bombing primarily in support of ground forces, while the navy developed carrier-based aircraft to combat the US fleet. Neither air corps prepared for war with China, whose vastness posed formidable challenges to a Japanese occupation. Following the outbreak of hostilities in summer 1937, ironically it was the navy that took the lead in the long-distance bombing of China’s urban centres. The navy had been developing land-based bombers, notably the seven-man 96-type Land Attack Aircraft (later called ‘the Nell’) capable of striking enemy ships within a twelve-hundred-kilometre radius. These bombers, together with carrier-based bombers and fighter planes, were quickly redeployed to raid Chinese coastal and inland cities.30 The impact of transnational thinking on the Japanese air war was unmistakable. In addition to attacking airfields, Japanese strategists targeted cities, government institutions and communication networks that lay well ahead of their ground forces. In an effort to force Chiang Kai-shek to sue for peace, long-range bombers hammered Nanjing for three months before the army reached China’s inland capital in December 1937. With troops bogged down in central China, navy planes also raided the southern city of Guangzhou for fourteen months before landing troops to conquer it in October 1938. After Chinese Nationalist forces retreated far into the interior, Japanese aircraft engaged in the world’s most sustained strategic bombing to date. In December 1938, the high command suspended the ground offensive, opting explicitly for ‘political strategic bombing’ (senseiryaku bakugeki ). The primary target was the Nationalists’ rearguard capital of Chongqing, whose mountainous location afforded ample protection from ground assault. From February 1938 to August 1943, Japan’s air forces launched more than two hundred raids against Chongqing, killing as many as fifteen thousand residents. In an unprecedented display of long-distance bombing, the 96-type land bombers routinely flew 780 kilometres each way from bases in Hankou. A single raid involved up to a hundred planes dropping incendiary and explosive bombs.31 The Japanese air services echoed the doctrines of Douhet and Trenchard in attempting to defeat China by eviscerating popular morale and destroying urban infrastructure. The strategic-bombing order of 2 December 1938 called for ‘breaking the enemy’s will to continue the war’. As early as September 1937, the navy’s Second Combined Air Corps staff commanded pilots that they ‘need not directly hit the targets’ when bombing Nanjing; rather, ‘the primary objective is to sow terror in the enemy’s morale’.32 In the bombing campaign against Guangzhou, Britain’s air attaché likewise observed a shift in Japanese tactics in May 1938 from attacking military objectives to the heavy bombing of residential and business districts. The Japanese military now aimed at causing ‘panic’ and ‘terrorising the civil population with a view to causing them to break with the Central Government’.33 Ultimately, three years of bombing Chongqing failed to defeat the Nationalist regime. For British experts who investigated the earlier air attacks on Guangzhou and other cities, two air lessons dominated. There was nothing problematic about strategic bombing per se, but the Japanese should have more effectively attacked China’s ‘civil economy or the national will to resist’. Japan, judged the British air attaché, could not be considered ‘a first class air power’. The second lesson was that strategic bombing should prove more successful when deployed in ‘economic warfare’ against the interconnected economic organization of ‘a first-class Power’. Affirming Douhet’s critique of colonial bombing, the subcommittee on air warfare concluded that Spain and China were ‘not highly industrialised’ and presented the bombers ‘no effective opportunity’. Bombing civilians would likely produce better results in advanced polities where leaders depended on popular support, whereas China’s civilian population was ‘too dispersed and elementary in structure to respond to moral pressure’.34 The British believed they would do a better job of bombing cities in Europe. Their chance came soon enough. II crossing moral thresholds On 9 September 1939, days after the start of the Second World War, President Franklin Roosevelt called on the belligerents ‘under no circumstances [to] undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or unfortified cities’. The German, British and French governments reassured the president. The major powers had long considered legal means to protect civilians from aerial bombardment. At the Hague Conference in 1907, they agreed that ‘bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended, is prohibited’. The powers could not agree on the subsequent Hague Rules for Air Warfare (1923), although most accepted the provision that restricted bombing to military objectives and only such targets in the ‘immediate vicinity of the operation of land forces’.35 In reality, international law did little to protect civilians from aerial attack. The Luftwaffe heavily bombed the centre of Warsaw as part of the ground assault in September 1939. The German government could legally claim that Warsaw was a defended city. On 14 May 1940, the Luftwaffe burned the centre of Rotterdam, also in support of land operations. These raids were followed by the massive bombing of Britain in the Blitz (September 1940–May 1941). Tactically, the German command sought to destroy Britain’s ability to defend against its planned invasion. However, after Hitler postponed Operation Sea Lion indefinitely in mid September, the Luftwaffe primarily conducted strategic bombing to weaken Britain’s economic capacity to continue the war. Bombers targeted ports, food storage facilities, munitions factories and public utilities. Rarely did the Luftwaffe aim to kill civilians as a strategic objective. But German planes often attacked industrial targets near crowded working-class neighbourhoods, killing some 43,384 Britons from June 1940 to June 1941. It could have been worse. The British benefited from Germany’s weak commitment to strategic bombing. Hitler himself did not believe that aerial bombardment alone would defeat Britain. Nor had the Luftwaffe significantly invested in long-range bombers before the war. German bombers could only reach Britain from vulnerable bases in northern France and the Low Countries. Hitler soon shifted his bombers to the Balkan campaign in spring 1941 and his surprise invasion of the Soviet Union in June.36 The British, by contrast, embraced strategic bombing much as Douhet prescribed. The RAF began bombing German urban targets in May 1940 and did not cease until Germany’s defeat in 1945. Unable to contest German armies in Europe before 1943, British leaders looked to Bomber Command as their only significant offensive weapon. Unlike the Luftwaffe, the RAF possessed four-engine bombers that could fly from England to many German cities. Although Bomber Command initially targeted military-industrial sites, it proved exceedingly difficult to hit the targets. Nearly all bombing occurred at night to avoid German fighter planes. An internal investigation in August 1941 reported that, of those bombers that actually reached their targets in Germany, only a quarter dropped their loads within a five-mile radius of the target.37 Desperate to show results, Bomber Command soon adopted the tactic of ‘area bombing’ and the doctrine of ‘morale bombing’. In late 1940, the RAF encouraged crews to drop their bombs in ‘industrial areas’ if they could not locate the primary target. As numerous secret RAF documents explained, a prime objective was to destroy German civilian morale, particularly that of industrial workers, whom the British viewed as the group most likely to abandon Hitler. ‘Workmen’s dwellings in crowded industrial districts’ presented some of the best targets. The point was not ‘killing as many people as possible’, but to break workers’ morale by showering ‘congested working class districts’ with ‘numerous small incendiary bombs, with an occasional high-explosive to provide the noise effect’. Such bombing would ‘upset production seriously’ and destroy workers’ homes in the Rhineland. It might even exacerbate ‘a revolutionary tendency’ in Saxony.38 Incendiary bombs, Bomber Command discovered, were not only much lighter than high-explosive bombs, they also destroyed larger areas, particularly wooden-roofed homes and buildings within densely concentrated German cities and towns.39 Not until 1943 did area bombing do serious damage to German cities. Under the command of Air Marshal Arthur Harris, Bomber Command deployed new heavy bombers that could reach Berlin and more intensively bomb Ruhr–Rhineland cities. In July, British bombers ignited a firestorm that engulfed central Hamburg. Some thirty-seven thousand people perished in the deadliest air raid in European history. Bomber Command thereafter fixated on the ‘Hamburgization’ of Berlin, although the spacious capital proved much harder to burn.40 When the US Army Air Force (USAAF) joined forces with Britain’s Bomber Command to bomb Germany in 1943, it vastly increased the Allies’ ability to damage civilian life. American commanders expressed discomfort with the RAF’s area bombing and targeting of civilians. Armed with the more accurate Norden bomb sight, they preferred precision bombing of industrial targets in daylight. However, because of the almost continuous cloud cover over Germany, American bombers often missed their targets, and the USAAF too engaged frequently in area bombing. The USAAF conducted raids on the ‘city area’ of at least twenty-five cities, relying heavily on incendiary bombs.41 German cities experienced their worst bombing from September 1944 to May 1945. Enjoying air superiority, Allied air forces dropped three-quarters of the total wartime tonnage of bombs directed at Germany in these last months of the war. Bomber Command moved beyond the industrial cities of western Germany to bomb smaller cities throughout Germany. To weaken the German army against advancing Soviet troops, Allied forces also bombed cities in eastern Germany. The fire-bombing of Dresden on 13–14 February 1945 by Bomber Command and the US Eighth Air Force was the most devastating of these raids, killing an estimated twenty-five thousand people.42 The European experience of area bombing strongly influenced the USAAF’s ultimate strategy of incinerating Japan’s cities. Here again, transnational ideas of total war overwhelmed initial planning and technological choices. Because of Japan’s distance from American airfields, it could not be bombed by shorter-range B-17s and B-24s. Accordingly, the US government poured enormous resources into building the long-range B-29, one of the superweapons of the time. While the Manhattan Project cost $2 billion, the design, production and testing of the B-29s cost $3 billion. After US forces captured Saipan and Tinian (Mariana Islands) in July 1944, Japanese cities came within effective range. American commanders expected the B-29s to employ precision bombing to destroy factories and transportation hubs with high-explosive bombs from the safe altitude of thirty thousand feet. Yet strong cross-winds at high altitudes confounded the bombers. Despite repeated raids in autumn 1944 and early 1945, the B-29s had not destroyed a single target.43 In January 1945, a cocky young major-general named Curtis LeMay assumed command of the XXI Bomber Command in the Mariana Islands. LeMay was the transnational bomber par excellence. He transferred to Japan the knowledge he had gained in bombing German cities. Commanding the Third Bombardment Division in Europe, LeMay discovered the utility of incendiary bombs, and he experimented with non-visual bombing techniques that departed from the USAAF’s devotion to precision bombing. He was, moreover, openly sympathetic to the area-bombing tactics employed by the RAF. In October 1943, LeMay and the First Bombardment Division command dispatched 274 B-17s to attack Münster and Coesfeld. The targets were the city centres, populated by working-class families, as the pre-raid intelligence briefing makes clear: For both the primary and secondary targets the built up area is the main thing to hit. The RAF has not been able to eliminate these two densely populated areas … Practically all the workers live in these areas of town. And the idea is to wipe out the built up area and disrupt the people as [much] as possible. This is definitely an area bombing job instead of a precision target job.44 This last sentence was crossed out, apparently as an edit to cleanse the record. Soon after taking command of the XXI Bomber Command, LeMay reconfigured the B-29s for area bombing and fire-bombing Japanese cities. B-29s were loaded with only incendiary bombs. Each Superfortress would drop roughly fifteen hundred six-pound M69 incendiary bombs containing the newly invented substance of napalm, a gasoline jelly that was difficult to extinguish. LeMay ordered his crews to bomb Japanese cities at night from low altitudes of five to eight thousand feet. On 9–10 March 1945, three weeks after the Anglo-American incendiary attack on Dresden, 279 B-29s fire-bombed a vast working-class area of Tokyo, killing an estimated hundred thousand people, injuring at least forty thousand and leaving more than a million homeless. LeMay went on to fire-bomb Japan’s other big cities during the rest of March. In the final blow, like Bomber Command’s Harris in the European theatre, LeMay targeted the densely populated, built-up areas of fifty-eight small and medium-size cities in June, July and August. Including the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, US bombers destroyed an incredible 43 per cent of the built-up areas of sixty-six Japanese cities.45 Some American military historians insist that the US bombing campaign against Japan primarily sought to destroy industrial targets and did not aim to kill large numbers of civilians or crush popular morale.46 Methinks they do protest too much. The USAAF’s strategists, notes Thomas Searle, understood they would be killing thousands of civilians in residential areas. LeMay successfully operationalized the fire-bombing of Japanese cities, but he did not create the strategy. Drawing lessons from the RAF’s incendiary tactics against German cities, American economic and military experts in the Committee of Operations Analysts (COA) and the Air Staff had been planning massive incendiary attacks against Japan’s ‘urban industrial areas’ since October 1943. The planners clearly distinguished these congested working-class areas from industrial targets such as steel and aircraft plants. They worried that smaller incendiary attacks would ‘merely create firebreaks against a later heavy attack’.47 Accordingly, in May–June 1944 the COA recommended that the USAAF build up its strength for one set of concentrated urban attacks while waiting for ideal weather conditions to fuel conflagrations. With chilling accuracy, the committee urged that the ‘entire March [1945] effort from the Marianas’ be devoted to the ‘complete destruction’ of Japan’s six major industrial cities (Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya and Kawasaki).48 By September, the COA’s subcommittee on incendiary attacks projected that ‘successful area attacks’ on those cities would force the evacuation of 3.5 million residents and ‘dehouse’ 7.75 million people, invoking the British term. The subcommittee and subsequent COA discussions estimated that these raids would kill more than half a million people. No one objected on moral grounds.49 Since 1943, American officers and scientists had been actively co-operating with British counterparts on an ‘Incendiary Panel’ aimed at developing more lethal incendiary bombs that would be dropped on both German and Japanese cities in the near future. As one RAF targeting official put it, ‘the great majority of weapons which had proved their worth against Germany would be equally suitable for use against Japan’.50 To operationalize this point, the USAAF tested an array of incendiary bombs in the Utah desert on a specially constructed ‘German village’ and an adjacent ‘Japanese village’. These villages consisted of typical workers’ apartment blocks. Despite the obvious differences in construction, tests proved that both types of house could be effectively incinerated after the stick-bombs crashed through their vulnerable roofs. It was just a matter of calibrating the various incendiaries for use against the more durable German dwellings or the lightly constructed Japanese houses. It was at the Dugway Proving Ground that the Americans customized the M69 napalm bomb to be deployed primarily against Japan.51 Echoing British justifications for bombing German working-class neighbourhoods, American commanders regarded Japanese civilians as the lifeblood of their nation’s war effort, and thus as legitimate targets. Some, like LeMay after the war, further rationalized the bombing of workers’ homes on the grounds that Japanese war industry relied on dense networks of family-based workshops.52 However, the planning documents confirm that the urban area attacks were aimed primarily at workers and their families, not small factories. General Ira Eaker, deputy commander of the USAAF, later summed up the logic: ‘It made a lot of sense to kill skilled workers by burning whole areas’.53 The target information sheets, which instructed crews before each raid, were likewise brutally honest. Prior to the devastating Tokyo raid of 9 March 1945, airmen were told they would be bombing probably the most densely populated ten square miles in any ‘modern industrial city’ on earth, averaging 103,000 people per square mile. The urban area attacks rarely targeted Japan’s large war industries. These, the target information sheets acknowledged, generally lay outside the ‘incendiary zones’, which were marked instead by a ‘sharp increase in population and a corresponding decrease in the incidence of industry’. Although strategists expected the raids to damage small neighbourhood factories as a by-product, they doubted this destruction would impair Japan’s overall industrial strength. The goal, as previously enunciated by the RAF in Europe, was to diminish production indirectly by attacking workers who lived in the built-up areas.54 The COA projected that the bombing of Japanese workers’ neighbourhoods would significantly cut production owing to absenteeism caused by homelessness, casualties, local transportation difficulties, diversion of manpower to firefighting and ‘social disorganization’.55 Initially COA planners thought it possible but unlikely that the anticipated social disorganization would result in a state of ‘psychological upheaval’ from which the Japanese could not recuperate. However, as the bombing campaign expanded to the smaller cities, the objective of destroying civilian morale played a greater role in US targeting. The USAAF came to embrace the transnational vision of fomenting mass panic, evacuations and even the popular overthrow of the regime. The most concerted use of psychological warfare occurred in late July 1945, just days before the end of the war. US planes leafleted large numbers of provincial cities. In two cases, the handbills listed the names of eleven cities and, in another, fourteen, warning that at least four would be bombed in the next few days. The bombers were true to their word. In ‘accordance with America’s well known humanitarian policies’, the leaflets urged townspeople to ‘evacuate the cities named and save yourselves’. Declaring that the ‘military clique’ had ‘enslaved the Japanese people’, the Americans advised ordinary Japanese to ‘restore peace by demanding new and good leaders who will end the war’.56 The USAAF’s campaign to crush Japanese morale also reflected developments in the social sciences and market research. In September 1944, President Roosevelt directed the secretary of war to establish the US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) to study the effects of the aerial attacks on Germany. These included ‘the direct and indirect consequences of attacks on specific industries, urban communities, and other targets, including effects upon the morale and will of the enemy to resist’. Such a study ‘would be valuable … in connection with air attacks on Japan’. A Morale Division was established, which became the largest division in the USSBS. Led by the social psychologist and survey pioneer Rensis Likert, the Morale Division was eager to demonstrate that bombing in Germany had resulted in ‘psychological demoralization’. The division recommended that the military choose targets in Japan that would similarly weaken the popular will to resist.57 After the war, the Morale Division unabashedly claimed success: The attack [on Japan] was directed against the nation as a whole — not only against the army, the fleet, the factories and the supply lines, but also against the entire population and its ability and will to resist. Thus the people of Japan were directly and indirectly involved in the fight. American bombs were aimed at them and their homes because of their critical importance to the fighting strength of the enemy. They were workers, and the ultimate outcome or length of the contest rested in good part on their output of weapons and tools. They were citizens whose willingness to make sacrifices would enable the enemy to throw his full strength into the fight, or whose unwillingness to make sacrifices would require him to turn resources away from the purposes of the war. They were fire fighters or victory gardeners, whose courageous participation in the war effort would strengthen the enemy’s resistance, or whose fright and apathy would turn them into evacuees or black marketers … . Finally, and of great importance, they were potential saboteurs and revolutionaries, who, if they became sufficiently angry at their leaders and the state of affairs, could organize and threaten the institutions of the state.58 This was the transnational logic of bombing that traced itself back to Douhet. In total war, it had become acceptable to target men, women and children at home. The distinction between combatants and non-combatants had indeed disappeared. III transnational civil defence As nations planned for deadly aerial offensives against the enemy, they simultaneously developed measures to defend their own homelands. ‘Active’ air defence emphasized anti-aircraft guns, fighter planes and early warning systems. States also rushed to promote ‘civilian defence’, connoting not only the protection of civilians, but also civilians’ active participation in their own defence. Police and professional firefighters could not possibly safeguard every neighbourhood from the tens of thousands of incendiary stick-bombs expected to fall in each raid. Millions of ordinary men and women had to be recruited as air-raid wardens, fire watchers, first-aid volunteers and members of residential or workplace civil-defence groups. In countries that faced the threat of aerial bombardment, the needs of civil defence did more to mobilize daily life on the home front than any other imperative, including food distribution and war savings campaigns.59 Like the doctrines of strategic bombing, ideas and practices of civil defence spread rapidly among nations during the inter-war years. Influenced by Trenchard and Douhet, the British government’s subcommittee on air raid precautions began secretly meeting in 1924 to prepare for aerial attacks on London in the next war. Admitting they could do little to protect civilians, officials fixated on the ‘panic’, ‘chaos’ and ‘moral collapse’ that would ensue among city people. They especially worried about the working-class population, which ‘may be particularly susceptible to attacks on their morale’. While devising ways to keep economically essential people in the city, British planners were already considering mass evacuations of women and children.60 Although the British government adopted few concrete measures at the time, other countries moved aggressively to organize their populations against air raids during the late 1920s and early 1930s. German authorities seized upon civil defence as their only viable protection against anticipated air attacks from France and other neighbours. The Versailles settlement, they lamented, prohibited Germany from possessing fighter planes and severely limited the number of anti-aircraft guns. Following the Nazi takeover in 1933, the party established the Reichsluftschutzbund (Reich Air Defence League, RLB). Reaching down to the level of apartment blocks, the league counted thirteen million members by 1939. Like many Nazi institutions, the RLB is usually understood as an exceptional creation of the radical regime. In actuality, the RLB grew out of two Weimar-era air-defence organizations, which in turn had modelled themselves after nationwide air-defence leagues in Poland and the Soviet Union, as well as those in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Italy and Czechoslovakia.61 As early as 1932, the Weimar Republic’s Ministry of the Interior formulated the fundamentals of civil defence that became pervasive in the Second World War. Urging that every fire-bomb be fought to prevent larger fires, the ministry insisted that the entire population must engage in ‘self-protection’ (Selbstschutz). In every apartment block, male residents would form a ‘house fire brigade’ (Hausfeuerwehr), possibly enlisting a few ‘brave women’. Led by an air-raid warden (Luftschutzhauswart), each house was expected to stock ash or sand to smother the incendiaries.62 A great many nations, large and small, avidly investigated and emulated each other’s civil-defence systems during the 1930s. The transnational flows of knowledge were strikingly multidirectional. We see this in the archives of the German Foreign Office. The ministry directed its embassies to act on various German agencies’ requests for intelligence on the civil-defence preparations of other countries, while arranging visits by foreign air-defence experts to Germany. The Nazi-era Air Ministry and Ministry of the Interior regularly gathered information on air-raid drills, gas masks and civil-defence organizations in Britain, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, the Netherlands, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark and even Japan and China. In turn, many foreign delegations came to observe Germany’s state-of-the-art air-defence system, notably shelters, a gas attack protection school and the RLB. Visits to Berlin continued until Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, often by specialists from neighbouring countries that Germany would soon occupy.63 These included the remarkable tour of German air-defence facilities by Britain’s under-secretary for home affairs Geoffrey Lloyd and the intelligence officer of the Air Raid Precautions Department. This high-level visit occurred in January 1938, just weeks before Germany’s annexation of Austria.64 Reich officials apparently permitted these visits to maintain their access to other nations’ civil-defence programmes. By showcasing Germany’s formidable air defences, they also intended to deter potential enemies from launching attacks. In this transnational world of information exchange, Japan emerged as one of the most enthusiastic players. Japanese authorities held the world’s first mass air-raid drill in 1928 in Osaka. Two million people, as members of the state-organized youth, women’s and veterans’ associations, participated in the city-wide blackout, first-aid activities and responses to a simulated gas attack. The Osaka exercises were widely reported by Western newspapers and embassies.65 Japanese officials had become keenly aware of the importance of civil defence during the First World War. Despite its minor combat role on the side of the Entente, the Japanese state investigated home-front activities in Europe more thoroughly than perhaps any other belligerent. Nearly every ministry, military and civil, dispatched teams of officials to the Allied countries. Their voluminous reports informed the special wartime commissions set up by each ministry to investigate policies for managing Japan’s post-war economy and society and for preparing the nation for the next big war. Long before ‘total war’ became a global term, returning army officers were formulating plans for the ‘total national mobilization’ (kokka sōdōin) of civilians (men and women) to work in war production, food distribution and civil defence.66 Several of these officers had witnessed German air raids on London and Paris, noting the frequent occurrence of mass panic. Were enemy aircraft to fire-bomb Japan’s cities of wood, warned the army’s Provisional Military Investigative Commission in 1919, such attacks would likely ‘eviscerate civilian morale’.67 These transnational visions of social breakdown became all too vivid in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. The quake and ensuing fires killed nearly a hundred thousand people in Tokyo and Yokohama. Proponents of total war were shocked. General Kazushige Ugaki, vice-minister of the army, recorded in his diary: ‘Chills run down my spine when I think that the next time Tokyo suffers a catastrophic fire and tragedy on this scale, it could come at the hands of an enemy air attack’. The earthquake enabled Ugaki and other officials to persuade the government to prepare civilians for aerial attacks.68 Hostilities in Manchuria from 1931, tensions with the Soviet Union and all-out war with China in 1937 prompted the Japanese government gradually to construct a nationwide civil-defence system reaching down to the neighbourhoods. On the eleventh anniversary of the Kantō earthquake on 1 September 1934, military and civil authorities commenced joint air-raid drills in the three cities of Tokyo, Yokohama and Kawasaki. Some five million residents were mobilized.69 Like planners elsewhere, Japan’s civil-defence specialists vigorously investigated foreign models. Nazi Germany’s advanced civil-defence programme, including the top-down RLB, particularly impressed Japanese military attachés and visiting delegations of officers and civil bureaucrats.70 In 1937 the Japanese state modelled its own air-defence law on Germany’s air-defence law, which compelled residents to participate in civil-defence activities.71 Even after Japan commenced hostilities against the Western Allies in December 1941, Japanese officials and experts continued to structure their civil-defence measures around best practices among the other belligerents, whether friend or foe. Their most detailed reports concerned the efforts of Japan’s ally Germany to withstand British and American air raids. Japanese experts twice visited civil-defence facilities in Berlin in 1940–1. Throughout the war, Japanese diplomats and military attachés in Germany reported on air raids and air defence. Their first-hand accounts of the fire-bombing of Hamburg and large-scale air raids on Berlin in 1943 persuaded Japanese army authorities and the Home Ministry to upgrade Japan’s civil-defence system in anticipation of comparable Allied raids on Japanese cities.72 More surprising was Japan’s ongoing study of British civil defence long after the two nations were at war with each other. Japanese officials had admired British home-front mobilization since the days of the First World War, when the two nations were allies. Even after war broke out in Europe in 1939, Japanese military and civil officials continued to draw lessons from the British government’s home-front programmes.73 Because Japan was still neutral vis-à-vis the Western Allies until Pearl Harbor, military attachés and diplomats in the London embassy were able to send numerous reports on British mobilization, including several on how Britons coped with German air raids during 1940.74 Japanese officials kept reporting on British civil defence throughout the Pacific War (1941–5) from posts in the neutral European countries. They described the enemy’s firefighting techniques, evacuations of schoolchildren and mobilization of women.75 They also paid considerable attention to Soviet air-defence activities. Japan and the Soviet Union remained neutral towards each other until the final days of the war. Although many Japanese elites were vehemently anti-communist, the official civil-defence magazine, Kokumin bōkū, frequently detailed Soviet firefighting methods and the widespread use of women in first-aid activities.76 These transnational flows of knowledge significantly shaped Japan’s civil-defence practices. Nationalistic Japanese were, of course, loath to admit this. Officials insisted that Japan surpassed all other belligerents in the nationwide organization of neighbourhoods against air raids.77 They touted the long history of village and neighbourhood associations, notably firefighting groups, dating back to the Tokugawa era (1603–1868). During the Pacific War, every ten to fifteen households were compelled to form a neighbourhood association (tonarigumi ) as the basic unit of civil defence. In the years leading up to the US air raids of 1944–5, residents drilled incessantly in extinguishing incendiary bombs with buckets and the occasional hand pump. If household members avoided civil defence drills or failed to fight fires during air attacks, they could be imprisoned, fined or, more often, denied their vital food rations. These civil-defence units were not simply rooted in Japanese tradition, however. The modern state repeatedly restructured the local associations, taking part in the global circulation of total-war thinking that motivated a wide array of nations to mobilize civilians at the grass roots from the time of the First World War.78 Everywhere they looked, Japanese observed the nationwide organization of civil-defence leagues, as in Germany, the Soviet Union or the Scandinavian countries. The state’s reliance on local women for civil defence was shaped by the perceived lessons of the First World War, when Japanese officials had observed the Western nations vigorously mobilizing women to work in war savings campaigns, food distribution and nursing. Seeking likewise to harness the energies of half the nation, the powerful Home Ministry in 1920 directed local authorities to organize women’s associations in every village and urban neighbourhood. In the mid 1930s, similarly inspired by the Nazi regime’s ‘self-protection’ movement among residents, the Home Ministry and the army spearheaded new programmes in ‘household air defence’ (katei bōkū). Neighbourhood women were trained to extinguish incendiary bombs before fires spread to adjacent homes. Preparing for a wider war in 1939–40, the state radically reorganized the disparate residential associations into a single village association (burakukai ) or urban block association (chōnaikai ), and below them the neighbourhood association (tonarigumi ). By no coincidence, the neighbourhood associations resembled the apartment house units in Germany’s RLB, and the block associations corresponded to the street associations headed by the Nazi Party’s block warden or the RLB’s street warden.79 The evacuation of schoolchildren from the big cities was another area in which transnational knowledge proved crucial. Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō and the army General Staff had opposed the evacuation of children and mothers, fearing it would result in defeatism, loss of manpower from neighbourhood civil defence and the weakening of Japan’s ‘family system’. The Japanese would defend bombarded cities ‘to the death’, pledged an army air-defence official, and he cited a Soviet injunction to civilians in the face of the ongoing German invasion: ‘If you abandon Moscow, you will not be permitted to return’.80 Nonetheless, education officials successfully persuaded the government to emulate Britain’s programme of evacuating children en masse. They were supported by diplomats and a former military attaché who had served in the Japanese embassy in London during the Blitz. Other experts reported on Germany’s programmes to evacuate children. In June 1944, Japanese authorities pre-emptively evacuated hundreds of thousands of primary school children to the countryside. They in fact improved upon British practices, having observed the problems of moving England’s urban children into strangers’ homes in the provinces. Some 337,000 Japanese children were evacuated with their classmates and teachers to rural areas, where they lived communally. Another 459,000 were sent to live with relatives.81 In other areas, Japanese scrambled to catch up with European developments, especially after the raids on Hamburg and Berlin in 1943. Home Ministry experts had long recognized the vulnerability to fire-bombing of Japan’s congested cities, and influential urban planners closely studied Germany’s pre-war efforts to fireproof cities. Some, notably Tokyo Imperial University’s Heigaku Tanabe, had recently visited Germany under British bombardment. These officials and planners recommended that the regime take urgent measures against the expected deluge of incendiaries. In January 1944, the government ordered the massive destruction of wooden homes and buildings in an effort to create firebreaks. Some fifty-five thousand dwellings and buildings were demolished in Tokyo alone from February to July 1944. From then until the final days of the war, the state mobilized civilians throughout urban Japan to destroy hundreds of thousands of homes in a desperate campaign to save millions more.82 IV the limits of transnational civil defence Transnational learning has inherent limitations. One may research best practices elsewhere, but local conditions necessarily vary. Accordingly, it is not enough to reveal connections between nations. The transnational historian must also compare and explain developments on both sides of the flows of knowledge.83 Whereas the European belligerents experienced bombing from the early days of the war, Japanese cities suffered significant bombardment only in the last five months of the war. Both the Germans and the British were able to adapt, improving their civil defences in response to the latest attack. Moreover, prior to 1943, bombing cities was not especially effective. Air defences in both Britain and Germany were formidable, and bomb loads remained relatively small. Based on their observations of European practices in the war’s early years, Japanese investigators initially concluded that a well-organized civil defence would thwart the enemy’s efforts to destroy cities. What was true in 1940 or 1941, however, would no longer be true in 1945. The Japanese faced a level of bombardment that the British never suffered, and that the Germans experienced only in the last year of the war. Worse still, those bombs were dropped on more concentrated targets in the Japanese case, and bomb loads consisted of much larger numbers of the lightweight but lethal incendiary bombs. The Japanese were good transnational learners and hardly the primitives depicted by the post-war USSBS. Yet they were constantly fighting, if not the last war, then the previous battles of a long and fast-changing Second World War. The Allied devastation of Hamburg and Berlin during the latter half of 1943 shocked Japan’s top military and civil leaders, but they had little margin in which to prepare against aerial attacks on Japan. Although they recognized the need to build stronger shelters, inadequate supplies of concrete remained within the homeland, and much of that was used to construct defences against the anticipated Allied invasion. Japan’s squadrons of home-based fighter planes had been badly depleted by three years of war in the Pacific and crippling material shortages. The state was also unable to provide the huge increases in mobile firefighting equipment necessary to combat the new incendiaries. Besides, few professional firefighters remained on the home front because of the large-scale mobilization of able-bodied men for war. In the end, as the USSBS acknowledged, no amount of Japanese civil defence could have blunted the onslaught by B-29s.84 Despite Japan’s unusually thorough mobilization of its human resources, bucket brigades of neighbourhood women fared poorly against the rain of napalm. The extensive fire-bombing of Japanese cities is such a forgotten chapter that we rarely ask about its impact on concluding the war in the Pacific. Indeed, Americans hold this Truth to be self-evident. The United States dropped two atomic bombs on 6 and 9 August 1945, and those bombs ended the Second World War. American scholars, for their part, passionately debate whether the atomic bombs were necessary to end the war, generally assuming that they did end it.85 However, as Michael Gordin reveals, few US strategists and decision makers expected that two atomic bombs would be sufficient to defeat Japan; they anticipated that several more would be necessary. It was only after Japanese leaders agreed to surrender unconditionally on 14 August that Americans became convinced that the atomic bombs had been decisive.86 Our subsequent fixation with the atomic bomb leads us to overlook several other important developments that helped to persuade Japanese leaders to surrender. Most immediately, the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan shortly after midnight on 9 August (local time). Top Japanese leaders convened the Supreme War Council within hours, whereas they had not met during the two days following the Hiroshima bombing. They appeared far more unsettled by the prospect of a war on two fronts and the Soviet takeover of Manchuria and Korea than they were by the atomic bombs.87 Then there were the effects of the little-known Allied blockade on the food supply. Whereas Hitler’s regime managed to feed the German people almost to the end, Japanese civilians began experiencing severe food shortages long before the air raids. Japan had depended on imported food for 20 per cent of its caloric consumption before the Pacific War. The Allied naval blockade effectively stopped Japanese imports of rice and other foodstuffs from South-East Asia and colonial Taiwan by the end of 1944. In addition to bombing the Japanese homeland, in late March 1945 the B-29s commenced dropping aerial mines in the waters of the Strait of Shimonoseki and Japan’s major ports that handled shipments of food and fuel from nearby Korea, Manchuria and China. Called Operation Starvation, the mission achieved nearly total blockade of the home islands by early August. Prominent industrialists advised military leaders that food and fuel shortages were crippling war production. The USSBS speculated that seven million Japanese might have starved to death if the war had lasted another year.88 Finally, the city-bombing campaign itself was rapidly eroding the will of Japanese leaders and the people to continue the war. This remains a controversial statement among historians. Let us recall Overy’s judgement that the bombing offensives in 1939–45 were ‘all relative failures in their own terms … with no clear-cut end’.89 That conclusion may hold for the European theatre, where five years of bombing weakened but could not by itself defeat Germany. The Allied victory required massive invasions of Germany from east and west. Against Japan, by contrast, the evidence suggests that US area bombing likely produced the effects predicted by Douhet and the RAF. Shortly after the war, the USSBS concluded that ‘even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion’. The survey elaborated that ‘certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated’.90 Historians have generally dismissed the USSBS’s findings as self-serving claims by the study’s author, Paul Nitze, and for allegedly relying on the selective memories of Japanese leaders whom the survey interrogated after the war.91 If conventional bombing was decisive, asked many Americans including the army chief of staff George Marshall, why didn’t the Japanese surrender after a hundred thousand people were killed in Tokyo in March?92 What American historians of the atomic bomb overlook, however, are the many Japanese reports of collapsing morale available to top officials before the Hiroshima attack.93 Indeed, during the five months before 14 August, the Japanese leadership grew increasingly alarmed at the devastating impact of the bombing campaign on the home front. To them and millions of Japanese, bombardment was hardly a singular event confined to March 1945. With each raid, the zones of death and destruction radiated across the big cities and then engulfed the entire country. As the B-29s methodically attacked the fifty-eight provincial cities during the summer, there seemed nowhere to hide and no end in sight. Demoralization may be best measured by the numbers of people fleeing their homes, their livelihoods and their neighbourhood support networks. The fire-bombing of Tokyo and other major cities in March triggered a mass exodus. Some 8.5 million people left the big cities, according to official Japanese estimates. The population of the city of Tokyo dropped 63 per cent, and 29 per cent of Nagoya’s population evacuated in the short period following two raids in mid March. The bombers were obliterating the urban basis of Japan’s war effort. Although the authorities pledged to keep war workers from leaving the cities, a great many fled with their families. The USSBS Morale Division later estimated that of those gainfully employed people who evacuated, fully 37 per cent had worked in war industries. Some left because their factories were bombed, but others simply abandoned workplaces to escape the deadly cities. In the bombed cities, production at even the undamaged factories fell to 54 per cent of the peak in 1944.94 The results seemingly vindicated the USAAF’s indirect strategy of decimating production by killing, ‘dehousing’ and terrorizing workers. Contrary to American stereotypes of fanatically loyal subjects standing up to bombing, Japanese reports at the time portrayed a nation of refugees consumed by fear and hunger. Following the March raid on Tokyo, the official gazette depicted the ‘ceaseless traffic [of evacuees] from morning to night’ on roads clogged with people transporting their belongings in trucks, bicycle-drawn carts, oxcarts, wheelbarrows and ‘even baby buggies’.95 In July, the Home Ministry’s Special Higher Police offered the government a brutally frank assessment in their monthly report entitled ‘The Shake-Up of Morale as Air Raids Worsen’. The police reported not only on the bombing of the six major industrial cities in spring 1945, but also on the traumatic effects of the expanding air raids on small and medium-size cities during the summer. In the immediate aftermath of the big-city attacks, officials noted, the general populace reacted with defiance and a willingness to carry on. Yet, as the days passed, they observed a shift to ‘feelings of terror’. By 1 June, an estimated eight million people had already left the four big urban industrial areas, and they did so in an ‘unplanned, self-willed’ manner. If anything, the police suggested, the subsequent bombing of the small and medium-size cities terrified residents more than those in the big cities. Even if they lived in cities that had not been bombed, people panicked after hearing news of attacks on other smaller cities. Large numbers reportedly left their houses every night and stayed with relatives in nearby villages. More and more would abandon the smaller cities outright, predicted the authorities. One’s chances of becoming a bombing victim were in fact much higher in the smaller cities. Whereas air raids on the big cities had destroyed about 40 per cent of homes, attacks on the small and medium-size cities in just one night typically burned down 80 per cent of housing. Claiming that 199 cities with a total population of thirty million had already experienced air raids, the Special Higher Police concluded that ‘feelings of terror’ towards the aerial attacks were ‘spreading to the entire nation’. They warned that the general public was succumbing to war-weariness, defeatism and even anti-military sentiment and antagonism towards the upper classes.96 Whether the fire-bombing and aerial mining campaigns would by themselves have persuaded Japanese leaders to surrender remains unprovable. We shall never know which factor was the most decisive because the leadership confronted several adverse developments at once: fire-bombs, atomic bombs, Soviet intervention and the prospect of mass starvation. Nonetheless, based on official Japanese thinking at the time, it is probable that air power would have ended the war before the end of 1945 even without the atomic bombs and Soviet intervention, just as the USSBS concluded. At the fateful meeting of the Supreme War Council on 9–10 August, the president of the Privy Council, Kiichirō Hiranuma, spoke for the prime minister and the emperor when he pointedly questioned whether Japan could continue the war in view of air raids occurring ‘every day and night’, the paralysis in public transportation caused by air raids, and the dire food situation. He also mentioned the atomic bombs, but simply as one of the developments. Echoing the Home Ministry’s reports on morale, Hiranuma warned of the outbreak of popular unrest ‘not by ending the war but by continuing the war’.97 Within a few hours, the Supreme War Council accepted the Allied terms, leaving only the fate of the emperor to be clarified in the next five days. V conclusion The inclusion of Japan in the history of bombing contributes to a fuller understanding of the Second World War as a global phenomenon. In terms of comparative history, it challenges the conventional wisdom that bombing simply stiffened civilian morale. That generalization is based almost entirely on the bombing of Britain and Germany. Yet Britain was heavily bombed for less than a year, and it is not obvious how well Britons would have withstood four more years of increasingly lethal aerial attacks. Germany did endure the massive destruction of its cities, but it was the extraordinary case. The norm may instead have been Japan and Italy. Some historians suggest that Anglo-American bombing also shattered civilian morale in Italy and influenced the leaders’ decisions to oust Mussolini and surrender to the Allies in 1943.98 We thus need to think more comparatively about why bombing did not defeat Germany, even though Allied bombardment overwhelmed German air and civil defences in the final months, just as it did in Japan. Nazi Germany differed from Imperial Japan in at least two important respects. Hitler’s regime relied on millions of foreign and slave labourers to build air-raid bunkers and reconstruct the cities and factories, whereas Japan lacked sufficient manpower to clear the rubble and rebuild.99 Above all, the radical Nazi leadership was determined to fight to the end, even if it meant the destruction of Germany as a nation.100 Japanese leaders, on the other hand, sought to avoid national annihilation. Unlike the Nazi regime, the Japanese government surrendered before enemy troops invaded the homeland. The Japanese experience as bomber and bombed also reveals the centrality of transnational learning in the remarkable levels of mass violence against civilians in the Second World War. The global circulation of ideas of strategic bombing and total war profoundly shaped why, and how, urban areas were bombed. Over the past three decades, it had indeed become normal to seek to destroy whole cities, particularly their working-class cores. National-history writing shows its limits here. It was by no means inevitable that either the Japanese air forces or the USAAF would turn to city-bombing in their respective wars against China and the Japanese homeland. Japan’s air forces had initially adopted strategies aimed at destroying armies and navies, while the USAAF developed strategies and technologies for precision bombing. Nonetheless, faced with an unwinnable ground war in China, the Japanese air forces drew on the widely available ideas of Douhet and other strategists in an attempt to break the Chinese people’s will to wage war. And, by 1944, American civil and military experts had so thoroughly embraced the RAF’s thinking on urban area attacks that the COA could dispassionately plan the obliteration of Japan’s major cities and the killing of more than half a million workers and their families. Transnational learning was equally important in how nations mobilized their home fronts in defence. To be sure, Japanese leaders appear fanatical in haranguing their people to stand up to air raids, but they were not exceptionally fanatical. German, Soviet and even British leaders conveyed similar messages to their people. So too would the US government after 1945. Civil-defence authorities called on the American people to stand their ground not simply against air raids but against Soviet atomic bombs. In the civil defence film Our Cities Must Fight (1951) a newspaper editor chastises those readers who would ‘desert’ the cities and factories after a nuclear bombing. Recalling ‘miles and miles of refugees trying to get away from cities under attack’ in the Second World War, he declared he would never forget ‘when some European people took to the hills’. To flee was tantamount to ‘treason’, handing victory to the enemy.101 We witness, once again, the logic of total war. It transcended individual nations. It transcended various ideologies. And it even transcended the war itself. Footnotes * I should like to thank James Bartholomew, Andrew Gordon, Kevin Kruse, Fredrik Logevall, Paul Miles, Daniel Rodgers, Dietmar Süss and Keith Wailoo for their comments on previous drafts. Research was generously supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Humboldt Research Award, the Leverhulme Trust and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. 1 The Day after Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb, director Jon Else (1980). 2 The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (hereafter USSBS), Civilian Defense Division, Final Report Covering Air-Raid Protection and Allied Subjects in Japan (Washington, DC, 1947), 14. 3 For example, Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007); Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds.), Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s (New York, 2007); Frederick R. Dickinson, ‘Toward a Global Perspective of the Great War: Japan and the Foundations of a Twentieth-Century World’, American Historical Review, cxix, 4 (2014). Among the comparative and transnational studies that do re-examine the wars, the best work has centred on Europe in the First World War: see John Horne, ‘Introduction: Mobilizing for “Total War”, 1914–1918’, in John Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge, 1997). See also the comparative-thematic essays in Ute Daniel et al. (eds.), 1914–1918 Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, <https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/themes> (accessed 15 Sept. 2019). 4 Hew Strachan, ‘Epilogue’, in Jay Winter (ed.), The Legacy of the Great War: Ninety Years On (Columbia, Mo., 2009), 193, 195. 5 Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe, 1939–1945 (London, 2013); Thomas Hippler, Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing, trans. David Fernbach (London, 2017). 6 For example, Francis Pike, Hirohito’s War: The Pacific War, 1941–1945 (London, 2016), 78, 153, 217, 408, 618, 792. 7 Sheldon Garon, ‘Transnational History and Japan’s “Comparative Advantage” ’, Journal of Japanese Studies, xliii, 1 (2017). 8 Overy, Bombing War, 609. 9 Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg (New York, 2001), 105–6; John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, 1986), 11, 40–1. 10 Juergen Paul Melzer, ‘Assisted Takeoff: Germany and the Ascent of Japan’s Aviation, 1910–1937’ (Princeton University Ph.D. thesis, 2014), 39–45. 11 Overy, Bombing War, 20–2. 12 Matteo Ermacora, ‘Civilian Morale’, in Daniel et al. (eds.), 1914–1918 Online, <https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/civilian_morale> (accessed 15 Sept. 2019). 13 Raymond H. Fredette, The Sky on Fire: The First Battle of Britain, 1917–1918 (Washington, DC, 1991), 39, 129–31, 160–2, 167. 14 C. L. N. Newall, ‘The Scientific and Continuous Attack of Vital Industries’, 12 May 1918: The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), AIR 1/1986/204/273/114; [Frederick Sykes], ‘Review of Air Situation and Strategy for the Information of the Imperial War Cabinet by the Chief of the Air Staff’, 27 June 1918: TNA, AIR 9/8. 15 Giulio Douhet, Il dominio dell’aria: saggio sull’arte della guerra aerea (1921), trans. Dino Ferrari as The Command of the Air (New York, 1942; repr. Washington, DC, 1983). 16 Erich Ludendorff, Der totale Krieg (Munich, 1935). 17 Horne, ‘Introduction’, 3–4, 242 n. 10. 18 Douhet, Command of the Air, 5–7, 9–10, 22, 182, 196–7. 19 Ibid., 150, 182, 188, 195–6, 276. 20 Ibid., pp. viii–ix; Melzer, ‘Assisted Takeoff’, 140; Marcel Jauneaud, L’Aviation militaire et la guerre aérienne (Paris, 1923); Phillip S. Meilinger, ‘Trenchard and “Morale Bombing”: The Evolution of Royal Air Force Doctrine before World War II’, Journal of Military History, lx, 2 (1996), 250. 21 ‘War Office Staff Exercise, Buxton, 9th–13th April 1923, 2nd Conference: Address by Chief of the Air Staff’, 2–3: TNA, AIR 9/8. 22 A.K., ‘Die Aufgaben der Luftstreitkräfte einer Wehrmacht’, Die Luftwacht, 4 (1928), 195–6, trans. [British] Air Intelligence as ‘The Employment of Air Forces in War’, 1 June 1928, and [Group Captain Foster], ‘Notes on a Memorandum by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff on “The War Object of an Air Force” ’, 23 May 1928: both TNA, AIR 9/8. 23 Charles Townshend, ‘Civilization and “Frightfulness”: Air Control in the Middle East between the Wars’, in Chris Wrigley (ed.), Warfare, Diplomacy and Politics (London, 1986); Nadin Heé, Imperiales Wissen und koloniale Gewalt: Japans Herrschaft in Taiwan, 1895–1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 2012), 202–4. 24 Hippler, Governing from the Skies, pp. xiii, xv, 64–72. 25 Giulio Douhet, ‘Recapitulation’, Rivista aeronautica (Nov. 1929), in Douhet, Command of the Air, 258. 26 Metropolitan Police, Office of the Commissioner, ‘Memorandum on “A.R.P. Lessons from Spain” and “Organisation of a Public Air Raid Shelter” ’, 1939: TNA, MEPO 2/3632; Albert Herrlich, ‘Bambus gegen Bomben: wie sich Canton gegen die japanischen Luftangriffe schützte’, Gasschutz und Luftschutz, viii, 12 (1938). 27 Committee of Imperial Defence, Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee (hereafter JIC), Sub-Committee on Air Warfare, minutes of the 2nd meeting, 2 Nov. 1938, 2; JIC, Sub-Committee on Air Warfare, Report No. 2: Air Co-Operation with Land Forces in Operations in Spain from July 1936 to December 1938 and in China from July 1937 to December 1938 (21 Feb. 1939), 4, 26–7; JIC, Sub-Committee on Air Warfare, Report No. 5: Active Air Defence and Passive Air Defence in the Field in the Operations in Spain from July 1936 to December 1938 and in China from July 1937 to December 1938 (29 Mar. 1939), 5; all TNA, CAB 56/6. 28 Kinji Sudo, ‘Bomben auf Tschungking’, Der Adler, no. 24 (1941). 29 Overy, Bombing War, 610. 30 Mizusawa Hikari, Gun’yōki no tanjō: Nihongun no kōkū senryaku to gijutsu kaihatsu [Birth of Warplanes: Development of the Japanese Air Forces’ Strategies and Technology] (Tokyo, 2017), 44, 50–60. 31 Edna Tow, ‘The Great Bombing of Chongqing and the Anti-Japanese War, 1937–1945’, in Mark Peattie, Edward J. Drea and Hans van de Ven (eds.), The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 (Stanford, 2011); Maeda Tetsuo, Senryaku bakugeki no shisō: Gerunika, Jūkei, Hiroshima [Strategic-Bombing Thinking: Guernica, Chongqing, Hiroshima] (Tokyo, 2006), 93–4, 124, 130–3. 32 Bōei Kenshūjo Senshishitsu, Chūgoku hōmen rikugun kōkū sakusen [Army Air Force Operations in China] (Tokyo, 1974), 124–6; Bōei Kenshūjo Senshishitsu, Chūgoku hōmen kaigun sakusen [Naval Operations in China], 2 vols. (Tokyo, 1974–5), i, 405. 33 ‘Report by H.B.M. Air Attaché [Shanghai] on Air Operations during Sino-Japanese Hostilities, 1938’, 25 Jan. 1939, 41–2, 59: TNA, AIR 2/3558. 34 Ibid., 82; JIC, Sub-Committee on Air Warfare, Report No. 2, 4; JIC, Sub-Committee on Air Warfare, Report No. 3: Air Attack on Industry in Operations in Spain from July 1936 to December 1938 and in China from July 1937 to December 1938 (21 Feb. 1939), 11; JIC, Sub-Committee on Air Warfare, Report No. 5, 1, 5. 35 Lindqvist, History of Bombing, 26, 49, 81; Overy, Bombing War, 29–30. 36 Overy, Bombing War, 59–65, 73–6, 85, 88–94, 108–9, 113; Dietmar Süss, Death from the Skies: How the British and Germans Survived Bombing in World War II, trans. Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes (Oxford, 2014), 2–3. 37 Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany, 1939–1945, 4 vols. (London, 1961), iv, 205; Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945, trans. Allison Brown (New York, 2006), 62–3, 67. 38 N. H. Bottomley, ‘Minute Sheet’, 8 Nov. 1940, TNA, AIR 14/249; H. E., ‘Memorandum: Labour Objective’, 12 Feb. 1941: TNA, AIR 20/8143. 39 Friedrich, Fire, 9–14, 63, 66–8. 40 Overy, Bombing War, 313, 321–3, 333–5; Friedrich, Fire, 95. 41 Thomas R. Searle, ‘ “It Made a Lot of Sense to Kill Skilled Workers”: The Firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945’, Journal of Military History, lxvi, 1 (2002), 106–9. 42 Overy, Bombing War, 377–8, 391–5. 43 Searle, ‘It Made a Lot of Sense to Kill Skilled Workers’, 109–12. 44 ‘Additional Intelligence Breifing (sic) Material for 3BD Field Order No. 77’, 9 Oct. 1943: Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama (hereafter AFHRA), IRIS 00230308, file 527.332, courtesy of Trevor Albertson. See also ‘Operation 114, Munster (Germany)’, 10 Oct. 1943: AFHRA, IRIS 00221743, file 520.332; Conrad C. Crane, American Airpower Strategy in World War II: Bombs, Cities, Civilians, and Oil (Lawrence, 2016), 167–78. 45 USSBS, Urban Areas Division, The Effects of Air Attack on Japanese Urban Economy: Summary Report (Washington, DC, 1947), 9. 46 Gian P. Gentile, How Effective Is Strategic Bombing? Lessons Learned from World War II to Kosovo (New York, 2001), 85–8, 93. 47 Colonel Guido R. Perera to Brigadier-General Hansell, 9 May 1944: AFHRA, IRIS 00110402, file 118.01 v.1. See also Searle, ‘It Made a Lot of Sense to Kill Skilled Workers’, 114, 117–19. 48 Colonel Guido R. Perera, ‘Attack on Japanese Strategic Targets’, memorandum for Colonel Lindsay, 8 June 1944: AFHRA, IRIS 00110402, file 118.01 v.1. 49 ‘Report to Committee of Operations Analysts: Economic Effects of Successful Area Attacks on Six Japanese Cities’, 4 Sept. 1944, 4, <http://www.japanairraids.org> (accessed 15 Sept. 2019). 50 ‘Incendiary Weapons for the Far East: Minutes of a Meeting Held at Air Ministry, Whitehall, on Friday, 30th June, 1944’: TNA, AIR 20/4768. 51 Dylan J. Plung, ‘The Japanese Village at Dugway Proving Ground: An Unexamined Context to the Firebombing of Japan’, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, xvi, 8 (2018), <https://apjjf.org/2018/08/Plung.html> (accessed 15 Sept. 2019). 52 Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, 1987), 285. 53 Interview with Lieutenant-General Ira C. Eaker, 22 May 1962, 3: AFHRA, IRIS 0090467, file K239.0512-627. 54 Narrative History Headquarters, Twentieth Air Force, ‘Tokyo Urban Industrial Area’, 9 Mar. 1945, 3; ‘Osaka Urban Industrial Area’, 10 Mar. 1945, 2; ‘Nagasaki Urban Industrial Area’, 28 Mar. 1945, 2–3: all AFHRA, IRIS 00262147, file 760.01 v.8, binder VII, Target Information Sheets, doc. 75. 55 Colonel Guido R. Perera, ‘Status of Studies on Incendiary Attack on Japanese Urban Industrial Areas’, memorandum for Colonel Lindsay, 29 Aug. 1944: AFHRA, IRIS 00110404, file 118.04-2. 56 New York Times, 28 July 1945; Mizushima Asaho and Ōmae Osamu, Kenshō bōkūhō: kūshūka de kinjirareta hinan [Air Defence Law Investigated: Ban on Fleeing Air Raids] (Kyoto, 2014), 9–15, 38. 57 President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, 9 Sept. 1944, quoted in President Harry S. Truman to Mr Franklin D’Olier, 15 Aug. 1945; Rensis Likert to Mr James Reynolds, 13 June 1945: both National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md., RG 243, USSBS, Office of the Chairman, General Correspondence, entry 1, boxes 19 and 17. 58 USSBS, Morale Division, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on Japanese Morale (Washington, DC, 1947), 9. 59 See Sheldon Garon, ‘Defending Civilians against Aerial Bombardment: A Comparative/Transnational History of Japanese, German, and British Home Fronts, 1918–1945’, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, xiv, 23 (2016), <https://apjjf.org/2016/23/Garon.html> (accessed 15 Sept. 2019). 60 Air Raid Precautions Committee, minutes of the 17th meeting, 30 Mar. 1925: TNA, CAB 46/1; ‘Air Staff Notes on Enemy Air Attack on Defended Zones in Great Britain’, 28 May 1924: TNA, CAB 46/3. 61 Reichswirtschaftsminister (Ronde) to Reichsminister des Innern (Wagner), ‘Der Luftschutzgedanke in Deutschland und im Ausland’, 29 Apr. 1929: Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Berlin (hereafter PA AA), II F-Luft, R32813; Deutsche Luftschutz Liga (Geisler) to Auswärtiges Amt (Frohwein), 21 Oct. 1931: PA AA, II F-Luft, R32823; ‘Luftschutz im Ausland’, Luftschutz-Rundschau, i, 1–2 (1932). 62 Reichsminister des Innern, ‘Abschnitt VII: Brandschutz’, 19 Oct. 1932: PA AA, II F-Luft, R32816. 63 See PA AA, Pol. I-Luft, R101487 (Gas- und Luftschutzfragen in Ausland, 1936–8), R101483–R101484 (Gas- und Luftschutzfragen in Deutschland, i, 1937–8; ii, 1938–9). 64 ‘Report on the Visits to Berlin and Paris of the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Home Affairs and Major Fraser, M.C., January 18–27, 1938’, 10 Mar. 1938: TNA, HO 45/17627. 65 USSBS, Civilian Defense Division, Final Report Covering Air-Raid Protection and Allied Subjects in Japan, 1; ‘The Air Manoeuvres’, Daily Telegraph, 16 Aug. 1928; Deutsche Botschaft, Tokio, to Auswärtiges Amt, ‘Luftangriffe’, 29 Dec. 1928: PA AA, R32813. 66 Jan Peter Schmidt, ‘Nach dem Krieg ist vor dem Krieg: der Erste Weltkrieg in Japan. Medialisierte Kriegserfahrung, Nachkrieginterdiskurs und Politik, 1914–1918/19’ (Ruhr-Universität Bochum Ph.D. thesis, 2013), 306–11, 322–3, 372–3. 67 Rinji Gunji Chōsa Iin, Sansen shokoku no rikugun ni tsuite [The Belligerents’ Armies] (Tokyo, 1919), 74–7. 68 Ugaki Kazushige nikki [Kazushige Ugaki: Diary], 3 vols. (Tokyo, 1968–71), iii, 445–6 (6 Sept. 1923); J. Charles Schencking, The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan (New York, 2013), 76–7. 69 Senda Tetsuo, Bōkū enshūshi [History of Air-raid Drills] (Tokyo, 1935), 31. 70 See ‘Dokui haken gunji shisatsudan hōkoku: Doitsu no bōkū ni tsuite’ [Report of the Military Inspection Team Dispatched to Germany and Italy: German Air Defence], 25 July 1941: Bōei Kenkyūjo/National Institute for Defense Studies, Tokyo, Rikukū Chūō Zenpan-174. 71 Tsuchida Hiroshige, Kindai Nihon no ‘kokumin bōkū’ taisei [Modern Japan’s ‘Civil Defence’ System] (Tokyo, 2010), 228–9. 72 Bōei Kenshūjo Senshishitsu, Hondo bōkū sakusen [Air Defence Operations on the Mainland] (Tokyo, 1968), 42, 46, 260–1. On the bombing of Hamburg, see the report by the Japanese consul-general of Hamburg: Otoshirō Kuroda, The MAGIC Documents: Summaries and Transcripts of the Top Secret Diplomatic Communications of Japan, 1938–1945 (Washington, DC, 1980), reel 6, no. 517 (25 Aug. 1943). 73 Sheldon Garon, ‘The Home Front and Food Insecurity in Wartime Japan: A Transnational Perspective’, in Hartmut Berghoff, Jan Logemann and Felix Römer (eds.), The Consumer on the Home Front: Second World War Civilian Consumption in Comparative Perspective (Oxford, 2017), 37–9, 44. 74 Gaimushō Ōakyoku Daisanka, Senjika no Eikoku jijō [Conditions in Wartime Britain] (Tokyo, 1941), ch. 3. 75 Imazato Ryūji, ‘Rondon kūshū no jikkyō o shisatsu shite’ [Observing London Air Raids], Kokumin bōkū, iii, 5 (1941); Tobe Toshio, ‘Kūshū to toshi sokai: Rondon no kyōkun’ [Air Raids and Evacuating the Cities: Lessons from London], Kokumin bōkū, vi, 7 (1944). 76 Sakai Shūkichi, ‘Kessenka! Nihon josei no sekimu’ [Facing the Decisive Battle! The Duty of Japanese Women], Kokumin bōkū, v, 5 (1943), 9. 77 Yamamoto Shigeru, ‘Tonarigumi no katsuyaku wa Doitsu ijō’ [Japanese Neighbourhood Associations’ Efforts Surpass Even Germany’s], Kokumin bōkū, iii, 11 (1941), 53. 78 Gregory J. Kasza, The Conscription Society: Administered Mass Organizations (New Haven, 1995); Garon, ‘Defending Civilians against Aerial Bombardment’. 79 Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, 1997), 124–9; Tsuchida, Kindai Nihon no ‘kokumin bōkū’ taisei, 181–2, 299–300. 80 Nanba Sanjūshi, ‘Toshi shishu wa gimu da!’ [It’s a Duty to Defend Cities to the Death!], Kokumin bōkū, iii, 10 (1941), 25. 81 Gregory Scott Johnson, ‘Mobilizing the “Junior Nation”: The Mass Evacuations of School Children in Wartime Japan’ (Indiana University Ph.D. thesis, 2009), 137–43, 146, 158, 161–2, 169–87, 220–4, 243. 82 Tanabe Heigaku, Doitsu bōkū, kagaku, kokumin seikatsu [German Air Defence, Science, National Life] (Tokyo, 1942); Kawaguchi Tomoko, Tatemono sokai to toshi bōkū [Demolition of Buildings and Urban Air Defence] (Kyoto, 2014), 24–5, 29–31, 95–6, 106, 111–21; Cary Lee Karacas, ‘Tokyo from the Fire: War, Occupation, and the Remaking of a Metropolis’ (University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D. thesis, 2006), 53–4, 71–2. 83 Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, 2016), 63–72. 84 USSBS, Civilian Defense Division, Final Report Covering Air-Raid Protection and Allied Subjects in Japan, 7–8, 44–5, 73, 138. 85 See Barton J. Bernstein, ‘Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory’, Diplomatic History, xix, 2 (1995). 86 Michael D. Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton, 2007), 6–7. 87 Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 3, ch. 5. 88 USSBS, Naval Analysis Division, The Offensive Mine Laying Campaign against Japan (Washington, DC, 1946), 3–4, 14–16; Garon, ‘Home Front and Food Insecurity in Wartime Japan’, 50–3. 89 Overy, Bombing War, 609. 90 USSBS, Summary Report (Pacific War) (Washington, DC, 1946), 26. 91 Barton J. Bernstein, ‘Compelling Japan’s Surrender without the A-Bomb, Soviet Entry, or Invasion: Reconsidering the US Bombing Survey’s Early-Surrender Conclusions’, Journal of Strategic Studies, xviii, 2 (1995). 92 Leonard Mosley, Marshall: Hero for our Times (New York, 1982), 337. 93 Tōkyō Kūshū o Kiroku Surukai, Tōkyō daikūshū, sensaishi [History of the Great Tokyo Air Raid and War Damage], 5 vols. (Tokyo, 1975), v, 244–5. 94 USSBS, Urban Areas Division, Effects of Air Attack on Japanese Urban Economy, 5, 7–8, 11. 95 ‘Shūgen’ [Word of the Week], Shūhō, cdxxxix–cdxl (1945), 2. 96 Naimushō Keihokyoku Hōanka, ‘Kūshū gekika ni tomonau minshin no dōyō’ [The Shake-Up of Morale as Air Raids Worsen], in Matsuura Sōzō (ed.), Nihon no kūshū [Air Raids against Japan], 10 vols. (Tokyo, 1980–1), x, 62–5. 97 Daitōa sensō hishi: ushinawareta wahei kōsaku: Hoshina Zenshirō kaisōki [Secret History of Greater East Asia War: Lost Peace Manoeuvres: Zenshirō Hoshina: Memoir] (Tokyo, 1975), 144–5. 98 Claudia Baldoli and Andrew Knapp, Forgotten Blitzes: France and Italy under Allied Air Attack, 1940–1945 (London, 2012), 20–2; Overy, Bombing War, 525–8. 99 Garon, ‘Defending Civilians against Aerial Bombardment’. 100 Ian Kershaw, The End: Hitler’s Germany, 1944–45 (London, 2011); Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939–1945: Citizens and Soldiers (New York, 2015). 101 Our Cities Must Fight, director Anthony Rizzo (1951). © The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2020 This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - On the Transnational Destruction of Cities: What Japan and the United States Learned from the Bombing of Britain and Germany in the Second World War
JF - Past & Present
DO - 10.1093/pastj/gtz054
DA - 2020-05-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/on-the-transnational-destruction-of-cities-what-japan-and-the-united-gXlvJS69O3
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -