HUMANITY FILES

Military air service (predecessor to the U.S. Air Force) · United States

United States Army Air Forces

The U.S. Army's air arm during World War II, dissolved in 1947 with the creation of an independent U.S. Air Force, which directed the strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan.

The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) served as the U.S. Army’s air arm from 1941 until 1947, when the National Security Act of 1947 established an independent U.S. Air Force. During World War II, it directed the American strategic bombing campaigns in both the European and Pacific theaters.

Role in Documented Cases

XXI Bomber Command, a USAAF unit under Major General Curtis LeMay, planned and executed the incendiary firebombing campaign against Japanese cities beginning in March 1945, documented in this archive at Tokyo Firebombing. The USAAF’s 509th Composite Group, operating under the same wartime command structure, delivered the atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in coordination with the separate Manhattan Engineer District, which was responsible for the weapons themselves (see Manhattan Project).

Accountability

No war crimes or accountability process examined USAAF conduct in the strategic bombing campaign after the war; Allied bombing operations were not addressed by postwar international tribunals. The campaign has instead been the subject of extensive historical and ethical scholarship regarding the laws and norms of aerial warfare, contributing to later developments in international humanitarian law.

Sources

Official Records

[1]Government Record

Effects of Air Attack on Urban Complex Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama

United States Strategic Bombing Survey · 1947

Books

[2]Academic Research

The Army Air Forces in World War II

Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds. · University of Chicago Press · 1953

The official multi-volume history of the U.S. Army Air Forces, prepared with access to wartime records.

Related Files

FILE HF-0021Research in Progress

Tokyo Firebombing

Tokyo, Japan · 9–10 March 1945

On the night of 9–10 March 1945, U.S. B-29 bombers attacked Tokyo with incendiary weapons in Operation Meetinghouse. The raid marked a major shift in the American strategic bombing campaign against Japan: from high-altitude attacks intended to strike industrial targets toward low-altitude night attacks designed to burn broad urban-industrial districts. Tokyo's war economy was not divided neatly between factories and homes. Small workshops and subcontractors were dispersed through dense residential areas, while much of the city's construction was highly vulnerable to fire. The resulting conflagration devastated large sections of eastern Tokyo. Casualty estimates vary: the U.S. Navy's official historical overview describes the raid as having claimed an estimated 100,000 lives, while other U.S. military histories cite figures around 83,000 or more than 80,000. Tokyo matters to Humanity Files because it demonstrates that mass urban destruction did not begin with nuclear weapons — months before Hiroshima, conventional incendiaries had already shown that modern air power could destroy a city district and kill tens of thousands of people in a single night.

War & Mass Killing
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