From The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World (A.J. Baime)
General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, head of the army air forces, had gambled $3 billion—and his entire career—on the development of the B-29 Superfortress. (The B-29 program cost taxpayers considerably more than the Manhattan Project did.)
The first incendiary mission was flown March 9–10, using bombs loaded with white phosphorus and napalm; the latter substance was a new highly flammable fuel gel developed in a Harvard laboratory. The B-29 crews had been instructed on the best way to drop their payloads, to create the maximum amount of fire: “The bombs from a single ship must be spaced so as to assure a merging of the fires started by each bomb into a general conflagration before fire fighters have had time to put them out . . . With a full bomb load . . . of M-69 incendiaries, the area burned out by a single ship should be around 16 acres.”
That first firebombing of Tokyo resulted in the largest death toll of any air raid, in any war ever, up to that point—an estimated 100,000 Japanese, likely more. Civilians hiding in dug-out holes that served as crude bomb shelters were baked alive by the towering flames, the heat reaching 1,800 degrees F. Others took refuge in canals only to be boiled to death in the searing heat.
On August 1, Curtis LeMay issued a warning to Japanese citizens in twelve cities to leave their homes and jobs to save their lives, as their cities were top on what was being called in the press LeMay’s “death list”—Mito, Fukuyama, Ōtsu, among others. On August 2, the day Truman met with the king of England and then started the transatlantic journey home aboard the Augusta, the Twenty-First Bomber Command struck the enemy with what the New York Times called “the greatest single aerial strike in world history.” Nearly 900 B-29s pounded targets with 6,632 tons of conventional and incendiary bombs. The flames engulfed miles of Japanese cities. “The sight was incredible beyond description,” recalled one B-29 crewman. These attacking planes saw no opposition. “They knew we were coming but they didn’t do anything about it,” said one officer.
How did folks on the home front feel about this?
No outrage came from the American public. All the critics who had hurled calumny at the British for their willingness to bomb civilian population centers in Nazi Germany now remained silent. In fact, popular American opinion now seemed to embrace this form of warfare. Newspaper articles ran long columns with pictures of the factories where the firebombs were built. FILLING “GOOP BOMBS” THAT ARE FRYING JAPAN LIKE MIXING CAKE DOUGH, stated a Boston Daily Globe headline. “The M-69s [firebombs] become miniature flamethrowers,” reported Time magazine, “that hurl cheesecloth socks full of furiously flaming goo [napalm] for 100 yards. Anything these socks hit is enveloped by clinging, fiery pancakes.” Only Secretary of War Stimson urged an end to the indiscriminate killing. Stimson went to see the president. “I told him I was anxious about this feature of the war for two reasons,” Stimson wrote in his diary. “First, because I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities; and second, I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength.”
Obliquely threatened with the atomic bomb prior to its use, the Japanese refused to surrender:
On the same day the Senate ratified the UN Charter, Japan responded officially to the Potsdam Declaration. Tokyo was rejecting it. The Japanese government “does not consider [the Potsdam Declaration] of great importance,” Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki said in a press conference. “We must mokusatsu it.” When the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service translated the word mokusatsu, it used the word ignore. In reality, the word meant “to kill with silence”—a vague notion. Another report from a Japanese news agency quoted the Japanese reaction to the ultimatum, saying Japan would “prosecute the war of Great East Asia to the bitter end.”
Of course, Japan did surrender after the atomic bombs were dropped, despite the fact that these bombings were less destructive to life and property than the firebombings had been.
I wonder if this is analogous to the coronaplague situation. Losing millions to influenza over the years never bothered us. Losing millions to automobile accidents that would be easy to prevent with lockdown-style regulations (e.g., only “essential” trips are authorized and private car ownership/amateur driving are banned) has never bothered us. Losing Americans to diabetes, heart disease, and other inevitable side effects of obesity doesn’t bother us enough to outlaw restaurants serving 2,000-calorie meals (or make us think twice about locking people into sedentary habits for 3 months). Losing Americans to cancer didn’t bother us enough to refrain from shutting down ultrasound and other cancer screenings from March through June 2020.
Unmitigated coronaplagues are sharp and painful, however. Even with a “do almost nothing” approach like Sweden took, the total number of deaths is smaller than causes of death that don’t motivate us to change behavior or policy. But the deaths are concentrated over a two-month period rather than being spread out over a year or two. From IHME:
Readers: What do you think? Correct SAT answer? “Atomic bomb is to firebombs as coronaplague is to influenza”
Bonus, from my Japan photos, Kyoto (spared both firebombs and the atomic bomb):
Related:
- from the Texas Medical Association: “In Texas, more than 11,000 people died from flu and its complications during the 2017-18 flu season, including 16 children, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) said.” (Texas dashboard, showing 4,348 fatalities from Covid-19 so far in 2020)
- Press coverage: “Our hospitals look like war zones”: Texas battling influx of COVID-19 cases” (Houston Chronicle); “Coronavirus kills another 1,000 in Texas in just 10 days” (Texas Tribute); “Dallas County sets grim record of 30 deaths from COVID-19 as Texas posts its own one-day high of 197” (Dallas Morning News)
What are the other choices or are we expected to write an essay?/sarcasm
My answer yellow fever and the atomic bombing of Japan are the same, the similarity is they both have had great PR.
Roosevelt had a letter opener made from the arm bone of a Japanese soldier.
It was a different country then.
Roosevelt was a cannibal in suit. All progressives are closet cannibals, as their socialist creed is nothing more than regression to behavior of a troop of aps. Apes are the original socialists, complete with dear leaders and total disrespect to property rights.
I think the moral of the atomic bombing story is that in hindsight, Japan should’ve surrendered earlier, not that they should’ve continued to let Americans drop one atomic bomb after another until their nation had been entirely burnt to the ground.
Ryan: But there is only one “coronabomb” and we surrendered immediately (choosing to live on our knees rather than dying on our feet, as the Swedes chose, and now we’re forecast to die on our knees (https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america shows that the cumulative U.S. death rate while cowering will be higher than the Swedish-in–freedom death rate by mid-September))! Nature does have a warehouse of additional viruses, of course, but she is not releasing the deadly ones on a week-to-week basis.
A world expert in the field of pandemic control (i.e. a Chinese person) told me back in March that pandemics are in some sense worse than war, because unlike in war, you can’t just surrender to make the death and destruction stop. People will just keep dying.
Ryan: But we can and do surrender to pandemics! We surrendered to flu many decades ago and accept that it will kill many of our old people and some of our children. There is a worldwide pandemic of obesity, for example, and the heart disease, diabetes, etc. that goes with obesity. In response to this epidemic, what do we do? We say “Pass the ice cream”, order frozen drinks before dinner, etc. Go to a U.S. doctor with a BMI that is overweight and even borderline “obese”. The doctor will say “You’re fine,” not “You need an emergency diet.”
I think coronavirus might be with us for a long time, just like all the other stuff you mentioned (influenza, car accidents, obesity, heart disease, diabetes). I don’t think standing around with our dicks in our hands saying “well, that’s the way it’s always been, there’s nothing we can do” is the right approach to *any* of those things.
I like the analogy in one way: this more deadly kind of coronavirus is new to us, as the atomic bomb was to warfare. We live with the yearly flu, some years are much worse than others and hundreds of thousands die here, millions worldwide, but at least we have some psychological sense that we “understand” influenza and can “control” it, because we have vaccines for it.
It’s right there every year! Go to Walgreens, get a shot. You’re “protected.” That’s a big psychological buffer.
We’ve never developed a successful vaccine to a coronavirus, and in that sense we are facing an unknown enemy (“weapon”) that we’ve never seen before. We’re panicked. Medical and scientific impotence in the face of a deadly virus has upended our sense of technological supremacy (or if not supremacy, at least some efficacy) over nature, which we developed throughout the 20th century. We eradicated scores of infectious diseases. We have a vaccine for ebola. We’ve even managed to control AIDS and get the virus load down and prolong people’s lives. But we have nothing for this coronavirus except strategies more than a century old – quarantines, masks, social distancing, contact tracing, lockdowns, etc., etc. We’re back in 1918 and earlier.
I don’t want to overdraw the analogy but we are facing a new kind of “weapon” for the first time, and that has us freaked out pretty badly.
When I first read about the atomic bomb as a child, the first thing I wondered was: What would have happened if we had one extra bomb ready, and dropped it in some relatively unpopulated area of Japan – just to demonstrate the effects – and then said: “You have 48 hours. You must surrender. Your cities are next.” Well, that was considered and rejected:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Proposed_demonstration
To complete the analogy, assuming we ever have a COVID vaccine, it would be “Star Wars” or SDI. Will it work?
Well, Japan didn’t surrender until after a second city was nuked. Hard to imagine them surrendering after a technical demonstration when they didn’t even surrender after the first city was destroyed.
It isn’t more deadly and it isn’t new. It is the same old sniffles. What’s new is the media fear mongering and political power overreaches.
@GB: I’m using “more deadly” in an extremely general sense. It’s certainly more deadly to our nation as a whole, on many levels, than the sniffles.
Just for fun: I’m thinking of making this into a t-shirt. It combines coronavirus mask mandates, the rainbow flag, and Black Lives Matter through the clenched fist logo of the Roter Frontkämpferbund. Perfect for the times we live in.
https://imgbox.com/ZvFGPfCi
> Losing Americans to diabetes, heart disease, and other inevitable side effects of obesity doesn’t bother us enough to outlaw restaurants serving 2,000-calorie meals
I kind of chuckled at this. There is actually a professional society for people who compete in professional eating contests. At least six people have died since 2012.
Here’s the Major League Eating website:
https://majorleagueeating.com/
And YouTube channel, where you can watch Badlands Booker eat three live octopuses (3.7 million views!) and a whole lot more:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClP_eBypwxmT3_3Qc5lN6Kg
There’s also a nearly two hour long documentary on nuclear deterrence from Sandia National Labs. Only 73 thousand views in three and a half years. From this I conclude that Americans are much more interested in watching a very obese man stuff his face with live sea creatures than they are in learning about how we’ve “controlled” the atomic bomb:
So it goes
gwood: “It was a different country then.” Ok, how about this question: “net neutrality is to U.S. media quality as coronaplague is to” … U.S. public health?
Interesting:
The British royal family doesn’t seem to be very concerned about wearing masks in public. The article at the Daily Mail does something interesting: it weighs the pros and cons of mask wearing, instead of simply condemning their behavior as irresponsible, privileged, elitist, etc. I wonder if this is just to avoid directly criticizing the royals?
Will the royals start wearing masks? Cambridges and septuagenarians Prince Charles and Camilla avoid face coverings for public engagements despite the example set by their European counterparts and politicians
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8553351/Will-royals-start-wearing-masks-Cambridges-Prince-Charles-Camilla-avoided-face-coverings.html
Scroll down to: “Do face coverings help reduce coronavirus transmission?” DM attempts to balance the +/- of masking, and I think it’s because they don’t want to directly upbraid Prince Charles, et. al.