Among images of the horrors of war the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima are gold standard. Each of these bombs caused many tens of thousands of casualties. Beside their destructive power the horror of other weapons seems to fall into insignificance.
In March, however, we commemorate the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Tokyo in which over 300 planes stacked with incendiary weapons followed each other at regular intervals for three hours and killed an estimated 100,000 people — as many as those killed by either of the nuclear weapons in Japan.
Crew members on the later bombers wore facemasks to deal with the smoke from burning flesh. So large a number of people died because the bombing targeted a very highly populated mainly residential section of Tokyo in which low income workers and their families lived in flimsy and flammable houses highly vulnerable to firestorms. It was technically a very successful operation, causing many deaths, many casualities and massive homelessness, with the loss of only a few planes.
As we reflect on the bombing today it is hard not to be overwhelmed by sadness at the wound to our common humanity laid bare by the bombing. That so much human planning, such ingeniousness in the making and deploying of weapons, such careful calculation of the effect of napalm and phosphorous on wood, paper and human flesh, and such relentlessness in the starting, feeding and renewing of fires, should be expended in the destruction of people as a demonstration of the power to kill, and so to inspire the enemy to surrender, might make us ask what kind of human beings could devise such things.
In contrast to the muted criticism later of the use of the nuclear bombs, there was little critical response at the time of the Tokyo bombing. That silence invites reflection because those who justified the bombing appealed in such crude terms to the end that justifies the means. The claim could not have survived any full description of the means used in the bombing. The real principle at work was that in war anything is justifiable, or perhaps more precisely that anything done by our side is morally acceptable.
So many of the population and of those responsible for prosecuting the war implicitly accepted this principle that potential critics either questioned their own misgivings or thought it more prudent not to voice them. Public acceptance made it more difficult to contemplate the horror of war embodied in the death of so many people in fire, and the pain and grief of those who survived. Moral questioning soon withdrew into more comfortable abstraction and into forgetfulness.
'But the human challenge is never simply to win the war. It is to build a better and more peaceful society.'
Forgetting, however, has its costs. To accept that the bombing of Tokyo was morally legitimate endorsed the belief that all human challenges can be resolved by overwhelming power supported by high technology. That may be true of war in the limited sense that stronger forces armed with more powerful weapons can destroy opposing armies. But the human challenge is never simply to win the war. It is to build a better and more peaceful society.
Good societies are built on a respect for each human being that forbids reducing their life and death to means to an end outside them. To forget the horror of the bombing of Tokyo risks undermining respect and enshrining the principle that the solution to all human problems lies in power and technology. Certainly the conviction that airpower and bombs would make a better world persisted in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, surviving each new proof of its folly.
In Australia ideas that have rusted with use elsewhere often seem bright and shiny. The appeal to power supported by the latest technology is evident in Australian immigration and penal policy. The costs to society of the disrespect for persons built into these policies is also evident.
Even more striking, however, has been the response to the bushfires and to the effects of climate change. The growing evidence gathered by scientists shows that this threat to our future has arisen out of human disrespect for the complex relationships that compose the natural and human world, and the consequent employment of new and more powerful technologies to exploit natural resources.
The dominant response, however, is to strengthen the powers of government and its agencies and to rely on more advanced technologies to deal with fires. The disrespect for the world and for human beings on which this response rests will certainly undermine its effectiveness. The unrelenting flight of bombers bringing death and devastation to Tokyo remind us of the destructive force of a marriage between power and technology that is not blessed by wisdom.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.
Main image: Photo taken by Ishikawa Koyo March, 1945 (Wikimedia Commons)