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ON the night of 9-10 March 1945, the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) conducted the most destructive air raid in history. The target was Tokyo and, by the time the fires died out the next morning, nearly sixteen square miles of the city were destroyed, leaving at least 83,793 Japanese civilians dead, more than 40,918 injured, and over one million homeless.2 The raid was a turning point in the bombing of Japan. Before 9 March, most raids were "precision raids" that used high-explosive bombs against Japanese factories, killing few Japanese civilians. After 9 March, the USAAF devoted the bulk of its effort to "area raids" that used incendiary bombs to burn down Japanese cities and to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.
Historians have not devoted as much attention to the incendiary bombing of Japan as they have to either the World War II bombing campaign in Europe or the atomic bombing of Japan, but it has hardly been ignored.3 The literature has focused, however, on the sequence of operations rather than on long-classified planning documents, and this bias has led historians to misunderstand several aspects of the campaign. Historians also misunderstand the relationship between bombing tactics used against Germany and those used against Japan.
This essay will offer a new interpretation of the U.S. strategic bombing campaign against Japan. I shall argue first that the incendiary bombing of Japanese cities was not a radical departure from the way the USAAF attacked Germany in World War II; second, that the shift to area bombing was a continuation of the attack on Japanese industry and not an abandonment of attacks on industry in favor of attacking Japanese morale; and third, that the shift from precision attacks on factories to area attacks on major Japanese cities had been part of U.S. plans for years and was encouraged by some of the same factors that led the USAAF to conduct area incendiary bombing of German cities. I shall also show that the shift did not result from changes of command (Major General Curtis E. LeMay's replacing Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell). Finally, I shall demonstrate that Japanese civilian casualties were not accidental or incidental, but an explicit goal of the incendiary raids on Japanese cities. Since...
