The Bombing of Japan and the End of the War with Japan

Richard Overy, a British historian of World War II who teaches at the University of Exeter, wrote The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe, 1940–1945, the definitive history of the Allied bombing of Europe, in 2013. Now he turns his critical eye on the American bombing of Japan. In this short, elegantly written book, he lays out how the American bombing campaign was planned and then carried out, and assesses how it affected the end of the war. In Chapter 1, “The Defeat of Japan,” he shows how strategic bombing of Japan was part of War Plan Orange, the American plan for fighting Japan, even in the 1920s and 30s, long before the US Army Air Force had long range bombers. This changed with the advent of the B-17, but even the B-17 and B-24 could not threaten the Japanese homeland. That would require the B-29, whose development was the single most expensive American program of World War II. Chapter 2, “American Area Bombing, “reveals that the famous change-over from “precision” bombing of factories and other military targets to incendiary bombing of cities was anticipated by similar changes in the European theater. There is also a detailed look at Operation Meetinghouse, the notorious March 9/10 firebomb attack on Tokyo that killed over 100,000 civilians. The chapter dealing with the most controversial aspect of bombing Japan is 3, “Why the Atomic Bombs.” Here Overy provides a careful, step-by-step chronicle of the making, testing, and deployment of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He shows that, in reality, there was never a “decision to drop the bombs,” that instead everyone involved, from presidents to scientists to generals, had always assumed that the bombs would be used if they proved to work. The initial target would have been Berlin, had there been time. As soon as that became impossible, a list of Japanese cities was created. Chapter 4, “Surrender: the ‘Sacred Decision,’” is the most interesting part of the book, as Overy lays out the complex situation—most Japanese cities partially destroyed, the looming American invasion of Kyushu, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, the military leaders fearful of a communist uprising—that confronted the emperor and the military leaders of Japan in August, 1945. His take is that the atomic bombs were only one factor in the resolution of this problem, and perhaps not the crucial factor. He also explains how neither Hirohito nor the generals (the naval leadership was not as uniformly obdurate) were willing to utter the word “surrender.” In the end, Hirohito took the decision to “end the war.”

So how does Rain of Ruin stack up against the standard set by Overy in The Bombers and the Bombed? The answer comes in two parts: what he covered in his portrait of Europe under bombardment, and not here, and, second, what sources he used. In The Bombers, he was covering a much longer period, and many more players. The sections on the bombing of Germany by the RAF and the USAAF included a great deal about German defenses, from radar and night fighters to the flak tower shelters that still dot Vienna. Rain of Ruin has very little on Japanese defenses, which are only mentioned twice. The coverage of Japanese civil defense and civilian response to bombing is also scant: there are descriptions of the terrible consequences from both the firebomb attack on Tokyo, and the atomic bombings, but that is all. Similarly, the evacuation—both spontaneous and government-organized—of German cities is described at some length in The Bombers, but the massive exodus from Japanese cities is merely mentioned. This is presumably a reflection of the vast difference in the sources that Overy used to write The Bombers, and now Rain of Ruin. For Europe, the breadth of the materials he cited was superb—it included, for example, records from the 1940s and current material on civilian victims in Italy and the Netherlands, in Italian and Dutch. He was also familiar with the literature in German and French. But he does not read Japanese. He did make good use of the handful of books written in English by Japanese historians, as well as the much larger number of books by Western scholars. His citations of the journal literature are especially impressive, and very much up-to-date. All in all, Rain of Ruin is an excellent account of how, and why, which Americans decided to bomb Japan as they did, and how the Japanese government responded to the attacks. An even better book will have to come from an historian who can read the literature in Japanese.

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Our Reviewer: Jonathan Beard is a retired freelance journalist who has devoted most of his life to reading military history. When he worked, he wrote and did research for British, American and Danish science magazines, and translated for an American news magazine. The first book he owned was Fletcher Pratt’s The Monitor and the Merrimac. Jonathan reviews regularly for the Michigan War Studies Review. His previous reviews include Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution, The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944, Prevail Until the Bitter End: Germans in the Waning Days of World War II, Enemies Among Us, Battle of the Bulge, Then and Now, Mussolini’s War: Fascist Italy From Triumph to Collapse, Engineering in the Confederate Heartland, The Bletchley Park Codebreakers, Armada, Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, The Collaborators, The Enigma Traitors, When Men Fell from the Sky, Midway: The Pacific War’s Most Famous Battle, When Men Fell from The Sky, The Lost Scientists of World War II, U.S. Battleships 1939–45, and The Last Emperor of Mexico.

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Note: Rain of Ruin is also available in audio & e-editions.

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