In 1943, with the war against Japan intensifying in the Pacific, Dr. L.F. Fisser of the National Defense Research Committee designed a tiny incendiary bomb for the use of the U.S. Army Air Force. The two-ounce bomb was to be dropped on Japan affixed to free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis), of which there happened to be an ample supply in Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico. The bat bombs were to be chilled to hibernating temperature in ice-cube trays, packed 180 to a box and sprung free at a thousand feet above the ground, where they would thaw, and, in great hunger, swoop down on the wood and paper homes of Tokyo.
Something may be insane, but it is only crackpot when it doesn’t work. Another plan to bring the total warfare concept to the Japanese capital was conceived by Gen. Curtis LeMay. Using B-29 bombers as they had not been used before, he sent waves of them in low over Tokyo at night armed with 100-pound oil-gel bombs and six-pound gelled-gasoline bombs. What came to be known as “the Great Tokyo Air Raid” burned out sixteen square miles of the city, leaving 100,000 people dead, a million wounded and a million homeless. Only the powers of the mobilized human imagination–powers that verge on magic–could transform a blind shrieking bat with a little bomb clipped to its skin into a B-29.
The Japanese government, at the time xenophobic and racist, its people self-persuaded of their subjection to a living God, had its own considerable powers of military imagination. The military thought not of bats to fight their war, but they did have an ample supply of young men who could be turned into bombs–human bombs, human torpedoes, human mines–to fly, to dive, to swim, perchance to explode, against enemy armament. This was glory. This was a culture of contempt for individual life. In battle, troops were ordered to commit suicide rather than surrender. It is no wonder, with such twisted regard for their own, that Japanese commanders were uninhibitedly brutal to their prisoners of war and to their subject peoples in China, Korea, Burma. They worked over 100,000 of them to death building their Thailand-Burma railway.
But the ways of death in war are innumerable. The ethics of warfare are reconfigured to its changing technology. By 1945 there was no longer a viable distinction between combatants and noncombatants. Perhaps 51 million human beings were killed in the worldwide war that raged from 1939 to 1945. Bombed, fire-bombed, strafed, mined, suffocated, gassed, incinerated, frozen, mutilated, starved, beheaded, hanged, buried alive and dissolved in a luminous flash. Certainly more than half of them died as civilians.
Twenty years before, another great war in Europe had killed its generation of young men, the fieldpieces drawn by horses, the ordinance in dinky trucks, though all of it sufficient unto the day, with Sten guns halving men on the dotted line, and mustard gas cauterizing their lungs, and some of those Big Berthas heaving 300-pound shells in seventy-five-mile trajectories. But the technology was not yet developed for carpet-bombing cities behind the lines. There were still lines. Civilians could still be refugees clogging the roads with their carts of bedding, their hope chests, their children, while the troops pushed through them toward the front.