I was musing on this here Tom Faranda’s Folly: Torture: Does the end justify the means? last Wednesday when I answered this rhetorical question in the first line of the post “Of course not”.
Here’s another op ed feature (from the WSJ) that argues the opposite. The writer attempts to justify our deliberate attacks on civilian populations in WW II in Japan. Not just the nuclear bombings – more people were killed in one night of firebombing Tokyo (March 9, 1945) then in either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombing.
LeMay and the Tragedy of War – WSJ.com
On the night of March 9, 1945, LeMay sent 346 huge B-29 bombers loaded with napalm from the Mariana Islands (Guam, Saipan and Tinian) to Tokyo. The first planes dropped their incendiaries on the front and back of the target area — like lighting up both ends of a football field at night. The rest of the planes filled in the middle. More than 16 square miles of Japan’s capital city were gutted, two million people were left homeless, and 100,000 were dead.
It didn’t end there. Washington gave LeMay the green light as his bombers burned 64 more cities. He used the World Almanac and just went down the list by population. Altogether, an estimated 350,000 people lost their lives. Anyone hearing this for the first time in 2009 would be hard pressed to defend such an action.
Yet at the time, newspapers across America heralded the event as a tremendous achievement — not unlike the moon landing 24 years later. The New York Times ran the story of the bombings on its front page for 10 straight days. Its lead editorial on March 12, 1945, warned the Japanese that if they didn’t give up more was on the way. The New Yorker magazine ran a glowing three part series on LeMay. Time magazine put him on its cover.
The argument is then made that the Japanese were on a genocidal tear through Asia, “one that killed upwards of 17 million Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and other Asians”, and our own terror bombing was justified to end the war early, and present the horrendous losses that an invasion of japan would have incurred.
Sorry, I respectfully disagree.
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