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"Was the American Bombing Campaign in World War II a War Crime?"

Well, General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific theater, was concerned about this question. He once remarked that, if the US were to lose the war, he expected to be tried for war crimes.

The fire-bombing of Tokyo targeted civilians; it was strategic only in the sense that it terrorized civilians. Tokyo's residential sectors were constructed with wood, so LeMay selected incendiary munitions rather than explosives. In the 2-1/2 hours of the March 9, 1945 Tokyo firestorm, the US killed 100,000 Japanese civilians -- mostly women, children, and old folks -- in their homes. This and similar firebombings in Japan are estimated to have "scorched and boiled and baked to death," to use LeMay's words, over a million Japanese civilians.

"There are no innocent civilians, so it doesn't bother me so much to be killing innocent bystanders." - Curtis LeMay on the March 9, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo.

"LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He ... and I'd say I ... were behaving as war criminals." - Robert McNamara

It's not an idle question, nor it is inherently unpatriotic or naive to consider the limits in the application of violence.

Well, General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific theater, was concerned about this question. He once remarked that, if the US were to lose the war, he expected to be tried for war crimes.

And the context? The fact that the Japanese summarily executed a lot of Allied prisoners. Note that people joke about things they consider remote. For instance, if I were in Japanese-occupied Asia during WWII, and I had justified the wartime bombing of Japan by the Allies, I would fully expect to be executed if caught doing so, not because it is a particularly bad thing to advocate, but because the Japanese don't have any problem executing anyone under their control for whatever reason. LeMay may have joked about being tried for war crimes, not because the bombings were particularly bad, but because he expected the Japanese to do away with him regardless if they won. It may also have been his highly-tuned Christian conscience at work. Did the Japanese High Command even pause for reflection as they subjected American prisoners-of-war to dissection in mainland Japanese medical facilities while they were still alive?

The other LeMay quote that I think is more relevant, but less used, is the following: "We’re at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?" This isn't some academic debate - it's about defeating the enemy with as few American losses as possible, at a time when 300 American boys were getting killed daily. People who complain that we put too little value on the lives of enemy civilians are putting too little value on the lives of American civilians wrenched from their daily lives, in the flower of their youth, to face the rigors of a cruel, pitiless and fanatical enemy.