Richard Overy’s Rain of Ruin is an epilogue of sorts to his epic global history of the Second World War from 2021, Blood And Ruins. This new work focuses on the final months of the war in Asia, something that has been a topic of other recent books, such as Mark Gallichio’s Unconditional (2020) and the early parts of Judgment at Tokyo by Gary Bass. Overy’s approach is to consider the air war, starting with the conventional bombing campaign against Japan’s cities, then moving on the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and finally looking at how this history contributed to Japan’s surrender.
Aerial bombing has been a contentious subject ever since it was conceived of. The development of air power, particularly after the First World War, gave nations the ability to project their military might far beyond the conventional battlefield, but in doing so it came into conflict with pre-existing conventions outlawing attacks on undefended civilian populations. The famous attack at Guernica in the Spanish Civil War showed that these lines were likely to be severely tested in any major conflict.
Indeed, the existential nature of the Second World War for many of its participant nations meant that the temptation was to find victory by any means necessary; this was compounded by ambiguity in what exactly constituted a legitimate target and the inherent inaccuracy of the technology of the time. Troops, fortifications and military equipment, of course, were directly military targets, but an enemy’s capacity to fight was directly tied to its economic output, so destroying factories and industrial assets might hamper military production and supply. And factories need workers, so by extension the labour force might be considered a legitimate military target. Finally, urban destruction might help reduce morale and the willingness of a nation to continue to fight.
In the European theatre, the British had embraced the concept of area bombing of German cities but the Americans had been more reluctant. When it came to Asia and the Japanese, however, many American strategists were more willing to consider targeting urban sites. Overy demonstrates that this was the product of several different causes: the desire to avenge the attack on Pearl Harbor, intra-service rivalries and the sense that the newly formed air force had to justify its creation, and perhaps also the belief that urban bombing represented an effective way of bringing about Japan’s surrender.
Once the US was able to establish airfields within range of the Japanese mainland, the strategy of urban bombing was put into effect, with special incendiary bombs designed to maximise the likelihood of fires that would spread and overwhelm the capacity of the local government to control them. Over the course of the first half of 1945, many of the major cities of Japan were subjected to withering assault.
Japan’s capacity to defend itself was failing, so the American bombers dropped increasing quantities of bombs during low-level raids. (It is worth noting, in passing, however, that the rates of loss of bombers was still high and being a member of a bomber crew was a very risky proposition.) The scale of the fires was such that the B-29 pilots felt their planes tossed about by the updrafts from the flames, while down below vast numbers of civilians died in fires so strong that there was often no trace of them left behind. An estimated 87,000 people died in the largest single raid, over Tokyo on 9 March 1945, but in truth there is no way of knowing how many died then, or in the full range of raids that were launched over a total of 66 different cities.
Given that many (air crews among them) remained opposed to the idea of indiscriminate bombing of Japanese cities, the strategy was discussed in euphemism and indirect language. The raids were designed to strike at intangible targets such as economic production and industrial capacity, they talked of the labour force rather than civilians, and Overy stresses that the success of the raids was articulated in geographic rather than human terms—proportion of urban area destroyed, rather than numbers of people killed—all subsumed within the oxymoronic concept of precision bombing of urban areas.
This campaign culminated, of course, and has been largely overshadowed by, the use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. One of the central debates to result from this period is whether the bombs were necessary to bring Japan to surrender. Overy argues that a more historical question is why they were seen to be necessary given what the American command knew of the situation and their alternative options. Postwar assessments concluded that the targeting of urban areas and labourers in Europe were relatively ineffective in reducing the capacity of the Germans to wage war, whereas targeting transportation networks and fuel supplies had a much greater impact. The naval blockade of Japan, similarly played a significant role in debilitating Japan’s military capacity. Still, prompting surrender was a distinct goal from reducing Japan’s ability to fight, so it is plausible that incremental strategies that gradually strangled the Japanese war effort (and social cohesion) lacked the single moment that could act to prompt Japan’s surrender.
Overy is authoritative discussing the Allied military chains of command but evaluating the Japanese government’s approach proves more tricky. The dual role of the Emperor as political actor and mystical symbol of Japanese history and culture certainly makes for complex interpretation. Likewise, allied soldiers in the Asian theatre found their enemies’ attitudes to risk and death alien and unfamiliar. Nevertheless, as Overy demonstrates, there were pragmatists within the Japanese government who recognised a lost cause and sought to bring the war to a conclusion, ultimately managing to prevent a land invasion on the main Japanese islands (beyond Okinawa).
For all the complex honorific structure of the language surrounding the emperor and discussions of Japan’s destiny, the central stumbling block preventing Japanese surrender was the question of the continuity of the emperor (as individual and as institution). In explaining how this was overcome, it is hard to unpick the contribution of several factors: the atom bombs, as well as the longer blockade and urban bombing campaign, the Soviet declaration of war, and the looming possibility of a full scale invasion of Kyushu and Honshu. Overy convincingly concludes that the equation “bombing equals surrender” is too simplistic.
Much of the material in this book will be fairly familiar to experts on modern Asian history, but it is certainly welcome to give a greater profile to the firebombing campaign, placing it alongside the atom bombs, as well as presenting the layered problem facing the Americans in their desire to bring a final end to the war. This is an important story, not least because it had consequences that went beyond 1945—the chief architect of the campaign, Curtis LeMay, went on to play a crucial role in America’s cold war nuclear weapons strategy and bombardment of Vietnam, while questions of precision bombing and legitimacy of targets are still with us today.
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