Starting in 1940, the Royal Air Force unleashed bomber raids against German cities, to be joined in 1942 by American B-17s and B-24s. The Western democracies protested in 1937 when the German Condor Legion pounded Guernica and Japanese aircraft did the same to Shanghai, but it did not take long for them to emulate the enemy’s example. Though losses from aerial bombardment were minuscule during World War I (Germany suffered 1,900 killed and wounded), vast improvements in aircraft after 1918 ushered in an age of annihilation. Britain and France quickly retaliated with their own raids on German soil.
30, 1914 - less than 11 years after the Wright brothers’ first flight - when a flimsy German monoplane dropped five small bombs on Paris. In the end, no more than one-third of the total Japanese deaths from air raids - and just 3.5% of the total land area destroyed - could be attributed to Fat Man and Little Boy.įar from being unusual, then, those two A-bombs merely marked the culmination of an already well-established principle: that urban areas were fair game for aerial attack. Conventional explosives had reduced all of the major cities of both countries to rubble. By the time the Enola Gay took off, at least 600,000 Germans and 200,000 Japanese had already been killed in Allied air raids. But the havoc they caused, with a combined death toll of over 100,000, was far from unprecedented. It’s true that the atomic bombs were, by many orders of magnitude, the most powerful explosives ever employed. These criticisms rest, it seems to me, on a profoundly ahistorical assumption: that there was something unusual about what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Only with the Axis threat long vanquished have numerous historians and philosophers come forward to claim that the use of the A-bomb was unnecessary and an atrocity that blemishes American honor. In 1945, 85% of Americans approved of a step deemed necessary to end the war and head off a costly invasion of Japan. The lack of controversy is fitting because there wasn’t much soul-searching at the time. 6, 1945, has not so far provoked the kind of anguished debate that accompanied the 50th anniversary. The 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on Aug.