NEW YORK -- First, my historian friend George Akita sent me a clipping of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's article that appeared in The Honolulu Advertiser (Aug. 7, 2003). Titled "We need rules for waging war," the piece begins with McNamara remembering the night of March 9, 1945, when 334 B-29s bombed a section of Tokyo and "burned to death 83,793 Japanese civilians and injured 40,918 more." The numbers are McNamara's. (I note this because I haven't seen such precise figures in any Japanese description of the raid.)
At the time, McNamara was on Guam on temporary assignment from Air Force Headquarters in Washington, and U.S. Gen. Curtis LeMay, commander of air operations in the Pacific, asked him to join the after-mission briefings. One remark by the general that McNamara recalls is: "If we lose the war, we'll be tried as war criminals."
The point of McNamara's argument in his essay, indeed, is to call for a "proportionality rule" to limit enemy casualties, although he said LeMay would dismiss the idea as "ridiculous."