Paper short abstract:

Scholars commonly assume that the bombing of Japanese cities resulted primarily from racism and even genocidal motivations. This paper situates the bombing of Japan in a decades-long process of transnational learning that involved a re-imagining of the place of the modern city in warfare.

Paper long abstract:

How had it become "normal" to destroy the built environment of urban centers by the Second World War? Scholars commonly assume that the US firebombing and atomic-bombing of 66 Japanese cities resulted primarily from racism and even genocidal motivations. This paper, however, situates the bombing of Japan in a decades-long process of transnational learning among nations in Europe, North America, and East Asia that involved a re-imagining of the place of the modern city in warfare. Beginning in the First World War, belligerents vigorously studied each other's strategies to "disrupt" economic and social organization in the enemy's cities, while investigating efforts to maintain the vitality of one's own urban environments by means of "civilian defense" against bombardment. They increasingly envisioned the city as both a built environment and a social organism—which functioned as the "nerve center" of the national body. Bombing would sever the "sinews" in this organism, they prophesied, culminating in breakdowns in communications, diminished economic activity, and panic and chaos among the civilian defenders and producers. Belligerents rarely aimed at the long-term degradation of the "natural" environment (a "Carthaginian peace"). Rather they sought to eviscerate the interconnections between human beings that sustained urban environments and the urban-based mechanisms of Total War (factories and neighborhood civil-defense and food-rationing organizations).

This paper focuses on the aerial bombardment of China, Germany, Britain, and Japan in 1937-45. The inclusion of Japan, as bomber and bombed, contributes to a more global, connected history of the Second World War. Why Japanese cities were bombed, and how they were bombed, was not an exceptional story, but was intimately connected to what the Allies had learned from bombing European urban environments.