Japanese Aerial Bombing of Cities

There haven’t been many big events of late. Of course the battle of Shanghai is still being furiously fought. But it is also the case that the Japanese are bombing Chinese cities from the air, particularly Nanking the Nationalist Capital. In doing so the Japanese aren’t being particular about what they hit beyond the city itself.

The Japanese may have been influenced by the ideas of Italian air power theorist Giulio Douhet . Douhet believed in the power of an aerial offensive that could not be countered except by a greater aerial offensive. Ground armies would be of only secondary importance and bombers could not be stopped from getting through to their targets.

More ominously he believed in the morale effect of strategic bombing. Terrified civilians would demand that their government make peace if it could not protect them. Douhet justified his advocacy of what was essentially terror bombing of civilians by arguing that the quick and decisive results achieved would reduce overall suffering caused by the war. In a few cases where the outcome was already clear such as the Netherlands in 1940 and Yugoslavia in 1941 something approaching Douhet’s theorizing did occur. Mostly it did not and the bombers did not always get through. The suffering of civilians was only increased.

In China, the Japanese air force was simply spitting into the ocean that was China’s vast area and population so Douhet’s theories were not vindicated in China. The Japanese employed two bombers in their campaign. One was the army’s Mitsubishi type-97 “Sally” which could carry a maximum of 1,600 pounds of bombs and the other was the navy’s Mitsubishi G3M “Nell” which could carry up to 1,700 pounds of bombs. These kinds of bombloads could do a moderate amount of general destruction but could not accomplish a strategic result. By comparison the maximum bombload of the American B-17 “Flying Fortress” was 16,000 pounds albeit less over long ranges.

So the Japanese accomplished very little except to produce photogtaphs of piles of dead civilians or terrified women and children which did nothing to improve world public opinion, including American opinion, on the relative merits of the two sides. After some initial losses to Nationalist Chinese fighter pilots due to flying unescorted bomber missions, the Japanese added fighter escorts and wore down the Nationalist Chinese air force. More on the Nationalist air force later.