On the night of March 9, 1945, American B-29 bombers burned 15 square miles of Tokyo, killing 100,000 civilians and leaving more than one million homeless. It was the greatest of the incendiary air raids, but it was far from the last. On March 11, American B-29s bombed Nagoya; March 13, Osaka; March 16, Kobe; March 18, Nagoya again. Five raids in nine days, 32 square miles destroyed in Japan’s four most populous cities — 41 percent of the area the Army Air Forces destroyed in all of Germany during the entire war, and at a total cost of only 22 B-29s and their crews. General Curtis LeMay, who was in charge, quit, at least for a time. He had run out of napalm. Two months later, his stocks replenished, he systematically burned 62 smaller Japanese cities. (...)
St. Clair McKelway, a veteran reporter for the magazine, had taken a leave of absence from the magazine to serve as a public relations officer in the Army Air Forces (AAF). He was stationed with the Bomber Command in Guam at the time, taking his orders directly from General LeMay, and he fully supported LeMay’s belief that the bombing would bring about a swift end to the war. The New Yorker’s managing editor, Harold Ross, accepted McKelway’s reporting. He should have been cautious for two reasons: first, McKelway was no longer his reporter, but was a lieutenant colonel under military orders. And second, Ross knew that McKelway had a history of playing fast and loose with facts. McKelway twisted the bombing story to match the AAF line, changed dates and facts to put himself at the story’s center and flatter his military superiors. Most importantly, he whitewashed what many now view as a war crime: the US’s concerted strategy of incinerating civilians wholesale in their homes.
McKelway’s deception is a cautionary lesson worthy of coverage in the “Wayward Press” series, but it is also a recurring tale in the media. The New Yorker editors were delighted to find they had a reporter working, living, and relaxing with the commanders and the bomber crews destroying Japan. No other publication had that sort of access. Fifty-eight years later, The New York Times would publish accounts of its own reporter, Judith Miller, about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. She based her stories on exclusive access to Ahmad Chalabi and to high-level Pentagon officials, an exclusivity she protected fiercely. Like McKelway, much of Miller’s story proved to be false — a mixture of lies, unverified claims, and vanity. Both McKelway’s and Miller’s editors knew their reporters were personally erratic, but the stories were just too good. They had to be published.
St. Clair McKelway, a veteran reporter for the magazine, had taken a leave of absence from the magazine to serve as a public relations officer in the Army Air Forces (AAF). He was stationed with the Bomber Command in Guam at the time, taking his orders directly from General LeMay, and he fully supported LeMay’s belief that the bombing would bring about a swift end to the war. The New Yorker’s managing editor, Harold Ross, accepted McKelway’s reporting. He should have been cautious for two reasons: first, McKelway was no longer his reporter, but was a lieutenant colonel under military orders. And second, Ross knew that McKelway had a history of playing fast and loose with facts. McKelway twisted the bombing story to match the AAF line, changed dates and facts to put himself at the story’s center and flatter his military superiors. Most importantly, he whitewashed what many now view as a war crime: the US’s concerted strategy of incinerating civilians wholesale in their homes.McKelway’s deception is a cautionary lesson worthy of coverage in the “Wayward Press” series, but it is also a recurring tale in the media. The New Yorker editors were delighted to find they had a reporter working, living, and relaxing with the commanders and the bomber crews destroying Japan. No other publication had that sort of access. Fifty-eight years later, The New York Times would publish accounts of its own reporter, Judith Miller, about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. She based her stories on exclusive access to Ahmad Chalabi and to high-level Pentagon officials, an exclusivity she protected fiercely. Like McKelway, much of Miller’s story proved to be false — a mixture of lies, unverified claims, and vanity. Both McKelway’s and Miller’s editors knew their reporters were personally erratic, but the stories were just too good. They had to be published.
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Robert Guillain, an eyewitness, wrote of the Tokyo bombing in his book I Saw Tokyo Burning (1981) that the bombers “circled and criss-crossed the area, leaving great rings of fire behind them,” that a house could be hit by 10 or even more small bombs, which scattered “a kind of flaming dew [napalm] that skittered along the roofs, setting fire to everything it splashed.” The houses, made of wood and paper, were “lighted from the inside like paper laterns.”
The napalm-bombing campaign worked so smoothly that it had its own momentum, yet it did not receive the press coverage it merited. The bombers’ very efficiency made its operation less newsworthy: there was little to photograph from 30,000 feet, and American military casualties were light. AAF press releases minimized Japanese civilian casualties, and even President Truman seems not to have fully realized what LeMay’s bombers had done. He wrote in his memoirs that the bombing began to do real damage to Japan only in midsummer 1945. Victory in Europe, not the incineration of Japan, was the big story.
The hurricane-force winds puffed up great clots of flame and sent burning planks planing through the air to fell people and set fire to what they touched … In the dense smoke, where the wind was so hot it seared the lungs, people struggled, then burst into flames where they stood … [I]t was often the refugees’ feet that began burning first: the men’s puttees and the women’s trousers caught fire and ignited the rest of their clothing. Proper air-raid clothing as recommended by the government consisted of a heavily padded hood … to protect people’s ears from bomb blasts … The hoods flamed under the rain of sparks; people who did not burn from the feet up burned from the head down. Mothers who carried their babies on their backs, Japanese style, would discover too late that the padding that enveloped the infant had caught fire … Wherever there was a canal, people hurled themselves into the water; in shallow places, people waited, mouths just above the surface of the water. Hundreds of them were later found dead; not drowned, but asphyxiated by the burning air and smoke … In other places, the water got so hot that the luckless bathers were simply boiled alive.And here’s what General LeMay, who had masterminded the raid, wrote in his memoirs (Mission with LeMay: My Story, 1965):
Drafts from the Tokyo fires bounced our airplanes into the sky like ping-pong balls. According to the Tokyo fire chief, the situation was out of control within minutes. It was like an explosive forest fire in dry pine woods. The racing flames engulfed ninety-five fire engines and killed one hundred and twenty-five firemen … About one-fourth of the city went up in smoke that night anyway. More than two hundred and sixty-seven thousand buildings.He quoted the Air Force history of the war, and he italicized the quote out of pride for what he and his men had done: “No other air attack of the war, either in Japan or Europe, was so destructive of life and property.”
The napalm-bombing campaign worked so smoothly that it had its own momentum, yet it did not receive the press coverage it merited. The bombers’ very efficiency made its operation less newsworthy: there was little to photograph from 30,000 feet, and American military casualties were light. AAF press releases minimized Japanese civilian casualties, and even President Truman seems not to have fully realized what LeMay’s bombers had done. He wrote in his memoirs that the bombing began to do real damage to Japan only in midsummer 1945. Victory in Europe, not the incineration of Japan, was the big story.
by Patrick Coffey, LA Review of Books | Read more:
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