Customer Reviews

Inferno: The Fire Bombing of Japan, March 9 - August 15, 1945

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The author is not shy about putting his point of view in the foreground. Hoyt writes in the Forward that two things stand out in the history of World War II as war crimes, the first being the Holocaust, and the second being the firebombing of Japanese cities in 1945. Regrettfully for the Chinese, the killing of over 20 million Chinese civilians by the Japanese did not seem to make this idiosyncratic list, nor the killing of a like number of Soviet citizens by the Wehrmacht.

The reader gets a taste of the historical inaccuracy to come on the first page of the text, when the American aircraft carrier Enterprise is identified as the carrier from which the Dolittle Raid was launched. While the Enterprise was in the task force, it was the Hornet that carried the bombers.

And so it goes throughout this 140 page text. Yes, Curtis LeMay served in the Eighth Air Force in Europe, but it was the RAF under Arthur "Bomber" Harris that destroyed Hamburg in 1943 in a series of raids. The Eighth Air Force participated, but only in daylight missions against industrial targets in that doomed city. The Doolittle Raid had as its objective military and industrial targets, and was hardly the "blunderbuss" approach Hoyt claims.

Other claims include the time-honored chestnut first devised by the Japanese at the end of the war, that Hirohito desired to end the war and was stymied by his advisors and cabinet. Bix's biography on the Showa emperor should put this claim to rest, but I am sure it will continue to be invoked by those who, like Hoyt, wish to exculpate the Japanese from any responsibility for the war and the horrors they suffered.

The one redeeming aspect of this book are the stories of the survivors of the bombing. They stand as a powerful rebuke to the Emperor, and the leaders of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy who launched their country on a militarist adventure in China and the Pacific.

As a military historian, based on this book, Hoyt is a competent journalist. He is, however, no William Shirer. If this book was exclusively about the oral histories of Japanese people who experienced the terror, hardships, losses, and deprivations of the final bombing campaign of Japan (Mar 1945 to Aug 1945), then it is a good book. However, Hoyt has implied that this is a history and has made some serious charges against the WWII military establishment accusing them of war crimes. This is no trifling matter. It requires much analysis and context to sift through the data to substantiate his claims. Overall any context and analysis is seriously lacking. If you are looking for a real history that covers these events and more, may I recommend Barrett Tillman's "Whirlwind." It has a balanced context, analysis, and confronts in depth the issues that Hoyt skims over or totally ignores.

The first major problem with the book is the prologue and the last chapter. Here, he launches into a tirade about the bombing of Japan being war crimes against the Japanese and that we should be ashamed. That depends on the context and presentation of facts and interpretation, which Hoyt doesn't provide. The fact is that more civilians were killed in Germany during WWII from precision and area bombing than in Japan. Precision bombing was what we were trying to accomplish via the Norden bomb sight in both Europe and the Pacific, but the results took on the appearance of area bombing. Read briefly about the collateral civilian losses in France during the air strikes leading up to D-Day and although we were practicing "precision" bombing, there was horrible, unavoidable fallout in civilian casualties. I suppose that the more salient point is that I am not aware of any German Luftwaffe officer who was tried as a war criminal for the area/fire bombing of Britain during the war. It appears that Hoyt is anachronistically applying his vision of what today's standards should be where they didn't exist 70 years ago. Further, his beef seems to be over Bosnia and Kosovo. His leap of logic escapes me. If you skip the prologue and the last chapter, the book is useful as a journalistic endeavor of telling his interviewees' stories of their experiences. However, tied obtusely to an agenda of villifying those who fought and died 65 years ago in Japan does damage to the book because it presents a case that he neither really makes nor can the evidence support. In Japan's case, were there any real civilians if everyone was mobilized to repel the final invasion? He doesn't address this. Nor does he mention the Japanese atrocities against the downed aviators during this brief period. The presentation is completely unbalanced.

The real irony of this book is that the strategic bombing effort succeeded in Japan where it failed in Europe. The bomber barons in Europe were boasting that they could end the European conflict through bombing without the necessity of an invasion of Europe. They were wrong. The strategic (and tactical) bombing effort actually worked in Japan. Oh well.....

The book is pricey. You can get Tillman's for less money and it is a much better book. It covers everything that Hoyt covers with the context and analysis.

I bought this book expecting to gain a historical perspective of the Air Offensive Japan campaign, which my grandfather participated in as a telephone lineman with the 20th Army Air Force. I was offended by the author's assertion that it was an immoral American war crime, comparable to the Holocaust. WW2 was a state of total war with fully mobilized combatant nation participants. As such, enemy civilians are fair game when the political/military leaders fail to surrender after the application of defensive lethal violence in a just war.

American adults and children were supporting the military effort with scrap metal drives, victory gardens, and bond drives, among other things. Do not think think for one minute the Axis powers, if they had the means to reach our shores with their bombers or had developed a nuke, would have hesitated to use them against our civilian population. Have you forgotten about Pearl Harbor or the Philippines where many American civilians were slaughtered in the course of the aggressive war waged by Imperial Japan?

As far as I am concerned, they reaped what they sowed.

My father served on Tinian and was a participant in the firebombing of Japan. I have read about every book on the subject of the B-29 campaign that I can find. This includes books written shortly after the war and recent ones. The ones written shortly after the war did not have to be politically correct and told it exactly how they felt at the time. They called the Japanese Japs, Nips, and Jap monkeys. They did not use the term Japanese.They were quite bitter at the Japanese at the time. They did not particularly approve of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The ensuing bombing and invasions of the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam did not go over well either. The Bataan death march was also fresh on their minds. They were also aware of the slaughter of the Chinese.

Apparently, this was not a problem for Hoyt. He referred to the firebombing as the second holocaust. Really? Did Hoyt not remember there was a war going on? Even though the empire of the Rising Sun was no longer on the offensive, they were hardly defeated at the onset of 1945. Even though there had been bombing missions against Japan, there had been almost no damage inflicted. There was only one "precision" mission that was declared a success. Billions had been spent training the men and building the planes, yet there was nothing to show for it. Each B-29 cost five times as much as a B-17, yet they were causing no damage.

The only way to cause damage was to firebomb. If not, we would have to invade an undamaged Japanese mainland. This would have been a disaster. Hoyt does not mention this. Apparently he was fine with have our boys shoot it out on land. Nobody wanted that. My father can attest to that. The marines trained on the beaches of Tinian and they dreaded the thought. Yet Hoyt talks about how cruel it was to kill civilians. Really? The only reason Japan surrendered was because their country had been annihilated by firebombing. But Hoyt spends his time talking about how people burned to death. I guess getting stabbed in a bonsai charge would be better. Having our boys getting machine gunned on the beaches of Japan is much preferable than burning the enemy.

Don't waste your time on this fairy tale. Get the book "Blankets of Fire".

The eye witness accounts of the firebombing of the Japanese cities is interesting, but the entire premise of this book that the firebombing of Japan was somehow unjustified to me is absolutely absurd.

If there was ever a people that deserved to be whipped from the face of the planet it was the Japanese of the 1940's. I grew up with several victims of the Japanese, one of which survived the Bataan death march. I remember his stories of his captors treatment of him and his comrades (most of which never returned). I remember the bamboo shoots that the Japanese had pounded up under his nails on ALL his fingers and toes, a gift from the Japanese empire that he took with him to his grave. I still listen to my friends fathers accounts in Manila where the Japanese soldiers would partake in various forms of entertainment, one of which included tossing Babbie's into the air and catching them on bayonets.

For a people that showed absolute fanaticism and willingness to sacrifice themselves defending the islands they had captured and to expect they would be willing to do any less on their homeland is also flawed. The firebombings and atomic bombings in the long run saved millions of Japanese civilians, but more importantly hundreds of thousands of American lives.

One thing that is rarely considered is that had the war dragged on, modern day Japan would be a very different place. Had the Soviets taken a greater roll in the defeat of Japan (as they were gearing up to do after the defeat of Germany), that would no doubt put a portion of this nation under their control and the Russians were by no means fans of the Japanese. Perhaps the Japanese people deserved occupation by the Russians after all the crimes the committed on other peoples and nations, but they didn't, thanks in part to the firebombings by the US.

One thing for sure, the United States ended World War II with two giant ! ! exclamation marks which prevented the Japanese from enslaving any of their neighbors into the distant future.

Most people are unaware that the firebombing campaign of Curtis LeMay killed more people - the vast majority of them civilian - than both of the atomic bombings combined. LeMay himself said that if his country did not win the war, he would be tried as a war criminal.

Hoyt here alternates between accounts of the bombing missions, the evolution of their inciniary civilian bombing campaign, and the stories of families on the ground during the conflagration. He is in top form here, shedding a bright light on one of the darkest corners of the Pacific War, and it is both uncomfortable and unsettling. In particular, the chapter "Road to Hiroshima" will leave you with both a chill and a tear in your eye. The writing is clear and lucid, and eyewitness accounts are all cross-referenced. The book is short and will be read quickly, in just a day or two, but it is valuable for cross-referencing general histories in which the firebombing campaign is usually (shamefully) reduced to a single paragraph or less.

You will leave this book with a bitter understanding of the distilled trajedy that was the Pacific War, of the unchecked destruction and wanton slaughter that became not only expected, but as some would argue, necessary. That such killing could ever become justified is the lesson that we non-veterans must not just learn but know.

We must, as armchair historians, allow ourselves to see the practices and results of our great nation's military, so that we might learn from them and absorb whatever lessons we can from the honor and courage of the men who fought there... and, bitterly, the women and children who died there. We owe it to the participants as well as both of our countries as well as the generations of future children to preserve the stories of our victories, however phyrric they might be.

Edwin Hoyt has done a superb job of communicating these thoughts. If you have an interest in the Pacific War, this is recommended reading. Its a hardcover as well, so it makes a nice addition to your library. Thank you, Mr. Hoyt.