William S. Lear wrote:
>I've always liked Leahy's view:
>
> ...[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
> was of no material assistance in our war against Japan ... [I]n
> being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard
> common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to
> make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying
> women and children.
>
> ---William D. Leahy, Fleet Admiral, U.S. Navy, Chief of Staff to
> the President
>
>Whether or not it was hypocritical of him to voice this opinion, I
>don't know ...
In 1991, Workers Vanguard did an excellent article on the history of
U.S. terror bombing. An excerpt:
[...]
>Colonel Harry Summers Jr., the Vietnam War historian and former professor
>of strategy at the Army War College, was blunter. In a column titled
>"'Collateral Damage' a Familiar, Often Intended, Part of War" (Los Angeles
>Times, 8 February), Summers noted that the deliberate targeting of the
>civilian population in order to break the will to resist "didn't start with
>'We had to destroy the town in order to save it,' the unfortunate remark of
>the young Army officer in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam war...." The
>carpetbombing of Vietnam only continued the U.S. forces' "scorched earth"
>policy in Korea, the firebombing campaign in Germany and Japan and-the
>A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
>
>In our last issue ("Terror Bombing Has Not Broken Iraq," WV No. 520, 15
>February) we noted that "in World War II Hitler adopted a policy of
>Schrecklichkeit, deliberate terrorizing of the 'enemy' population," but
>"the Allies outdid the Nazis in this department." The "democratic"
>imperialists in fact had a preference for mass slaughter through air power,
>which kept the horrendous casualties at a distance.
[...]
The rest is in the lbo-talk archive, at
<http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9905/0852.html>.
Doug
