Marilyn B. Young is a professor of history at New
York University. This excerpt originally appeared
in Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History
edited by Yuki Tanaka and Ms. Young.
Airpower embodies American technology at its most
dashing. At regular intervals, the air force and
allied technocrats claim that innovations in air
technology herald an entirely new age of warfare.
Korea and Vietnam were, so to speak, living
laboratories for the development of new weapons:
the 1,200-pound radio-guided Tarzon bomb
(featured in Korean-era Movietone newsreels);
white-phosphorous-enhanced napalm; cluster bombs
(CBUs) carrying up to 700 bomblets, each bomblet
containing 200 to 300 tiny steel balls or
fiberglass fléchettes; delayed-fuse cluster
bombs; airburst cluster bombs; toxic defoliants;
varieties of nerve gas; sets of six B 52s,
operating at altitudes too high to be heard on
the ground, capable of delivering up to thirty
tons of explosives each. A usual mission
consisted of six planes in formation, which
together could devastate an area one half mile
wide by three miles long. Older technologies were
retrofitted: slow cargo planes (âPuff the Magic
Dragonâ) equipped with rapid-fire machine guns
capable of firing 6,000 rounds a minute; World
War I era Skyraiders, carrying bbomb loads of
7,500 pounds and fitted with four 20-millimeter
cannon that together fired over 2,000 rounds per minute.
The statistics stun; they also provide distance.
They are impossible to take in, as abstract as
the planning responsible for producing them. In
Korea over a three-year period, U.S./UN forces
flew 1,040,708 sorties and dropped 386,037 tons
of bombs and 32,357 tons of napalm. If one counts
all types of airborne ordnance, including rockets
and machine-gun ammunition, the total tonnage
comes to 698,000. Throughout World War II, in all
sectors, the United States dropped 2 million tons
of bombs; for Indochina the total figure is 8
million tons, with an explosive power equivalent
to 640 Hiroshima-size bombs. Three million tons
were dropped on Laos, exceeding the total for
Germany and Japan by both the U.S. and Great
Britain. For nine years, an average of one
planeload of bombs fell on Laos every eight
minutes. In addition, 150,000 acres of forest
were destroyed through the chemical warfare known
as defoliation. For South Vietnam, the figure is
19 million gallons of defoliant dropped on an
area comprising 20 percent of South Vietnamsome
6 million acres. In aan even briefer period,
between 1969 and 1973, 539,129 tons of bombs were
dropped in Cambodia, largely by B-52s, of which
257,465 tons fell in the last six months of the
war (as compared to 160,771 tons on Japan from
1942â1945). The estimated toll of the dead, the
majority civilian, is equally difficult to
absorb: 2 to 3 million in Korea; 2 to 4 million in Vietnam.
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