I hate to break it to you, my friend, because I feel like I'm telling some kid that there's no Santa Claus, but this statement is simply not true.
Look up "JB-355"; spend a few minutes reading about it.
As I said before, Chennault, as head of the Flying Tigers, was pushing Roosevelt for B-17s to be used to drop incendiaries on Japanese cities as early as the summer of 1941. ("JB-355" was the resolution FDR signed in July of 1941 that gave the green light to Chennault's request; it's the reason that the B-17s were in the Philippines on 8 December 1941, and it's the reason the Japanese destroyed them.)
Chennault: "A small number of long-range bombers carrying incendiary bombs could quickly reduce Japan's paper-and-matchwood cities to heaps of smoking ashes."
General George C. Marshall, before the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor: "If war with the Japanese does come, we’ll fight mercilessly," General George C. Marshall told news reporters in an off-the-record briefing on November 15, 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor. "Flying Fortresses will be dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians—it will be all-out."
Again, Dolittle's men dropped incendiaries on Tokyo in early 1942.
I've provided sources for this information; LeMay himself acknowledged that he would have been tried for war crimes in the event the Japanese were to win the war.
The following article (which I linked to in a previous post) describes "Operation Meetinghouse"; this was the raid on Tokyo in March of 1945:
In this article is a map of the city of Tokyo that was prepared by the U.S. Army Engineers; the map identifies sections of the city by their level of inflammability. (It didn't identify military targets; it identified the different areas of the capital by how well they would burn.)
The map was prepared in 1942, 2-3 years before the bombing campaign began.
On a side note, none of this troubles me; I wasn't around when any of this was going on and I'm young enough so that my understanding of the war didn't come from a father (or uncle) who had served in it. Because of this, I have no more of an emotional attachment to this conflict than I do to the War of 1812. (And because of this, I have no problem looking at this objectively.)
“...Dolittle’s men dropped incendiaries on Tokyo in early 1942...
“... LeMay himself acknowledged that he would have been tried for war crimes in the event the Japanese were to win the war...
“...none of this troubles me;...(...I have no problem looking at this objectively.) [Captain Walker, post 151]
Goodness gracious, you’re right!
The B-25Bs that launched from USS Hornet on 18 April 1942 did carry incendiary munitions: one weapon each, out of four total (the other three were general-purpose weapons of the 500 pound class, with a filler of high explosive). If you are able spin these details into a central, immovable policy directive telling Allied bomber forces what to do and how to do it for the remaining three years and four months of the war against Imperial Japan, I honor your rhetorical gifts.
It’s a mistake to quote senior leaders such as James H Doolittle and Curtis E LeMay, then pretend their off-the-cuff opinions and stray remarks defined policy for conducting every later operation in exhaustive detail. All these guys talked and wrote a very great deal and not every word carried equal force, nor significance.
Claire L Chennault should be afforded less weight in discussions like we’re having. Before the war he was a washed-up Air Corps Captain who had fallen out of favor with leadership for advocating pursuit aviation over long-range bombardment. He wasn’t taken seriously until he managed to accumulate some successes with his American Volunteer Group.
If you find pre-war assertions about torching Japan’s Home Islands ominous in light of later air strikes, permit me to point out that all of it barely rated the dismissive moniker “tough talk,” until the United States actually made good on promises to ramp up production of systems, weaponry, munitions, and supplies. Dark days were upon the country, even as most Americans wallowed in wishful thinking and denial.
Moral absolutists who fret over this or that action by the USA and UK during the Second World War are lending the topic a seriousness it doesn’t deserve: “war crimes” were a ploy, a gambit invented by the Soviets to con the rest of the UN into taking them seriously. They were not trying enlighten you, they were trying to fool you. The trick worked.
If you’ve been hoping I will genuflect to your righteousness, I have to disappoint you. Your authority isn’t earned by any honest effort in the real world. But you issue diktats to the rest of us as if you were a potentate; when challenged, you hide behind the skirts of an “Authority” that only supports what you say and works your will: an intellectually dishonest way to sneak in through the back door and exercise power without legitimacy. A gambit all too human.
Congratulating yourself on your “objectivity” in this is a non-starter: makes your credibility smaller, not greater. In a word, untrustworthy. You’ve been enjoying a life of lotus-eating ease courtesy of people who actually went to war in the 1930s and 1940s, enduring sacrifices untold for our sakes.