"Rain of Ruin
By Richard Overy
Norton, 224 pages, $29.99
Of the lingering controversies of World War II, perhaps the most intensely debated is America's bombing of Japan's cities. The two most dramatic forms -- the firebombing raids in the spring of 1945, which killed more than a quarter-million civilians, and the better-known atomic bombings that summer -- pitted morality against necessity as both sides groped for a way to end the war on acceptable terms.
The air campaigns have been covered from many angles in recent books. Malcolm Gladwell's "The Bomber Mafia" (2021) focuses on the apostles of strategic bombing, notably Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, the chief architect of the firebombings. James M. Scott's brilliant "Black Snow" (2022) balances America's drive to end the war against heartrending stories of ordinary Japanese citizens caught in the bombsights. Max Hastings's "Retribution" (2007) frames the bombings in the context of the wider war for Asia.
In "Rain of Ruin" Richard Overy, a British historian whose books include "The Dictators" (2004), distills the atomic bombing campaign -- and its precursor, the incendiary strikes -- into a single moral issue. As he writes, "The question asked is usually 'was it necessary?'; the question, however, should really be 'why was it thought to be necessary at the time?'"
The strategy of scorching densely populated cities wasn't the initiative of a single, bloody-minded general of the Strangelove stripe. "Area bombing" of urban centers -- a shift from pinpoint bombing of factories and military targets -- had been studied by the U.S. Army Air Forces since 1943. The Office of Strategic Services analyzed Japan's urban demographics to find areas most vulnerable to fire. Air Forces analysts dissected the results of Britain's carpet bombing of German cities, and a replica village of typical Japanese homes was erected in a Utah desert to test the effects of napalm attacks.
This analysis produced ghoulish metrics: Seventy-five tons of incendiaries on an aiming point would create a fire that would burn out of control. Firebombing Japan's six largest cities was predicted to destroy 70% of its urban areas, disrupting its war industries, leaving workers homeless and killing around 560,000 people through "suffocation, incineration and heat."
Theory became grim reality in the spring of 1945. Operation Meetinghouse, LeMay's raid over Tokyo the night of March 9-10, 1945, sent B-29 Superfortress bombers over the city's most crowded areas. Aided by the bane of firefighters -- fast, dry winds -- 279 Superfortresses unloaded a half-million 6-pound firebombs. Small fires merged to form a massive conflagration that destroyed nearly everything in its path. Homes, shops, buildings and cars went up in flames. The death toll reached 100,000 -- the largest number of civilians killed in a single day of any 20th-century war.
Mr. Overy doesn't gloss over the human cost. "Sparks filled the air, setting fire to people's clothing and hair until they became another combustible object," he writes. "Women in flight with their babies strapped to their backs failed in time to see that the infants were burning to death." Elsewhere, he recounts, civilians who packed a Tokyo theater "were steamed, braised, asphyxiated and finally reduced to a thick layer of ash, the buckles, helmets and odd fragments of bone the only evidence that the ashes had been human beings."
The campaign continued for nearly five months, killing more than 269,000 people in 66 urban areas. "Enemy cities were pulverized and fried to a crisp," Gen. LeMay said later.
"It was something they asked for and something they got." In his memoirs, he evinced no sympathy for the people "we scorched, and boiled and baked to death."
Mr. Overy places LeMay's ruthlessness in the context of a barbarous war. Japanese soldiers had earned their reputation as butchers. Memories of mass-murders, from Nanjing in 1937 to the slaughterhouse that was Manila in February 1945, the author writes, "helped to sustain the sense of revenge against an atrocious enemy."
Americans also argued that the bombings were justified by military necessity. Mr. Overy parses through the conventional refrain of the time: Japan's war production, unlike Germany's, "was distributed throughout an urban network of small craft shops, often in private homes." With microfactories and parts shops woven into residential areas, the experts reasoned, the only way to destroy the war-production machine was to burn it out of neighborhoods.
The reality, the author says, was less clear-cut. Japan's war industries were devastated by August 1945, but separating the effects of area bombing from the simultaneous U.S. naval blockade, which cut off raw materials needed for production, requires heavy speculation. American reasoning, while imperfect, was plausible enough to blunt worries that its tactics had shifted to the kind of terror bombing Hitler had used against Britain during the Blitz.
Historians have long debated American motives for using the atomic bomb against Japan. Searching through Army and White House records, Mr. Overy finds a sincere desire to use the bomb to end the war as soon as possible. "In all the discussions about the use of the bomb in the months leading up to the test, military priorities prevailed," he concludes. "Defeat of Japan was what the American public and the armed forces in the Pacific wanted." For President Harry Truman and Gen. George C. Marshall, "the bomb was a possible though not a certain way of achieving that goal." U.S. casualty estimates from an invasion of Japan's two main islands ranged from 100,000 Americans dead to the fantastic number of one million. These numbers do not include Japanese defenders, uniformed and civilian, who would die in far greater numbers as the invasion drove inland.
Mr. Overy devotes much of his analysis to Japan's decision to surrender. A peace movement, backed by admirals and a political faction of Japan's cabinet, had been stirring since 1944. But army generals, commanding some 900,000 troops in Manchuria and hundreds of thousands on the home islands, insisted on a glorious, suicidal fight to the end. With the imperial cabinet deadlocked, it was left to the emperor to issue a seidan, or "sacred decision."
The atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki late in the imperial debate (Aug. 6 and 9). But even as the emperor was accepting defeat (Aug. 10), his ministers were still uncertain that the bombs were true atomic weapons.
LeMay's incendiary campaign had been longer, resulted in more deaths and laid waste to a far greater urban area. "The evidence from postwar interviews by the Morale Division," Mr. Overy notes, "found that the firebombing campaign was three times as significant as atomic bombs 'in inducing certainty of defeat.'"
Mr. Overy avoids postmortem moralizing and keeps his narrative tight and balanced. His prose is efficient, and he resists the temptation to pile on too many stories of human suffering or indulge in literary flourishes. He teases out nuance and lets the reader draw conclusions. Dedicated to two bombing campaigns with enduring ethical implications, "Rain of Ruin" is a compact, first-rate history of one of World War II's great tragedies.
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Mr. Jordan is the author of "Brothers, Rivals, Victors." His next book, "Ike and Winston," will be out in 2026.” [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: Fire From the Skies --- The U.S. bombing campaign that targeted Japan's cities in 1945 produced staggering civilian casualties. Military planners concluded that such destruction was necessary to end the war.Jordan, Jonathan W. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 15 Mar 2025: C7.
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