The reality is, things have changed. Or haven't you noticed?
My father, who helped in a small way to kill thousands, was not a violent man. Curtis LeMay, who led him into battle, surely was. The former, two years off a small farm in the central San Joaquin Valley, left a quiet college campus in California in early 1943, and at twenty-one joined the American armed forces. For much of the Great Depression, a decade prior, millions in the Imperial Japanese Army had been plundering China and Southeast Asia, and they were now engaged in a murderous fight to the death against an assorted host of enemies. In contrast, William Hanson had fired a small rifle only at birds and rabbits, in the countryside five miles outside the backwater farming town of Kingsburg, California. In his two decades he had never ventured more than a few miles from his parents' farmhouse. He had never been in an airplane, and had never seen a bomb. When he enlisted in the United States Army, his future plane, the B-29, did not even exist as a combat-tested bomber.When William Hanson joined the American army, imperial Japan was still largely unscathed. The closest American land forces to Japan were over 2,000 miles away. Only a few planners like Curtis LeMay knew that thousands of enlisted civilians like my father in a few months of training could kill both brutally and efficiently, if given the proper equipment and leadership - and backed by the vast industrial capacity of the American nation. My grandfather, a farmer who twenty-seven years earlier had left the same forty acres, also served in a democratic army. Frank Hanson ended up as a corporal in the 91st Infantry Division and was gassed in the Argonne. He told my father that he should quickly get used to killing - and that he probably would either not come back, or would return crippled. Americans, my grandfather added, had to learn to fight fast.
A little more than a year after his enlistment, on March 9, 1945, a 400-mile-long trail of 334 B-29s left their Marianas bases, 3,500 newly trained airmen crammed in among the napalm. The gigantic planes each carried ten tons of the newly invented jellied gasoline incendiaries. Preliminary pathfinders had seeded flares over Tokyo in the shape of an enormous fiery X to mark the locus of the target. Planes flew over in small groups of three, a minute apart. Most were flying not much over 5,000 feet above Japan. Five-hundred-pound incendiary clusters fell every 50 feet. Within thirty minutes, a 28-mile-per-hour ground wind sent the flames roaring out of control. Temperatures approached 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The Americans flew in without guns, and LeMay was not interested in shooting down enemy airplanes/ He instead filled the planes with napalm well over their theoretical maximum loads. He wished to destroy completely the material and psychological capital of the Japanese people, on the brutal theory that once civilians had tasted what their soldiers had done to others, only then might their murderous armies crack. Advocacy for a savage militarism from the rear, he though, might dissipate when one's house was in flames. People would not show up to work to fabricate artillery shells that killed Americans when there was no work to show up to. Soldiers who kill, rape, and torture do so less confidently when their own families are at risk at home.
The planes returned with their undercarriages seared and the smell of human flesh among the crews. Over 80,000 Japanese died outright; 40,918 were injured; 267,171 buildings were destroyed. One million Japanese were homeless. Air currents from the intense heat sent B-29s spiraling thousands of feet upward. Gunners like my father could see the glow of the inferno from as far away as 150 miles as they headed home. The fire lasted four days. My father said he could smell burned flesh for miles on the way back to Tinian. Yet only 42 bombers were damaged, and 14 shot down. No single air attack in the history of conflict had been so devastating.
Unfortunately for the Japanese, the March 9 raid was the beginning, not the end, of LeMay's incendiary campaign. He sensed that his moment - a truly deadly man in charge of a huge democratic force free of government constraint - had at last arrived, as the imperial Japanese command was stunned and helpless. All the old problems - the weather, the enemy fighters, the jet stream, the high-altitude wear on the engines, political limitations on bombing civilians - were now irrelevant. There was to be no public objection to LeMay's burning down the industrial and residential center of the Japanese empire - too many stories about Japanese atrocities toward subjugated peoples and prisoners of war had filtered back to the American people. To a democratic nation in arms, an enemy's unwarranted aggression and murder are everything, the abject savagery of its own retaliatory response apparently nothing.
Suddenly, all of Japan lay defenseless before LeMay's new and unforeseen plan of low-level napalm attack. To paraphrase General Sherman, he had pierced the shell of the Japanese empire and had found it hollow. LeMay had thousands of recruits, deadly new planes, and a blank check to do whatever his bombers could accomplish. Over 10,000 young Americans were now eager to work to exhaustion to inflict even more destruction. Quickly, he upped the frequency of missions, sending his airmen out at the unheard-of rate of 120 hours per month - the Eight Air Force in England had usually flown a maximum of 30 hours per month - as they methodically burned down within ten days Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka before turning to smaller cities. His ground crews simply unloaded the bombs at the dock and drove them right over to the bombers, without storing them in arms depots. Between 300 and 400 planes roared out almost every other day, their crews in the air 30 hours and more each week. Missions over Japan, including preliminary briefings and later debriefings, often meant 24 consecutive hours of duty. Benzedrine and coffee kept the flyers awake.
In exchange for the unprovoked but feeble attack at Pearl Harbor on their country, American farmers, college students, welders, and mechanics of a year past were now prepared - and quite able - to ignite all the islands of Japan. Their gigantic bombers often flew in faster than did the sleek Japanese fighters sent up to shoot them down. Japanese military leaders could scarcely grasp that in a matter of months colossal runways had appeared out of nowhere in the Pacific to launch horrendous novel bombers more deadly than any aircraft in history, commanded by a general as fanatical as themselves, and manned by teenagers and men in their early twenties more eager to kill than ever Japan's own feared veterans. So much for the Japanese myth that decadent pampered Westerners were ill equipped for the savagery of all-out war. Even in the wildest dreams of the most ardent Japanese imperialists, there was no such plan of destroying the entire social fabric of the American nation.
When the war ended, William Hanson had become a seasoned central fire control gunner on a B-29, with thirty-four raids over Japan. His plane and nearly a thousand others had materialized out of nowhere on the formal coral rock of the Mariana Islands, burned the major cities of Japan to the ground - and in about twelve months were gone for good. Yet for the rest of their lives these amateurs were fiercely loyal to the brutal architect of their lethal work, who announced after the war was over, "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal." LeMay was absolutely right - he would have. My father occasionally ridiculed LeMay's bluster and his cigar, but it was LeMay nonetheless whom he ridiculed - and LeMay whom he was proud that he had served under.
For much of my life I have wondered where such a murderous force of a season came from. And how a democracy made a willing killer out of my father and other farm boys, putting their lives in the hands of an unhinged zealot like LeMay, who was ostensibly neither emblematic of a democratic citizenry nor representative of the values that we purportedly cherish. Or was he? How can a democratic leader brag of such destruction, take pride in his force's ability to destroy thousands - in short, how can be be so utterly uncouth? How in less than a year after being assembled can a motley group of young recruits fly the most lethal bombers in history to incinerate a feared militaristic culture six thousand miles from their own home? And how can that most murderous air force in the world nearly disappear into the anonymity and amnesia of democracy six months after its victory?
Those thoughts are the easy anxieties of the desk-bound class. I have come to realize that both Curtis LeMay and my father are stock types, not aberrations, of the democratic society that produced them. Democracy, and its twin of market capitalism, alone can instantly create lethal armies out of civilians, equip them with horrific engines of war, imbue them with a near-messianic zeal within a set time and place to exterminate what they understand as evil, have them follow to their death the most ruthless of men, and then melt anonymously back into the culture that produced them. It is democracies, which in the right circumstances, can be imbued with the soul of battle, and thus turn the horror of killing to a higher purpose of saving lives and freeing the enslaved.
My father knew of that soul long ago, which explains why during these last fifty years he was proud to have server under LeMay - an authentic military genius notwithstanding his extremism. Despite his horrific stories of B-29s overloaded with napalm blowing up on takeoff, of low-flying bombers shredded by flak and their crews of eleven sent spiraling into their self-generated inferno over Tokyo, of the smell of burning Japanese flesh wafting through the bomb-bay doors, of parachuting flyers beheaded on landing, he never equated that barbarity with either LeMay or himself.
On the contrary, he seemed to think that the carnage below his plane and the sacrifice of his friends in the air - twelve of sixteen B-29s in his 398th Squadron, 132 of 176b men, were shot down, crashed, or never heard from again - had been necessary to win the war against a racist imperial power, and to save, not expend, both Asian and American lives. Despite his lifelong Democratic party credentials, my father spoke highly of "Old Iron Pants" even in the midst of the general's subsequent entry into controversial right-wing politics. The bastard shortened the war against evil, my father told me. You were all lucky, he went on, once to have had angry men like LeMay and us in the air. We flew into the fire, he said, because we believed that we were saving more lives than we took. As he aged, all memories - childhood, job, family - receded as the recollection of those nights over Tokyo grew sharper; parties, vacations, and familial holiday festivities became sideshows compared to annual reunions with his 313th Bomber Wing and 398th Squadron. His last hallucinatory gasps of July 1998 were a foreign vocabulary of B-29 operations and frantic calls to crew members, most of whom were long since dead.
Democracies, I think, if the cause, if the commanding general, if the conditions of time and space take on their proper meaning - for a season can produce the most murderous armies from the most unlikely of men, and do so in the pursuit of something spiritual rather than the mere material.