Japanese civil defense did perform very well after incendiary attacks on 93 cities reported in the unclassified 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey: an average of 1,129 tons of incendiaries and TNT on each of those 93 cities failed to cause firestorms and only killed an average of 1,850 people in each raid.

Why is this ‘only’? It’s 172050 dead (plus, I guess, about twice that wounded) who wouldn’t otherwise have been. It’s much more ’successful’ than the Blitz against Britain, perhaps even than Bomber Command’s raids on Germany, on a average deaths-per-raid basis. It does not suggest a particularly efficient civil defence organisation.

At least 40 million people were killed in WWII and the 420 overhyped nuclear attack radiation cancer casualties are 0.001% of that that.

Who overhypes this? I’ve never seen much attention paid to the cancer casualties at all. It’s the couple of hundred thousand deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that grab attention.

What you have to say about incorrect extrapolation from nuclear weapons tests is interesting. But you ought to lay it all out in an article or a book rather than on a blog.

All the controversy I’ve seen has focussed on why nuclear weapons were used at all (thus taking it for granted falsely that they produced more severe effects than non-nuclear raids), not on the mechanism by which their use ended the war.

I’m not referring to the long-standing debate about whether the atomic bombs should have been used or not but the more recent discussion about whether the Soviet invasion of Manchuria was more important to the Japanese decision to surrender than the use of the atomic bombs. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (2005) is key here.

‘Aerial bombardment was devastating; at least half a million civilians died from it in WWII, perhaps more than a million. It just wasn’t devastating enough, consistently enough to cause a knock-out blow, as predicted by many before the war; and people didn’t react to being bombed the way they were ’supposed’ to. … both sides were deterred from using chemical weapons in WWII, but I’m not sure what your point is. You can’t drop a gas chamber on an enemy city …’

Thanks, my point about chemical warfare is simply that restraint was shown for weapons of mass destruction in WWII, to an even greater degree than it was for high explosive and chemical bombardment. This has implications for other weapons of mass destruction in wars today. Assuming 1 million deaths from aerial bombardment and at least 40 million killed during during WWII, then aerial bombardment accounts for 2.5% of those killed. I agree that people didn’t panic and lose all morale the way they were predicted to.

This history is applicable today. In order to produce the kind of overhyped nuclear bombing effects people expect, you’d have to find a city made out of wooden medieval houses like the square mile of Hamburg or 1945 Hiroshima, and drop the bomb when most people are outdoors or preparing breakfast on charcoal braziers that can easily be overturned by the blast and set the houses on fire.

The idea of bigger bombs are significantly more effective was debunked by Lord Penney, who pointed out that a blast wave over an unobstructed desert doesn’t behave as in a built up city: each house destroyed depletes at least 1% of the blast energy and after a few hundred houses in a line from ground zero are totalled, the effects don’t scale up by the cube-root law any more: there is also an exponential attenuation factor that limits scaling. The actual blast effects in built up areas are less severe in brick and concrete cities than in Hiroshima where fire burned down wooden buildings, and those effects vary only very slowly with yield.

The basis of mass destruction collapses when energy is conserved, which it isn’t in the popular source books on predicting the effects of nuclear weapons. Even the apparently solid crater predictions in Glasstone and Dolan are completely false for large weapons because they neglect the energy used to dump material out of large craters against gravity. For example, in the case of a 10 Mt surface burst on dry soil, the 1957, 1962, and 1964 editions of Glasstone’s ‘Effects of Nuclear Weapons’ predicted a crater radius of 414 metres. After 1987, the introduction of physically real gravity effects reduced the crater radius for a 10 Mt surface burst on dry soil to just 92 metres, only 22% of the figure believed up to 1964.

‘I’d be interested to know where you get your information about Japanese civil defence capabilities against atomic attack, as they didn’t do too well against incendiaries.’

Japanese civil defense did perform very well after incendiary attacks on 93 cities reported in the unclassified 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey: an average of 1,129 tons of incendiaries and TNT on each of those 93 cities failed to cause firestorms and only killed an average of 1,850 people in each raid. The three cases where there was failure were Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tokyo was a civil defense failure because the conventional high explosive included in the incendiary bombing loads over a long period of bombing prevented fire-fighting being efficient.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civil defense failures due to surprise as documented in 509th commander Tibbet’s autobiography: in Hiroshima the air-raid warning sounded at 7 am, and the all-clear at 7:30 am, but the bomb was dropped at 8:09 am. People cooked breakfasts with charcoal braziers in inflammable wood homes, with paper screens and bamboo furniture. Blasted red-hot charcoal and screens in the wooden houses started fires. In Nagasaki, the air-raid siren sounded at 7:50 am but was cleared before the bomb fell. Tibbets writes that for a month before the attacks weather aircraft were sent over the cities daily to ‘accustom the Japanese to seeing daytime flights of two or three bombers’.

This caused civil defense warning and response to get lax to small numbers of B-29s, maximising the effects the the explosions. E.g., many people watched the bomb fall behind windows without taking cover, and received both flash burns burns and then flying glass in their faces when the blast wave arrived. Civil defensein Hiroshima was documented by the secret reports of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.

For example, the Bank of Japan, Hiroshima branch, was a 3-story reinforced concrete frame building at just 400 m from ground zero. There were no initial ignitions at all by either blast or thermal radiation. However, 1.5 hours afterwards a a firebrand started a fire in a room on the second floor. The survivors in the building simply extinguished the fire with buckets of water! Later another firebrand ignited the third floor, and the survivors this time ran out of water and just shut the doors and allowed it to burn out. The fire did not spread to the lower floors.

This incident is explained in panel 26 of the U.S. Dept. Defense, ‘DCPA Attack Environment Manual: Chapter 3, What the Planner Needs to Know about Fire Ignition and Spread’, report CPG 2-1A3, June 1973. This report adds that the Geibi Bank Company in the firestorm area of Hiroshima also survived the bomb with no thermal or blast ignitions:

‘However, at about 10:30 A.M., over 2 hours after the detonation, firebrands from the south exposure ignited a few pieces of furniture and curtains on the first and third stories. The fires were extinguished with water buckets by the building occupants. Negligible fire damage resulted.’

The civil defense advice Japan issued immediately after Nagasaki, basically advice to duck and cover when seeing lone B-29s dropping single bombs, is well documented (albeit in a politically prejudiced way) in most of the books on the effects on survivors who dismissed it (wrongly) as hard-line propaganda, just as ‘duck and cover’ advice is generally dismissed after 1977 (when it was dropped from the final chapter of ‘The Effects of Nuclear Weapons’, which in every previous edition from 1950 on had been a civil defence justification but in 1977 politically was restricted to only effects).

‘Why Japan surrendered is still a contentious question. Recently the Soviet invasion of Manchuria has assumed greater importance in the historiography than previously, but the atomic bombs were still crucial. (In the words of one member of the peace faction in the Japanese war cabinet, Hiroshima was a ‘gift from heaven’.) Yes, another atom bomb wouldn’t have been ready for some time, but the Japanese decision-makers didn’t know that.’

It’s well documented that the Emperor was holding out in the hope that Stalin would help it negotiate a surrender. That hope was lost when Stalin declared war on Japan, which Stalin did because after Nagasaki because he thought the way was soon going to end, thus Russia had everything to gain and nothing to lose by declaring war at the last possible minute.

This is not a rejection of the effect of nuclear weapons in ending the war: they did that. They pushed Stalin into declaring war on Japan, and in turn that pushed the Emperor into seeking a conditional surrender. Doubtless, the effects of nuclear weapons also had some direct influence on the Emperor and the military leadership, but if you read the published accounts of their discussions (even those in Rhodes, ‘Making of the Atomic Bomb’, 1986), they aren’t convinced that the nuclear attacks are far worse than the Tokyo incendiary raid. All the controversy I’ve seen has focussed on why nuclear weapons were used at all (thus taking it for granted falsely that they produced more severe effects than non-nuclear raids), not on the mechanism by which their use ended the war. E.g. the BBC history group has been accused of bias in portraying Truman’s decision to bomb Japan as a warning to deter Stalin from world domination: http://www.julianlewis.net/local_news_detail.php?id=16

I’ve been into the firebombing of Japan in detail from a number of sources. Colonel Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, goes into this in his autobiography The Tibbets Story. Before being put in charge of the 509th at Tinian Island for nuclear attacks on Japan, Tibbets was bombing European cities and saw the immense problems. Tibbets actually advised General LeMay on how to do incendiary raids effectively on Japan. This resulted in the success at Tokyo after a lot of failures. It’s incredibly important because Tibbets planned the nuclear attacks with this experience in mind, to maximize the impact.

Oppenheimer predicted 20,000 deaths from nuclear attacks for nighttime raids (nuclear radiation and blast casualties, no direct exposure to thermal radiation), but Tibbets exploited the thermal radiation and also a blast incendiary mechanism by attacking in the morning while people were either outdoors (exposed to the thermal flash) commuting or else cooking breakfasts on charcoal braziers in wooden houses full of bamboo furnishings and paper screens, with obvious results (the plan was fairly similar at Nagasaki, attacked at lunch time):

‘Six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet [975 m] of air zero stated that black cotton black-out curtains were ignited by flash heat… A large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was, however, in agreement that a great majority of the original fires were started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires… There had been practically no rain in the city for about 3 weeks.’

- Secret May 1947 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report on Hiroshima, pp. 4-6, U.K. National Archives document: AIR 48/160.

Tibbets found that for incendiary success you need wooden cities because brick houses are 80% incombustible and don’t have enough fuel per unit area for firestorms. Second, you can’t burn even wooden houses with incendiaries alone. You need to drop a mixture of high explosive (to make holes in tiled roofs, allowing incendiaries to enter the loft spaces) plus incendiaries, or you get nothing. Even when an incendiary did enter a small room, the British Home Office found that only 20% of them actually caused a continuing fire. Out of hundreds of incendiary raids in Europe, only five definite firestorms were produced: Hamburg, Darmstadt, Kassel, Wuppertal and Dresden. Stanbury gives the following data for Hamburg (‘The Fire Hazard from Nuclear Weapons’, Fission Fragments, Scientific Civil Defence Magazine, Home Office, London, No. 3, August 1962, pp. 22-6, British Home Office, Scientific Adviser’s Branch, originally classified Restricted, in the British National Archives: document HO 229/3):

‘On the night of 27/28th July 1943, by some extraordinary chance, 190 tons of bombs were dropped into one square mile of Hamburg. This square mile contained 6,000 buildings, many of which were [multistorey wooden] medieval.

‘A density of greater than 70 tons/sq. mile had not been achieved before even in some of the major fire raids, and was only exceeded on a few occasions subsequently. The effect of these bombs is best shown in the following diagram, each step of which is based on sound trials and operational experience of the weapons concerned.

‘102 tons of high explosive bombs dropped -> 100 fires
‘88 tons of incendiary bombs dropped, of which:
‘48 tons of 4 pound magnesium bombs = 27,000 bombs -> 8,000 hit buildings -> 1,600 fires
‘40 tons of 30 pound gel bombs = 3,000 bombs -> 900 hit buildings -> 800 fires
‘Total = 2,500 fires’

Hence, 2,500 house fires occurred in a square mile with 6,000 wooden buildings, and caused a firestorm.

If you look at the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report ‘The Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki’ it compares the effects of nuclear bombs with all the incendiary raids on Japan. It shows that 93 raids with an average of 1,129 tons of incendiaries and TNT each failed to cause firestorms and only killed an average of 1,850 people each. Tokyo on 9/10 March 1945 was exceptional, in killing 83,000 people in a firestorm due to 1,667 tons of incendiaries and TNT. The absolute number of nuclear casualties depend on controversial factors like whether you include the 40,000 Korean slave labourers present in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or not. (See ‘Hiroshima’s forgotten victims’ in the Manchester Guardian Weekly, vol. 131, 1984, No. 8. p. 18.) But the radiation statistics are well studied with a control group. In 1996, half a century after the nuclear detonations, data on cancers from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors was published by D. A. Pierce et al. of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, RERF (Radiation Research vol. 146 pp. 1-27; Science vol. 272, pp. 632-3) for 86,572 survivors, of whom 60% had received bomb doses of over 5 mSv (or 500 millirem in old units) suffering 4,741 cancers of which only 420 were due to radiation, consisting of 85 leukemias and 335 solid cancers.

It was politics that ended the war, not gross effects from aerial bombardment. The surprise attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki couldn’t have been repeated on a third city with similar effect because the Japanese were already stepping up air raid warnings and duck and cover advice to avert burns etc. It was the declaration of war on Japan by Russia which precipitated conditional surrender. At least 40 million people were killed in WWII and the 420 overhyped nuclear attack radiation cancer casualties are 0.001% of that that.

Why Japan surrendered is still a contentious question. Recently the Soviet invasion of Manchuria has assumed greater importance in the historiography than previously, but the atomic bombs were still crucial. (In the words of one member of the peace faction in the Japanese war cabinet, Hiroshima was a ‘gift from heaven’.) Yes, another atom bomb wouldn’t have been ready for some time, but the Japanese decision-makers didn’t know that. I’d be interested to know where you get your information about Japanese civil defence capabilities against atomic attack, as they didn’t do too well against incendiaries.

I can’t help thinking that the firebombing of Tokyo can only be said to have had ‘relatively little impact’ if there’s something a bit off about your overall argument.

[As it happens, I share your heretical belief that the a-bomb wasn't actually much more destructive than Bomber Command at the top (?) of their form.]

“According to the 2002 International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare, the number of people killed by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and human experiments is around 580,000.[5] According to other sources, the use of biological weapons researched in Unit 731’s bioweapons and chemical weapons programs resulted in possibly as many as 200,000 deaths of military personnel and civilians in China.”

This was more Hitler’s gas chamber genocide than hot blooded aerial bombardment; Japan never actually dropped biological warfare agents on America. Maybe you are also thinking about the incendiary air raid on Tokyo in March 1945, or even the propaganda-hyped nuclear explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki with their trivial effects (conventional weapons type injuries plus just 400 cancers linked to radiation – above the control group – spread over 50 years)? As with Hamburg and Dresden, these attacks occurred relatively late in the war, and had relatively little impact.

Japan surrendered conditionally after Nagasaki principally because Russia (which Japan had been hoping would help it negotiate a surrender) declared war on Japan, seeing that the war was coming to an end with nuclear warfare, and preferring to be included as a victor in the war against Japan than not. If Japan had not surrendered, the next nuclear attack wouldn’t have come until September because of the bottlenecks in production of fissile material, and it’s civil defence plans based on the observed effects of nuclear attack would have prevented mass fires due to overturning of charcoal braziers, the flash burns and the glass fragment injury from delayed blast arrival after the single bombers were spotted…

At no point did Britain exploit this gas advantage; nor did it use anthrax which it tested and stockpiled. By the same token, Hitler never used nerve gas against Britain. This was partly because Britain would retaliate and partly because the general purpose activated charcoal absorbers in British gas masks were perfectly capable of absorbing nerve gas vapour, so Hitler would have had to use doses 3,700 times higher than the lethal inhalation concentration for tabun and 3,100 times that for for sarin, to kill by skin droplet absorption, assuming people were outdoors.

Tabun was discovered by Dr Gerhard Schrader in Germany on 23 December 1936. Germany made 12,000 tons as a war gas between April
1942 and May 1945, but did not use it for fear of heavy mustard gas reprisals. For comparison, Iraq made only 210 tons, using it at Basra
against the Iranians on 17 March 1984. Outside the lab, it gets dispersed and diluted so easily in the atmosphere that it takes immense quantities to have the intended effect.

So even if you don’t want to get into the nuclear question, the chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction available during World War II simply weren’t used. Regardless of the exact influence of moral versus military considerations in determining not to use weapons of mass destruction, it does indicate that even the most deplored dictator in history didn’t try to use weapons of mass destruction against civilians during war. He instead used hydrogen cyanide gas (patented as ‘Zyklon B’; Dr Brune Tesch discovered oxalic acid would convert could solidify hydrogen cyanide into solid crystals for convenience) to exterminate 6 million people, ethnic minorities and others.

I just think that there’s a lesson here that is being missed due to mainstream groupthink: weapons of chemical and biological mass destruction were available to both sides during WWII, but weren’t used in the conflict for various reasons. Fear of escalating the depravity of the conflict without getting any benefit, loss of moral prestige, a desire to wait for the other side to descend that low first, whatever. Weapons of mass destruction were however used in gas chambers for genicide. Anyone rational would conclude that the biggest threat is not from aerial bombardment but from non-military genicide in concentration camps. (Naturally, nobody with a large propaganda budget has any vested interest in pushing this extremely anti-pacifist fact into public debates.)

In short, the RAF’s bomber advocates had a genuine belief in the primacy of the bomber during the 1930s, but didn’t think about it or test it in any rigorous manner.