On the night of March 9th, 1945, 325 B-29 bombers from the Twentieth Air Force based in the Marianas flew over Tokyo dropping 1665 tons of bombs onto the heart of Japan’s greatest industrial city. The raid was a complete success by American accounts, 22 industrial targets had been destroyed.1 However, there was a major difference in this raid from the Doolittle Raids and other bombing runs on Tokyo from the earlier part of the war. This raid was not the normal high altitude precision bombing that the US Air Force had been practicing for the first four years of war, but instead it was low flying B-29 “Superfortresses” dropping thousands of tons of incendiary bombs on large civilian areas of the major industrial city of Tokyo. In this raid alone, according to Japanese official records, roughly 100,000 civilians were killed and over a million civilians were left homeless.2 This incendiary campaign continued until the end of World War II destroying more than sixty Japanese cities and leaving hundreds of thousands of civilians dead and millions more homeless. Many United States officials were said to have called for this strategy because it was believed to be a very effective way of breaking Japanese morale and by doing so it would remove the need for an invasion of the Japanese mainland that would have been very costly in the number of lives lost (some US officials believed two million men would perish in the invasion). However, many historians believe this shift from precision to incendiary bombing to have been a horrible and morally reprehensive attack aimed directly at Japanese civilians and that the costs in human life far outweighed the consequences of the change in strategy. At the beginning of the war Franklin Roosevelt, the President of the United States before his death in 1945, requested that the military refrain from collateral damage to the greatest extent possible.3 And for the most part that attitude was maintained in US military actions. In 1944 the U.S.’s bombers came into range of Japan with the capture of the Marianas. However, by 1945 the U.S.’s precision bombing of Tokyo and other important industrial cities was notably inefficient. The bombers had failed to destroy a single target by mid-January of 1945. The bombers were incapable of accurately dropping their precision bombs on target because of strong winds at the altitude they were dropping their bombs from.4 Under pressure from high up officials, General Curtis LeMay, the general in charge of the Twentieth Air Force, made the difficult decision to begin to use low altitude incendiary bombing runs at night because he believed they would achieve much better results. LeMay’s decision openly conflicted with the request of President Roosevelt, but he believed that it had to be done. It is easy to believe that the raids were aimed at destroying industrial targets and cutting Japanese morale short and ending the war before an invasion was necessary. U.S. officials believed that an invasion would have been extremely difficult and would have required a huge amount of troops and money. Not only would the United States have to commit money and troops to the invasion, but they would also have to commit troops to a peace-keeping/occupational force in Japan for years to come because of the hostility that existed between the two. In a sense, the United States believed that in order to preserve American (and maybe Japanese) lives they would have to prevent an invasion at all costs. The Japanese would have to submit to the United States to end the war. The United States believed that by destroying Japanese industry they were destroying the Japanese’s will to continue the war. Therefore, the use of low altitude night raids using incendiary bombs that were much more accurate and effective than high altitude precision bombs would have been a much more humane and effective end to the war than an invasion of the Japanese mainland. The United States was saving many thousands of lives by trying to effectively bomb Japanese industrial facilities. The civilian casualties that were an effect of the United States incendiary bombs were an unfortunate consequence of the very cluttered nature of Tokyo and other major Japanese industrial cities. Though it can be argued that the civilian casualties were an unfortunate consequence of the requirements of war, evidence suggests otherwise. U.S. officials began to consider incendiary bombing of industrial areas in Japan in early 1943. The Committee of Operations Analysis (COA) was formed to locate and prioritize targets for bombing in Japan.5 In COA meetings at the beginning of September of 1943, officials delved deeply into the possibility of bombing civilian areas. Colonel John F. Turner suggested at the meetings “We have been intrigued with the possibilities… of complete chaos in six cities killing 584,000 people. In these cities 70% of the housing would be destroyed.”6 Though not claiming to have maliciously targeted the ravaged civilian areas, the strategy of the United States seemed to be to inspire complete and total fear into the hearts of every Japanese person within bombing range and to bomb civilians intentionally. This would supposedly deplete Japanese morale so much that they would beg for a treaty. This bombing may have led to saving more human lives by preventing an invasion of the mainland of Japan, but it went entirely against basic rules of engagement of war. Not only were urban areas considered as a possibility of bombing, but the COA also added them to a list of important areas of industry to be bombed making Japanese civilians not only casualties, but targets. The COA argued that “Japanese war production [was] peculiarly vulnerable to incendiary attack of urban areas because of the widespread practice of subcontracting to small handicraft and domestic establishments.”7 Accounts of the bombings were often horrible descriptions of the suffering atrocities put onto civilians on the ground as American bombers flew above them. Saotome Katsumoto, a young girl who lived in Tokyo when the first incendiary bombs were dropped onto the city recalled the story: “It was a midnight air raid, but unlike anything we had experienced before. The planes flew very low, so low you could see the fires reflected in their undercarriages, and they dropped mostly incendiaries… All around me people were on fire, writhing in agony.”8 The pilots were horrified at what they were called by to do for their country. Chester Marshall was one of the men flying above the carnage. He remembered thinking “I couldn’t bring myself to look down on the scene. I remembered that at 5000 feet you could smell the flesh burning.”9These bombings seemed even more morally reprehensible because of the hypocrisy they reveal in the U.S. war strategy. The United States had gone to war on a moral cause and had been criticizing the indiscriminant bombings of the Germans in their blitzkrieg strategy as “inhuman barbarism.”10 President Roosevelt himself criticized the tactics of civilian bombing in his ‘Quarantine Speech’ on October 5th of 1937, declaring: “The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population… has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.”11 In the end of the war, no one was called to take responsibility for the horrible consequences of the actions that the United States took. The morality of the actions is based upon the question of intent. Was it the United States intent to bomb civilian areas or were the civilians collateral damage a war that was spiraling towards its horrible end at Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Was it the right thing to do to risk hundreds of thousands of civilians’ lives in order to prevent a full out invasion of the Japanese mainland by U.S. forces? The moral questions of this action are very hard to place because in times of war it is very hard to accept that the enemy that you kill is actually a human being that may not want to have anything to do with the war. The United States’ actions may still hurt us in the present. The horrible things that civilians suffered because of a previous military generation may have spurred the violence in the future in both Vietnam and Iraq. Both wars were begun on a basis of higher moral virtue attempting to triumph over the evils of the Soviet’s Communist regime and Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. However, now we are beginning to see more and more of the horrible things that have taken place in situations like the massacre at Haditha or the embarrassment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. These actions clearly do not support the Christian social justice teaching of the right for every human being to their precious life and even today we can see that the consequences of the action are not moral. However, the intent and the means are two issues that are still questionable and can be very difficult to determine.