Civilised weapons and savage warfare : race and American airpower strategy, 1918-1973

This thesis examines the influence of racism on US airpower strategy from 1918-1973. It demonstrates that the racial prejudices of airpower decision-makers led them towards aggressive bombing practices that made little effort to avoid killing civilians or killed them deliberately. To do so, it examines four case studies: the intervention in Nicaragua from 1927- 1933, the Pacific Theatre of WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Particularly, this thesis shows that a racist view of Asian people, beginning in earnest in the 1880s, accelerated in the interwar period, and hardened throughout the latter three cases, shaped the use of American airpower. It demonstrates that a ‘yellow peril’ paranoia that saw Asians as inured to death and deployed a core imagery of Asians as apes, insects, and automatons, primed them as targets for indiscriminate bombing. These racist visions not only caused American airmen to act immorally but also led them to eschew effective strategies, that emphasised precision and restraint, to pursue ineffective area bombing. This was peculiar because interwar US airpower theorists lauded a precision strategy that targeted the ‘key-nodes’ of an enemy’s war economy and criticised European conceptions that saw mass slaughter as innate to air warfare. The abandonment of precision thinking was especially strange given how effective American ‘key-node’ bombing was against Nazi Germany. As such, this switch can only be fully understood when viewed through the lens of race. Existing literature acknowledges that racism moulded conduct in these wars, sometimes in the airpower context. However, existing studies remain limited in their focus on a given war and do not draw wider conclusions or show continuity throughout the period. By examining this phenomenon holistically, this thesis demonstrates that the American airpower establishment was influenced by a systemic and institutional racism that mirrored wider American culture, right from the start