{"id":367,"date":"2007-05-29T22:07:31","date_gmt":"2007-05-30T03:07:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=367"},"modified":"2011-04-04T22:25:47","modified_gmt":"2011-04-05T02:25:47","slug":"war-powers-war-lies-part-22-not-one-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=367","title":{"rendered":"War Powers, War Lies: Part 22: Not One Stone"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Big Picture Home Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Big Picture Column<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0 Next Big Picture Column<\/a><\/p>\n

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War Powers, War Lies: A Series<\/h2>\n

Part 22: Not One Stone<\/h2>\n

Published in the Maryland Daily Record May 29, 2007<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Operation Gomorrah, commenced July 24, 1943, was, as philosopher A.C. Grayling put it, something new and terrible even by the standards of industrialised violence so far experienced in the Second World War.\u201d[1]<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A Firestorm<\/h3>\n

Specifically, Gomorrah was mounted for the specific purpose of obliterating the city of Hamburg.\u00a0 Royal Air Force Lancasters<\/a>, Halifaxes<\/a>, Stirlings<\/a> and Wellingtons<\/a> came loaded, not with conventional bombs, but with incendiaries.\u00a0 In his 2006 book, Among the Dead Cities<\/em> (upon which I draw heavily below), Grayling has described what they accomplished.\u00a0 Here is part of what resulted on just one of the four nights of the raid, that of July 27-28:<\/p>\n

Fires in different streets progressively joined together, forming into vast pyres of flame that grew rapidly hotter and eventually roared upwards to a height of 7,000 feet, sucking in air from the outlying suburbs at over a hundred miles an hour to fuel their oxygen hunger, creating artificial hurricanes \u2018resonating like mighty organs\u2019 … which intensified the fires further… Its greatest intensity lasted for three hours, snatching up roofs, trees and burning human bodies and sending them whirling into the air.\u00a0 The fires leaped up behind collapsing facades of buildings, roared through the streets, and rolled across squares and open areas \u2018in strange rhythms like rolling cylinders.\u2019\u00a0 The glass windows of tramcars melted, bags of sugar boiled, people trying to flee the oven-like heat of air-raid shelters sank, petrified into grotesque gestures, into the boiling asphalt of the streets.[2]<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the wake of these four nights of raids, 45,000 identifiable corpses were found, and 30,480 buildings were reduced to rubble, half the Hamburg housing stock.\u00a0 One and a quarter million refugees were created.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Other exigencies of the war necessitated a pause in the \u201ccarpet bombing\u201d or \u201carea bombing\u201d of population centers until February 1944, but then the pattern resumed: Stuttgart, Brunswick, Halberstadt, Regensburg, Schweinfurt and Augsburg.[3]\u00a0 After another pause for D-Day and invasion support, the effort continued in February 1945: Dresden, Leipzig, Worms, Mainz, W\u00fcrzburg, Hildesheim, Gladbeck, Hanau and Dulmen.[4]<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Laying the Carpet<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In Europe, although the Luftwaffe had certainly been the first to strike civilian centers from the air, with blitzkrieg<\/em> in Eastern Europe, and in England with the Blitz, the RAF was the clear leader in the practice of aerial obliteration of civilians, their infrastructure, and their culture.\u00a0 By contrast, the U.S. Eighth Army Air Force, when it arrived on the scene, insisted on efforts to focus on Hitler\u2019s war industries, notably the ball bearings and oil which were central to the military effort.\u00a0 (So effective was the Eighth Army that eventually the Luftwaffe was effectively grounded for lack of fuel.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the Pacific, of course, the U.S.\u00a0 made different choices.\u00a0 When the U.S. finally got its B-29s within striking distance of the Japanese mainland, those bombers, designed to carry maximum payloads, were directed to fly low, allowing them to carry even greater loads \u2013 of incendiaries.\u00a0 These were then dropped on the wooden Japanese cities of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.\u00a0 Tokyo was attacked on March 9-10, 1945.\u00a0 Fifteen square miles in one of its most densely populated districts experienced \u201ca ferocious firestorm that killed more than 85,000 people.\u201d[5]\u00a0 From there, the U.S. laid waste to \u201cnearly half of the built-up areas of … sixty-six Japanese cities.\u201d\u00a0 The nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came at the end, in August 1945.\u00a0 Between them the nuclear attacks killed perhaps 100,000 people immediately (over 100,000 more later on) and destroyed half the buildings in each city.[6]<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Illegal, But With Impunity<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Whatever the morality of these bombing campaigns, they certainly violated international law.\u00a0 The Hague Conventions of 1907, never superseded at the time of the Second World War, specifically forbade employment of \u201carms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering.\u201d\u00a0 Art. 23(e).\u00a0 Under Article 25, \u201cThe attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.\u201d\u00a0 And Article 27 provided<\/a>: \u201cIn sieges and bombardments all necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes.\u201d\u00a0 And it is worthy of note that in trying the Nazis at Nuremberg, the tribunal held that the Hague Conventions were part of the customary law of war<\/a>, and binding on Germany whether or not it was a signatory.\u00a0 Perhaps equally noteworthy, however, was that, although the twelfth and last of the \u201cminor\u201d Nuremberg trials placed on trial architects of war strategies and tactics that had violated international law, no German, so far as I am able to determine, was ever tried for atrocities against civilians from the air.\u00a0 Perhaps reasons of state (i.e. the implications for the RAF and the U.S. Air Force) guided prosecutorial discretion .<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There had been efforts between the World Wars to update the Conventions, in view of the flagrant bombing violations perpetrated by all sides in World War One.\u00a0 A running conference from 1922 to 1937 sponsored a draft set of Rules of Air Warfare, which would have forbidden Gomorrah and Hiroshima in even more express terms.\u00a0 The Rules were never ratified for various complex reasons.\u00a0 But in the course of the proceedings, the U.S. and (apparently) the British delegates had endorsed the view that bombardment of civilian centers violated extant law,[7] which the Rules merely articulated.[8]\u00a0 Area bombing had thus clearly been recognized, in advance, as illegal by representatives of the very nations that later perpetrated it in places like Hamburg and Hiroshima.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Such illegality posed two separate problems for the Allies: how to justify their actions to themselves, and how to justify them to the populace.\u00a0 The story of how the Allied leadership muddled through those problems has very large implications.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Apologetics and Justifications for Atrocities<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As the Allies and the Axis drew closer to war in the 1930s, there was never any question that our side intended to bomb civilians.\u00a0 As early as the 1920s, the chiefs of British Bomber Command were formulating policy explicitly centered on area bombing.\u00a0 The thinking was that bombing was so destructive of civilian morale that the national will to fight of adverse powers would crumble.[9]\u00a0 While Britain had committed itself at the outset to complying with the draft Rules of Aerial Warfare, that commitment lasted only until May 1, 1940<\/a>, when the order articulating that commitment was rescinded.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 American bombing doctrine, as noted, focused instead on pinpointed destruction of enemy industrial sites.\u00a0 However, in practice U.S. and RAF military doctrines were much closer together than would appear.\u00a0 If it was acceptable to bomb industrial sites, the U.S. approach, it was equally acceptable to bomb the infrastructure that made running those sites possible: the bridges, the railways, the water supply, the power grid.\u00a0 If such bombing meant that life became impossible for civilians in large areas surrounding those sites, then so be it.\u00a0 And in practice, the distinction was even less than might seem the case as a matter of theory.\u00a0 American bombers simply lacked the technology and the correct weather in either theater of war to make precision bombing a full-time tactic, though in Europe they tried.[10]\u00a0 In Japan, they did not try; there they were under the command of Gen. Curtis LeMay, who became notorious in a later war, Vietnam, for urging that we bomb the North Vietnamese \u201cback to the stone age.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 And he was not a late convert to that view.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In any event, the internal justification for area bombing either espoused a view that civilians were collateral damage to attacks on the industrial war machine or that in modern warfare, the civilian\/combatant distinction was not viable or important.\u00a0 In some cases, bombing of civilians was, ironically, presented as humanitarian and in keeping with the larger goals of the law of war, in that collapse of the enemy could be precipitated faster, and at a lower cost in human life overall, if civilian morale could be broken from the skies.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For some, it was not even a problem.\u00a0 Extermination of the enemy populace and culture seemed like a self-evident goal to pursue.\u00a0 For instance, the day after Pearl Harbor, Congressman Charles Eaton of New Jersey was clearly contemplating genocide against Japan in urging Congress and the country to summon \u201cdetermination once and for all to wipe off of the earth this accursed monster of tyranny and slavery.\u201d [11] Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of the Treasury in 1944, as victory became clearly inevitable, put forward a plan for the complete demolition of the remainder of German industry postwar, leaving Germany permanently as a \u201cpastoralized\u201d country.[12]<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It was enough of a problem to most national leaders, however, that a frank dedication to extermination of enemy civilians was not prominently embraced.\u00a0 Grayling is almost amusing in recounting the frustration of Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris, the leader of RAF Bomber Command, at the official pronouncements and directives of those above him trying to steer him away from area bombing or at least to distance themselves from it.\u00a0 Harris bluntly described himself this way: \u201cIt is my business to kill people: Germans.\u201d[13]\u00a0 And much boastful publicity was given to the Hamburg raid.\u00a0 Yet when British humanitarian voices were raised in protest, and questions were asked in the House of Commons, Minister for Air Sir Archibald Sinclair responded firmly: \u201cThe targets of Bomber Command are always military.\u201d[14]\u00a0 This was of course true if and only if everything civilian was military by definition, a mental qualification that Sinclair almost certainly was resorting to.\u00a0 (Shades of \u201cI have never ordered torture\u201d?)<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cA Military Base\u201d<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Where it came to Japan, and in particular to Hiroshima, a similar mental qualification, amounting to a lie, may have been indulged in by none other than Harry Truman, so often presented as a paragon of honest speaking.\u00a0 \u201cThe world will note,\u201d Truman said, \u201cthat the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base.\u201d[15]\u00a0 There were two significant military bases in the vicinity<\/a>, but the bomb was not dropped, nor was it intended to be dropped on them.[16]\u00a0 The Target Committee deliberately chose a location in the heart of the town, specifically rejecting going out of town to get near to the bases.\u00a0 While Truman told the Secretary of War to avoid civilian targets[17], everyone involved in the targeting process knew that order was obsolete when given.\u00a0 If Truman had been honestly mistaken in the radio address just quoted, he would doubtless have been informed of the gaffe afterwards, and if he had been totally honest, he would have owned up to it.\u00a0 He did not.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 None of this is a discussion of the morality of area bombing in general, or Hamburg and Hiroshima in particular.\u00a0 Rather it is a discussion of the way that laws of warfare are broken by even the best nations on earth and lies are told by the leaders of those best nations to hide it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It can indeed be argued that the Hamburgs and Hiroshimas were morally correct, even if illegal; but if they were truly believed to be correct, then why the dishonesty?\u00a0 Why did the Allied leaders not adopt a moral stance challenging the laws of war, or at least the laws that forbade area bombing of civilians?<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I would posit, by way of an answer, that the real thought process here was likely more elemental than either a legal or a moral one.\u00a0 Nations grow lawless in wartime \u2013 an ancient observation, memorably phrased by the Roman orator Cicero: Silent leges inter arma.\u00a0 (Literally \u201cthe laws are silent amid arms.\u201d)\u00a0 So it may be that the very concept of the laws of war is mostly a fig leaf and a sham.\u00a0 There is propaganda value, however, in pretending to hold to those laws so that there is a yardstick for the enemy not to measure up to.\u00a0 But hypocrisy is required to make people believe there is a yardstick at all.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Meanwhile, the real law of war may be this: destroy the alien, the other, the enemy.\u00a0 Burn, sack and pillage the cities.\u00a0 Leave not one stone upon another (as Jesus prophesied would happen to Jerusalem).[18]\u00a0 Erase the enemy from the book of life, as mankind has tried to do in countless wars, at Auschwitz, in the killing fields of Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Kosovo, in Darfur. \u00a0View enemy armies merely as impediments to the chief goal of war: obliterating the civilians. Certainly there is something in the warrior mind that will always tend in this direction.\u00a0 Even in somewhat more civilized wars there will always be My Lais and Hadithas.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Candor<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But assuming, without conceding, that this is the real law of war, then even so it would have been productive to dispense with the hypocrisy, and to speak openly of the moral, tactical and strategic choices being made.\u00a0 Surely it would have been a good idea to talk honestly about Hamburg.\u00a0 If the nations that billed themselves as the last hope of civilization against barbarity wanted to go ahead and roast cities alive after such a discussion, \u201ccivilization\u201d would at least have chosen what was done in its name.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Honest debate would have been even more helpful before the end.\u00a0 The choice to bomb Hiroshima may have seemed only a small step beyond the choices to bomb Hamburg and Tokyo.\u00a0 It is arguable that to the air force personnel who carried out the actions, there was little difference, except that far fewer aircraft were involved.\u00a0 To the airmen, an incendiary bomb was an incendiary bomb.\u00a0 In hindsight, though, we know that the Hiroshima projectile had quite different implications.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And if for security reasons the debate could not be had before the fact, surely it would have been in \u201ccivilization\u2019s\u201d best interest to have had a frank national dialogue about the atomic bomb afterwards, and not to have obfuscated with happy talk about military bases.\u00a0 The deceptions deprived us of much of that dialogue.\u00a0 The U.S. had just unleashed a weapon whose best use, and perhaps sole purpose, was the obliteration of whole cities at a blow.\u00a0 It was therefore a weapon whose whole point was to violate international laws we ostensibly observed \u2013 unlike conventional incendiary bombs, which at least also had legitimate applications against military targets.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Beware of Imitators<\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Even a nation eager to elevate the \u201ctrue\u201d law of war above the \u201cimpossibly idealistic\u201d Hague Conventions might have wanted to consider whether it was safer to observe the Conventions anyway — and thereby retain their protections.\u00a0 After all, even a nation frankly bent on merciless obliteration of the enemy might still have had qualms about establishing a precedent that bore a distinct and novel threat of obliterating us as well.\u00a0 For that is, of course, the strategic situation into which Hiroshima ushered us.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The nature of that strange and unprecedented strategic situation will be considered next time.<\/p>\n

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[1]\u00a0\u00a0 Among the Dead Cities<\/em> (2006) at 16.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2]\u00a0\u00a0 Id., at 18.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3]\u00a0 Id., at 65.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4]\u00a0 Id., at 73<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[5]\u00a0\u00a0 Id., at 77.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[6]\u00a0\u00a0 Id., at 78.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[7]\u00a0 \u201cAt the beginning of this conference Ambassador Hugh Gibson, speaking for the United States delegation, said that civilization was, threatened by the burden and dangers of the gigantic machinery of warfare then being maintained. He recalled that practically all the nations of the world had pledged themselves not to wage aggressive war. Therefore, he said, the conference should devote itself to the abolition of weapons devoted primarily to aggressive war.\u00a0 Among the points advocated by Ambassador Gibson [of the United States in Geneva in 1932<\/span>] were the following: Special restrictions for tanks and heavy mobile guns, which were considered to be arms peculiarly for offensive operations; computation of the number of armed forces on the basis of the effectives necessary for the maintenance of internal order plus some suitable contingent for defense; abolition of lethal gases and bacteriological warfare; effective measures to protect civilian populations against aerial bombing.\u201d http:\/\/www.mtholyoke.edu\/acad\/intrel\/WorldWar2\/disarm.htm<\/a> .<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[8]\u00a0\u00a0 See Grayling at 146 and preceding pages.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[9]\u00a0 Id., at 134 and following.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[10]\u00a0\u00a0 Grayling at 141, citing Stuart Halsey Ross, Strategic Bombing by the United States in World War II: The Myths and the Facts<\/em> (2003).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[11]\u00a0\u00a0 Cong. Rec.<\/em>, 77th<\/sup> Cong., 1st<\/sup> Sess., Vol. 87, pt. 9 at 9520-27 (1941), cited in J. McWhorter, Doing Our Own Thing <\/em>(2003) at 44.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[12]\u00a0\u00a0 Grayling at 159 and following.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[13]\u00a0\u00a0 Id., at 118.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[14]\u00a0\u00a0 Id., at 189.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[15]\u00a0\u00a0 Radio address of August 9, 1945.\u00a0\u00a0 Cited in Grayling at 156. Cited to:Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, Containing the Public Messages, Speeches and Stements of the President April 12 to December 31, 1945<\/em> (Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1961) page 212. The full text also was published in the New York Times,<\/em> August 10, 1945, page 12.\u00a0 Sourced in http:\/\/www.dannen.com\/decision\/hst-ag09.html,<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[16] \u00a0\u00a0See the Targeting Committee\u2019s report, preserved at http:\/\/www.dannen.com\/decision\/targets.html<\/a> . \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[17]\u00a0\u00a0 Truman confided to his diary that he had ordered that civilians be spared, and the targets be exclusively military.\u00a0 http:\/\/www.dannen.com\/decision\/hst-jl25.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[18]\u00a0 Mat. 24:2.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

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The internal justification for area bombing either espoused a view that civilians were collateral damage to attacks on the industrial war machine or that in modern warfare, the civilian\/combatant distinction was not viable or important. In some cases, bombing of civilians was, ironically, presented as humanitarian and in keeping with the larger goals of the law of war, in that collapse of the enemy could be precipitated faster, and at a lower cost in human life overall, if civilian morale could be broken from the skies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2537,2506,2561,2573,2513,2566,2562,2521,2546,2558,2529,2536,2533,2549,2570,2555,2517,2564,428,2514,2559,2253,2550,2556,2552,1433,2571,2578,2523,2531,2534,2538,2535,2522,2515,2557,2580,2572,2548,2518,2510,2507,2530,363,2560,2528,849,2574,2541,2547,2576,392,2569,2544,456,2509,2524,2532,2526,2565,422,2545,2542,347,2504,2551,2505,2543,1908,364,2563,2519,2508,2554,413,2520,2567,2568,2511,2577,2575,2516,2579,2540,2553,2512,1466,2539,2525,2527],"class_list":["post-367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigpicture","tag-8th-army-air-force","tag-a-c-grayling","tag-air-mar4shall-sir-arthur-harris","tag-ambassador-hugh-gibson","tag-among-the-dead-cities","tag-archibald-sinclair","tag-arthur-harris","tag-augsburg","tag-august-1945","tag-back-to-the-stone-age","tag-bladbeck","tag-blitz","tag-blitzkrieg","tag-bombardment","tag-book-of-life","tag-british-bomber-command","tag-brunswick","tag-business-to-kill-germans","tag-cambodia","tag-carpet-bombing","tag-charles-eaton","tag-cicero","tag-civilian-structures","tag-curtis-lemay","tag-customary-international-law","tag-d-day","tag-darfur","tag-doing-our-own-thing","tag-dresden","tag-dulmen","tag-eastern-eurpoe","tag-eighth-army-air-force","tag-england","tag-february-1945","tag-firestorms","tag-general-curtis-lemay","tag-gospel-of-matthew","tag-haditha","tag-hague-conventions-of-19907","tag-halberstadt","tag-halifaxes","tag-hamburg","tag-hanau","tag-harry-truman","tag-henry-morgenthau","tag-hildesheim","tag-hiroshima","tag-hugh-gibson","tag-incendiary-bombing","tag-international-law","tag-j-mcwhorter","tag-japan","tag-jerusalem","tag-kobe","tag-kosovo","tag-lancasters","tag-leipzig","tag-luftwaffe","tag-mainz","tag-minister-for-air-sir-archibald-sinclair","tag-my-lai","tag-nagasaki","tag-nagoya","tag-north-vietnam","tag-not-one-stone-upon-another","tag-nuremberg","tag-operation-gomorrah","tag-osaka","tag-pearl-harbor","tag-president-harry-truman","tag-raf-bonmber-command","tag-regensburg","tag-royal-air-force","tag-rules-of-air-warfare","tag-rwanda","tag-schweinfurt","tag-secretary-of-war","tag-silent-leges-inter-arma","tag-stirlings","tag-strategic-bombing","tag-stuart-halsey-ross","tag-stuttgart","tag-targeting-committee","tag-tokyo","tag-u-s-air-force","tag-wellingtons","tag-world-war-i","tag-world-war-ii-in-pacific","tag-worms","tag-wurzburg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=367"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1336,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367\/revisions\/1336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}