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On the night of March 9-10, 1945, the United States dramatically shifted tactics late in its war with Japan. No longer would it place any emphasis on precision bombing of its enemy’s territory. The new strategy that replaced this would intentionally be vastly more lethal.
On the night of March 9-10, 1945, the United States dramatically shifted tactics late in its war with Japan. No longer would it place any emphasis on precision bombing of its enemy’s territory. The new strategy that replaced this would intentionally be vastly more lethal.
That evening, 334 U.S. aircraft flew in low over Tokyo, where they dropped an enormous quantity of incendiary bombs that destroyed 16 square miles in the heart of the capital. In this one assault, 1 million people were rendered homeless and as many as 100,000 Japanese people were killed.
The United States knew exactly what it was doing. Afterward, its mastermind, Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay (who would go on to advocate for Washington’s enormous aerial bombing campaigns during the Vietnam War), stated that the citizens of Tokyo who lost their lives in incendiary raids had been “scorched and boiled and baked to death.”
In moral terms, at least, LeMay wasn’t the only high-ranking officer within the U.S. military to provide an assessment. Three months later, Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers called the Tokyo air raids “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history.”
I learned the details of this campaign as a correspondent in Japan in the early 2000s, where I developed a passion for the history of 20th-century Asia. As an American reporter, I felt compelled to wander the districts hardest hit by U.S. firebombs and write about an inadequately known event for a general readership. Later, I would do the same with the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the United States applied the same war strategy of indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations, only with even more ghastly and devastating weapons: newly invented atomic bombs.
This story remains tremendously relevant to our world today. I would start with the fact that just seven years before it firebombed Tokyo, the United States voiced disbelief and outrage over imperial Japan’s bombing of Chinese cities in its attempt to put down China’s efforts to free itself from colonial rule.
How can a nation travel so quickly from extreme condemnation of atrocities committed against civilians to commissioning similar atrocities itself, sometimes even accompanied by exultation? This question has long fascinated me. In the case of the United States’ war against Japan, the deepest roots of the answer seem to lie in Japan’s own atrocities. To be clear, what followed is no excuse. But Washington’s almost exterminatory approach to the war found its public justification and incitement in the most notorious and even evil acts of Japan itself.
As the eminent historian of Japan, John W. Dower, wrote in his pioneering work on World War II in Asia, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, U.S. righteousness in adopting these tactics drew upon the enemy’s own history of morally indefensible atrocities. These ranged from the heavy shelling and bombing of Chinese cities, to a notorious contest by Japanese officers during the Nanjing Massacre to see who could be the first to kill 150 Chinese people with their samurai swords, to the death rate of Allied prisoners of war (which was nearly seven times higher when they were captured by Japan than by Germany or Italy), to, as Dower wrote, the “rape and murder of nuns in the streets of Hong Kong.”
Washington, in other words, made use of genuine Japanese monstrosities to justify and even amplify atrocities of its own.
This awful past has resonated deeply with me for months as I have watched the unfolding of the conflict between Israel and Hamas and the outrageous toll that it has taken on civilians on both sides––first against Israelis, and then in vastly larger numbers against Palestinians. Dower argues, I believe convincingly, that one only arrives at a state of what many consider criminalized warfare through the utter othering of the enemy—meaning through exclusionary claims about blood, soil, faith, and morality. Those in identitarian conflicts believe that their circumstances are altogether unique and cannot be readily understood by outsiders. And this helps feed a sense of self-justification in the dramatic escalation of revenge tactics.
In the U.S.-Japanese conflict, this othering was often race-based, with a civilizational, East-vs.-West overlay. Each side worked overtime to constantly dehumanize the other.
As it has been elsewhere in the past, I believe that in the current conflict, a signal event in the mobilization of such feelings was rape. The rape of Israeli women by Palestinians at the outset of the conflict seems to have packed no less emotional power in rallying Israeli society than the murder of around 1,200 Israeli citizens in Hamas’s surprise Oct. 7 attack. The rapes stirred shock and outrage that galvanized Israel and helped supercharge its entitled sense to escalatory revenge against Palestinian society that has far surpassed the scope of people who can be said to bear any responsibility in the rape and murder of Israelis.
For weeks, in both Israel and the Western world, the brutal raping of Israeli women—most of whom were attacked while attending an outdoor concert—remained the focus of persistent coverage and furious indignation.
Rape and allegations of rape have played a special role in fueling violent conflicts since ancient times. Historical protagonists, in fact, have usually known this and have often manipulated claims of rape in order to speed mobilization and heighten motivation for retribution.
Nicoletta Gullace, a historian at the University of New Hampshire who specializes in World War I, told me that this became a common feature during that conflict. “There is no question the French were going to be behind fighting because the Germans were heading toward their soil. But for the U.S. and Britain, there needed to be compelling reasons to get the public to accept involvement in a country that a lot of people couldn’t find on a map,” she said. “There soon came into being a campaign about the rape of Belgium, showing the rape of women, bayonetting babies, allegedly chopping off the breasts of women, allegations that women were being infected with venereal diseases. They spoke of the Germans as Huns, and they were invariably portrayed with pointed hats and very often as gorillas.” Today, few historians contest the idea that German and other armies committed rape during this conflict, but following the widespread political use and manipulation of claims of rape during the war, a consensus about both its extent and the degree of complicity of politicians and commanders has been hard to establish.
In Gaza, the retribution came swiftly and terribly, but the enormous catalog of outrages, along with their toll, has continued to mount. Israel, for example, has predominantly relied on dumb munitions, including 2,000-pound bombs, to devastate Gaza’s cities. Weapons like these were designed for open battlefield situations or for use against fortified enemy positions, but Israel is using them in some of the most densely inhabited territory on earth. Israel has also attacked hospitals and refugee camps in Gaza. This has all displaced an enormous percentage of the Palestinian population, and by the latest count killed more than 25,000 people, overwhelmingly women and children. Meanwhile, men in Gaza caught up in the Israeli dragnet have been stripped, beaten, tortured, and simply “vanished.”
This would all be remarkably familiar to a historian like Dower, who helped popularize the concept of total war, a give-no-quarter type of conflict that became common in the 20th century, in which races or civilizations and not just armies or men are pit against each other in the minds of the warring parties. To be clear, this includes Hamas, which initiated the current wave of hostilities with its Oct. 7 attack on unarmed civilians in southern Israel. Hamas officials have also spoken of continuing to attack Israel endlessly into the future, or at least until Israel is defeated and disappears.
On the Israeli side, from the prime minister down, officials have responded with similarly bloodcurdling and eliminationist rhetoric about Gaza and, by inference, its population. Some have spoken of simply flattening Gaza outright. Others have implied that there is no such thing as an innocent Palestinian. Others still have bruited about the idea of a “solution” that would consist of totally or largely emptying Gaza of its native population. It is publicly aired notions like these, backed up by Israel’s military offensive in the territory, that contributed to South Africa accusing Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice in The Hague in a case that has been gradually supported by more and more countries. In its first significant action, this tribunal has just ordered Israel to prevent the killing of non-combatants in Gaza while it adjudicates the genocide charge that could take years to decide.
All along, the grisly downward spiral in the Israel-Hamas conflict has been about far more than Israeli public opinion following Oct. 7. International opinion has been almost as important, and arguably none more so than that of the United States. Here, too, stories about the rape of Israeli women have been hugely impactful.
Just before year’s end, a lengthy New York Times investigation of the use of rape as a weapon of war during Hamas’s bloody incursion into Israel fueled waves of disgust and condemnation of the group. These included individual and gang rapes, but also the beheading of raped women, the cutting off of breasts, other forms of dismemberment, and extreme violence and sexual disfigurement of other kinds.
Personally, I harbor no doubt that grave horrors were committed against Israeli women during the Hamas attack, but some critics have said the Times account raised important questions, some of which have never been answered. In fact, some of these critics are people who work in editorial roles inside the Times. A few of them felt so strongly about insufficient corroboration of some of these claims that they reached out to me unsolicited with their complaints, knowing that I had been writing columns about this conflict. These ranged from a general lack of forensic evidence, especially of the kind usually gathered in sexual crimes, to the contradictions to one of the most prominent rape stories raised by the family of a murdered victim.
On a more general level, the Times and the Western press have given little or no heed to Hamas’s denials that it organized or ordered the rape of Israelis. The group has claimed that other Palestinian factions or unaffiliated individuals were responsible for these heinous acts. I do not raise this point out of a naïve belief in Hamas’s word or because I doubt that Hamas was capable of committing the rapes that occurred.
I raise this question because I believe in a hallowed principle in the journalistic profession that requires giving all of the main parties to any conflict or dispute the opportunity to explain their actions. In war, this often leads to hollow denials and wooden, formulaic statements. But failing to quote the accused party at all leads to even worse outcomes.
Speaking more to the historical big picture than to the details of events in Israel and Gaza, from which she has been as remote as I have, Gullace offered this bit of context: “Just because events are being exploited for propaganda purposes does not mean that things like rapes were not occurring. But because of the way these things were being sensationalized, in the postwar period the focus has often become the nature of the propaganda more than a forensic sense of what actually happened.”
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