of all, was the real target of the Enola Gay not Hiroshima but the Soviet Union; the real purpose of the atomic bombing to demonstrate American power (and ruthless readiness to deploy it) to a Soviet "ally" with whom our relations were already swiftly deteriorating?3
Whatever the answer, of course, the bombing of Hiroshima was a horrible destruction of human lives. But it came, after all, at the end of a world war in which lives had become terribly cheap; World War II claimed hundreds of lives in all for every person killed at Hiroshima. Our ability to understand, if not to approve, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima must depend at least in part on whether it was an action that made military and political sense in the context of that war.
The idea of destroying cities from the air, and of the strategic air strike as the decisive action of war, was not a new one in 1945. For nearly a generation, since before the end of World War I, "prophets of air power" in every major power most notably Mitchell in the U.S., Trenchard in Britain, and above all Douhet in Italy, had argued that strategic bombing of enemy cities would win the next war.4
In fact, air war planners greatly overestimated the physical ________
3Leon V. Sigal, Fighting to a Finish (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 10 11.
4Ironically, serious interest in strategic bombing did not extend to Germany. The Luftwaffe was dedicated above all to tactical air power, and Germany never did deploy a true strategic bomber. and even the moral effect of conventional strategic bombing. Cities were not usually laid in rubble by one or two conventional bombing raids, and (as in the famous case of the London Blitz), civilian morale could stand up to such bombing surprisingly well. Indeed, the military effectiveness of strategic bombing in Europe is open to question. In on
...