A tattered brown envelope from the War Department Air Corps was intriguingly labeled “Japanese Bombing pictures.” A “SECRET” stamp was crossed out with the notation “Released.”

Inside were dozens of US aerial surveillance photos of Japanese war plant targets, before and after American bombing raids. Here’s one sequence from an attack on June 22, 1945 on a Mitsubishi plant:

The cost to the Japanese of their desperate throw of the dice on Dec. 7, 1941, is starkly captured in other documents in the Gulick files:

But the US had a strategy beyond exacting  reparations from its defeated Axis adversary. It planned to rebuild Japan as a bulwark of postwar world peace.

More on that in coming posts.