A couple of years ago I read "The Soul of Battle," by Victor Davis Hanson, now the Hoover Insitute's main cheerleader for the Iraq War and head Arab-hater. Hanson describes three inspiring instances of aggressive military leaders destroying violent slaveholding societies - Epimamondas' (sp?) devastation of Sparta, Sherman's thrust into the Deep South, and finally Patton's Third Army's fighting in Eastern France and Western Germany (Hanson ignores the fact that the Red Army did most of the work of destroying the Wehrmacht). He makes the important point that all three of these generals won their victories by avoiding major set-piece battles and minimizing casualties. In many ways an inspiring book, in particular in its takedown of Southern whining about Sherman's march. So what's the problem?
There is something very unsettling in the book's introduction. Hanson goes to some lengths to describe his father's service as a bomber pilot in the US firebombing raids on Japanese cities in the last months of World War II. He says that his father always believed that these raids had shortened the war and were a cruel necessity, and he himself argues for that view. He takes up a defense of Curtis Lemay.
Now, Japan was in the grips of an aggresive, violent, deadly militaristic cult. It is certainly arguable that the mass bombing raids, and the two atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities accelerated the end of the war, and perhaps saved lives. And I certainly don't hold individual bomber crews responsible for the mass deaths.
Nonetheless the firebombing of essentially defenseless Japanese cities in 1944-1945 WAS NOT the relatively low casualty kind of war Hanson describes in the body of his book. Lemay and his compatriots designed the raids explicitly to create firestorms in wooden Japanese cities and incinerate the maximum number of civilians possible. And they kept bombing long after most "military" targets had been flattened. I believe that this was one of the pioneering uses of napalm, although I could be wrong on that.
Also worth noting is that the fabled "estimated 1,000,000 casualties" in the event of a US Army invasion of Japan is just that ... a fable. Truman or Stimson, I can't remember which, pulled that out of his ass after the dropping of the atomic bombs to more easily justify their use. According to a book based on US Army archival sources on planning for the US invasion of Japan (I don't have the author handy, but I could track him down if anyone's interested - R. Skates?) the US army estimated its likely casualties for the projected invasion of Kyushu at 70,000 dead and wounded, based on the Okinawa and Iwo Jima fighting.
Most Americans simply are not aware that the way the US has made war from World War II through the Gulf War was by minimizing American casualties through heavy use of airpower. Makes sense I guess. But in spite of pretty rhetoric about military targets, etc., what it means in practice is mass civilian casualties. In World War II, Korea, and Vietnam we deliberately targeted civilian populations and in each case caused hundreds of thousands of deaths (lower-end estimates for Korea and Vietnam).
Now if you understand that about US warmaking, then you understand that mass civilian casualties are predictable in any war the US undertakes, and that they were entirely predictable in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And you might not be so eager to go to war. Sadly, most Americans don't know and don't want to know about this history.
And while Hanson lauds low civilian casualties in the body of his book, he effectively apologizes for the mass extermination of civilians in the introduction.
More of the "cult of death" that so many Iraq war supporters and so many conservatives have embraced.