Penta wrote in
:

On 11 Jan 2004 15:00:01 -0500, (James Nicoll)
wrote:


OK, that was a military attack on (mostly) military assets.
I'll substitute March 9th, which included attacks on civilians.

March 9th?

I'm guessing it's the firebombing of Tokyo he's going after here and not
Bob Hope's film debut in "The Big Broadcast of 1938" (Thanks, History
Channel!):

On this day, U.S. warplanes launch a new bombing offensive against
Japan, dropping 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo. Almost 16
square miles in and around the Japanese capital were incinerated, and
between 80,000 and 130,000 Japanese civilians were killed in the
worst single firestorm in recorded history.

The *rest* of the story is that Japan had moved light industry into the
civilian areas of Tokyo in an attempt to shield them from American
bombing. If the Fourth Geneva Convention had existed then (it didn't
exist until 1949), an attempt to protect their industrial base in this
manner would have violated Article 28: "The presence of a protected
person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from
military operations."

If we could apply the Fourth Geneva Convention *retroactively* to this
attack, then, he would be correct in calling it a war crime -- and the
appropriate people (the war-time Japanese leadership) was brought to
account for it.

Good for us...

--
Reed