Nick Turse on U.S. terror bombing during World War II

Prior to World War II, the growing trend of “terror bombing” in conflicts across China, Ethiopia, and Spain outraged Americans.  In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt lamented that “without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air.” 

Soon after, however, the military embraced policies that put civilians at grave risk. During World War II, a British bombing raid on Dresden, Germany, created a firestorm that ripped through the city, suffocating and cooking people alive.  A second British wave was followed by hundreds of U.S. bombers.  All told, 25,000 to 35,000 people were incinerated.  Confronted with “terror bombing” allegations after the attack, the head of U.S. Army Air Forces protested that war “must be destructive and to a certain extent inhuman and ruthless.”  Roughly 600,000 German civilians were killed in air raids during the war. 

In Japan, the U.S. attacked 67 cities, burning 180 square miles, killing more than 600,000 civilians, and leaving 8.5 million homeless.  The massive death and destruction led Secretary of War Henry Stimson to worry that the United States would “get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities.”  Nonetheless, Stimson signed off on an atomic strike on the city of Hiroshima that killed 140,000 people, mostly civilians, and another on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 70,000.  The United States has never compensated those victims’ families or survivors of the attacks.

~ Nick Turse, "FOR A CENTURY, THE AMERICAN WAY OF WAR HAS MEANT KILLING CIVILIANS: Indiscriminate airstrikes have been a U.S. hallmark from the “banana wars” to the forever wars.," The Intercept, November 12, 2023

Pablo Picasso's Guernica, 1937