As Michael Sherry and Cary Karacas have pointed out for the US and Japan respectively, prophecy preceded practice in the destruction of Japanese cities. pp. Stripped of their guns to make more room for bombs, and flying at altitudes averaging 7,000 feet to evade detection, the bombers carried two kinds of incendiaries: M47s, 100-pound oil gel bombs, 182 per aircraft, each capable of starting a major fire, followed by M69s, 6-pound gelled-gasoline bombs, 1,520 per aircraft in addition to a few high explosives to deter firefighters.6 The attack on an area that the US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated to be 84.7 percent residential succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of air force planners. See also Michael Bess, in Choices Under Fire. Estimates of the death toll range from about 83,000 to nearly 200,000, with most coming in at about 100,000. In the ten-day period beginning on March 9, 9,373 tons of bombs destroyed 31 square miles of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe. No previous or subsequent conventional bombing raid anywhere ever came close to generating the toll in death and destruction of the great Tokyo raid of March 9-10, 1945. Sahr Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, p. 1. It soon made available images of the total devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki depicting the ravages of cities reduced to rubble and devoid of human life, thereby demonstrating the Promethean power of the victor. If you value the Journal, please go to the Subscription page and contribute. US National Archives. On March 9, 1945, with the code name “Operation Meetinghouse,” 334 B-29 bombers under the command of Colonel Curtis LeMay, took off from USAAF bases in the Mariana Islands. First, it suggested that there was little that Japanese authorities or any nation could have done in the face of such overwhelming technological power. Curtis LeMay was appointed commander of the 21st Bomber Command in the Pacific on January 20, 1945. . Could be interpreted . Targeting for the most part then and subsequently essentially defenseless populations, it was an approach that combined technological predominance and allocation of vast financial resources with a priority on minimization of US casualties and maximization of enemy civilian casualties. 45-62. "They set to work at once sowing the sky with fire." In contrast to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which for fifty years has been the subject of intense research by Japanese, Americans and others, the most significant records of the Tokyo attack are those compiled at the time by Japanese police and fire departments. Capture of the Marianas, including Guam, Tinian and Saipan in summer 1944 had placed Japanese cities within effective range of the B-29 “Superfortress” bombers, while Japan’s depleted air and naval power and a blockade that cut off oil supplies left it virtually defenseless against sustained air attack. Basic decisions by the Japanese authorities and by Washington and the US occupation authorities shaped Japanese and American perceptions and memories of the firebombing and atomic bombing. This did not mean suppression of all information about the atomic bombing or the firebombings. Viewed from another angle, it would be worth inquiring about Japanese responses to the bombing. While firebombing never emerged as a major subject of American reflection or self-criticism, the atomic bombing eventually did. Tokyo firebombing This week marks the 60th anniversary of a March 9-10, 1945, air raid that killed an estimated 100,000 people in Tokyo. Yet it remains one of the forgotten horrors of the Second World War. As predicted, ~1600 tons of napalm-filled incendiary bombs released over Tokyo in the next 48 hours initiated enormous firestorms that engulfed 15 square miles of the city. Fisk and Karacas draw on Overall Report of Damage Sustained by the Nation During the Pacific War, Economic Stabilization Agency, Planning Department, Office of the Secretary General, 1949, which may be viewed here. The single effective Japanese government measure taken to reduce the slaughter of US bombing was the 1944 evacuation to the countryside of 400,000 third to sixth grade children from major cities, 225,000 of them from Tokyo, followed by 300,000 first to third graders in early 1945.11 In the absence of the evacuations, the carnage would have been far greater. At the same time, the nature of the targets and the weapons were transformed by new technologies and confronted new forms of resistance, and US leaders then and subsequently would insist that their targets were military and strategic even as they patently zeroed in on civilian populations. As [John] Dower says: ‘In the localities themselves, suffering was compounded not merely by the unprecedented nature of the catastrophe…but also by the fact that public struggle with this traumatic experience was not permitted.’”25 The US occupation authorities maintained a monopoly on scientific and medical information about the effects of the atomic bomb through the work of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, which treated the data gathered in studies of hibakusha as privileged information rather than making the results available for the treatment of victims or providing financial or medical support to aid victims. criticisms that emerged only in the wake of US victory. US National Archives. Less noted then and since in the United States and internationally were the systematic barbarities perpetrated by Japanese forces against resistant villagers, though this produced the largest number of the estimated ten to thirty million Chinese who lost their lives in the war, a number that far surpasses the half million or more Japanese noncombatants who died at the hands of US bombing, and may have exceeded Soviet losses to Nazi invasion conventionally estimated at 20 million lives.22 In that and subsequent wars, it would be the signature barbarities such as the Nanjing Massacre, the Bataan Death March, and the massacres at Nogunri and My Lai rather than the quotidian events that defined the systematic daily and hourly killing, which would attract sustained attention, spark bitter controversy, and shape historical memory. to our semi-monthly Newsletter to learn and link to the content of each issue. Thus, in eight days, with 1,600 sorties, LeMay’s air force burned out 32 square miles of the centers of Japan four largest cities, killing at least 150,000 people, though … From the Iliad to Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chapters 5-7. Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) examines the understanding of the Nanjing Massacre in each country. Robert Guillain was a French reporter assigned to Japan in 1938. He is the editor of The Asia-Pacific Journal. However, noted historians such as Gabriel Kolko, an American-born Canadian academic, estimates the Tokyo body count at 125,000 – which rivals the final death toll from the Hiroshima bombing. . If area bombing remained controversial, indeed, fiercely debated within military circles throughout much of World War II, by the end it would become the acknowledged centerpiece of war making, emblematic above all of the American way of war. Quoting Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the atom bomb project and the point man on radiation denial: "The Japanese claim that people died from radiation. Part two examines the bombing in Japanese and American historical memory including history, literature, commemoration and education. The firebombing, by contrast raised uncomfortable issues about the government’s decision to perpetuate the war through six months of punishing bombing with no alternative except defeat. There is a second major change in the international landscape of military conflict. of War Henry Stimson would worry about the “growing feeling of apprehension and misgiving as to the effect of the atomic bomb even in our own country”24 and take the lead in defending the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If this is true, the number was very small.". Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, pp. General Curtis LeMay's director of attack recalled. These bombings often overshadow the Firebombing in Tokyo that claimed the lives of over 100,000 Japanese, an equitable number to the death toll of the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima. A detailed photographic record, including images of scores of the dead, some burnt to a crisp and distorted beyond recognition, others apparently serene in death, and of acres of the city flattened as if by an immense tornado, is found in Ishikawa Koyo, Tokyo daikushu no zenkiroku (Complete Record of the Great Tokyo Air Attack) (Tokyo, 1992); Tokyo kushu o kiroku suru kai ed., Tokyo daikushu no kiroku (Record of the Great Tokyo Air Attack) (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1982), and Dokyumento: Tokyo daikushu (Document: The Great Tokyo Air Attack) (Tokyo: Yukeisha, 1968). The bottom photo, taken on March 7, … Many other bodies were not recovered, and the city's director of health estimated that 83,600 people were killed and another 40,918 wounded. 24-25. The Tokyo Air Raid started as a high altitude level carpet bombing over the main cities of Japan. This would become a hallmark of the American way of war, notably in campaigns from Korea and Indochina in the 1950s to 1975, but with new approaches that also took a devastating toll on civilians during the Gulf and Iraq Wars and throughout the Middle East in the new millennium. Comments, contributions, corrections, and suggestions are always welcome: Your email address will not be published. An insightful discussion of Japanese war crimes in the Pacific, locating the issues within a comparative context of atrocities committed by the US, Germany, and other powers, is Yuki Tanaka’s Hidden Horrors: Japanese Crimes in World War II. These bombings were especially horrifying because no more than two bombs destroyed many homes and killed almost 120 thousand people. It has been overshadowed by the atomic bombing and by heroic narratives of American conduct in the “Good War” that has been and remains at the center of American national consciousness.2 Arguably, however, the central breakthroughs that would characterize the American way of war subsequently occurred in area bombing of noncombatants that built on German, Japanese and British bombing of cities prior to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An extended fire swept over 15 square miles in 6 hours . U.S. bombing, by contrast, hewed to strategic targets, prioritizing military installations and factories until 1944, when it supported Britain in the wholesale bombing of German cities. The death toll of the Tokyo raid was the highest of any air raid during the entire war, including Hiroshima (estimated 70-80,000 deaths) and Nagasaki (estimated 60,000 deaths). Nature reinforced man's handiwork in the form of akakaze, the red wind that swept with hurricane force across the Tokyo plain and propelled firestorms with terrifying speed and intensity. . . Many more who died in the following weeks and months go unrecorded. II The Firebombing and Atomic Bombing of Japanese Cities: History, Memory, Culture, Commemoration. If accurate, it is indicative of the immense difficulty in escaping for those near the center of the Tokyo firestorm on that windswept night. The 28-mile-per-hour wind, measured a mile from the fire, increased to an estimated 55 miles at the perimeter, and probably more within. Japanese ideological mobilization and control was such that there are no signs of resistance to the government’s suicidal perpetuation of the war at any time during the bombing campaign. Mark Selden, “String of Pearls: The Archipelago of Bases, Military Colonization, and the Making of the American Empire in the Pacific,” International Journal of Okinawan Studies, Vol 3 No 1, June 2012 (Special Issue on Islands) pp. Although many people today are more aware of the bombing of Dresden than Tokyo, the bombing of Dresden a month earlier resulted in an estimated 18- 25,000 deaths. Almost 90% of the bombs dropped on the home islands of Japan were delivered by this type of bomber. Grayling goes on to note the different experiences of survivors of the two types of bombing, particularly as a result of radiation symptoms from the atomic bomb, with added dread in the case of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki hibakusha, not only for themselves but also for future generations. Each of these, in different ways, highlights the possibilities of bombing independent of nuclear weapons but also with greater precision than in the heyday of area bombing. The firebombing of Tokyo is often overshadowed by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. . If other nations, notably Germany, England and Japan, led the way in area bombing during World War II, US targeting of entire cities with conventional weapons only emerged in 1944-45 on a scale that quickly dwarfed all previous destruction. People died from extreme heat, from oxygen deficiency, from carbon monoxide asphyxiation, from being trampled beneath the feet of stampeding crowds, and from drowning. but at the Tokyo Trials, defense attempts to raise the issue of American firebombing and the atomic bombing were ruled out by the court. Hiroshima, the famous account written by John Hersey for The New Yorker, had a huge impact in the US, but was banned in Japan. Although many people today are more aware of the bombing of Dresden than Tokyo, the bombing of Dresden a month earlier resulted in an estimated 18- 25,000 deaths. The Tokyo Fire Department gave the total number of casualties as 97,000 dead and 125,000 wounded, although historians 40 years later would argue that the … This is one reason why, six decades on, World War II retains its aura for Americans as the “Good War”, a conception that renders it difficult to come to terms with the massive bombing of civilians in the final year of the war. Moral Dimensions of World War II (New York: Knopf, 2006), pp. The drone opens a new page in this history of state terror. In Japan, the US air war reached peak intensity with area bombing and climaxed with the atomic bombing of Japanese cities between the night of March 9-10 and Japan’s August 15, 1945 surrender. Their 500-gpm pumps were therefore largely useless.”. The human toll that night exceeded that of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year, where the initial blasts killed about 70,000 people and … Part one provides an overview of US bombing strategies culminating in the final year of the war in US prioritization for the first time on the bombing of civilians and assesses its impact in shaping the postwar global order and military strategy. Given the near total inability to fight fires of the magnitude produced that night10, it is possible, given the interest of the authorities in minimizing the scale of death and injury and the total inability of the civil defense efforts to respond usefully to the firestorm, to imagine that casualties may have been several times higher, more likely in the range of 200,000 than 100,000: this is an issue that merits the attention of researchers, beginning with the unpublished records of the US Strategic Bombing Survey which are now available for researchers. The US would celebrate the power of the bomb in powerful visual statements of the birth of the nuclear era that would be directed at the entire world on August 6, on August 9 and in the decades that followed, both in officially controlled photographic images and in privileged reportage, notably that of New York Times science reporter William R. Laurence. The Tokyo fire department put the casualties at 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department believed that 124,711 people had been killed or wounded. By contrast, the US destruction of more than sixty Japanese cities prior to Hiroshima has been slighted, at least until recently, both in the scholarly literatures in English and Japanese and in popular consciousness. Air raids over Tokyo continued in the period afterward, and the death toll perhaps reached 200,000 civilian deaths alone. Throughout the spring and summer of 1945 the US air war in Japan reached an intensity that is still perhaps unrivaled in the magnitude of human slaughter.15 That moment was a product of the combination of technological breakthroughs, the collapse of Japanese defenses, and American nationalism capable of overriding moral and political scruples pertaining to the killing of civilians. Such a view is, I believe, negated by US participation in area bombing attacks at Dresden in 1944. But the critical moment in US bombing and napalming of cities came with the firebombing and nuclear attacks that obliterated large areas of Japanese cities between February and August 1945, leaving an indelible imprint not only on the urban landscape but also on subsequent U.S. war making. A History of Europe Since 1945, the destruction of cities and civilian populations was by no means limited to Germany and Japan but extended all across Eastern and Western Europe to the Soviet Union and China exacting a terrible toll in lives. The firebombing of Tokyo was designed to terrorise and bomb the Japanese into surrender. Michael Sherry, “The United States and Strategic Bombing: From Prophecy to Memory,” in Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. 382-404, and John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, espec. With area bombing at the core of its strategic agenda, US attacks on cities and noncombatants would run the gamut from firebombing, napalming, and cluster bombing to the use of chemical defoliants and depleted uranium weapons and bunker buster bombs in an ever expanding circle of destruction.19. Thank you for your support. The Tokyo Fire Department estimated 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded. The Japanese People and World War II, (New York: WW Norton 1978), p. 163, puts the number of urban residents evacuated to the countryside overall at 10 million. Cary Karacas, “Place, Public Memory, and the Tokyo Air Raids.” Geographical Review 100, no. . He estimates that 350,000 students from national schools in grades three to six were evacuated in 1944 and 100,000 first and second graders in early 1945. The firebombing raids on Tokyo, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, were low altitude incendiary bombing raids ordered by General Curtis LeMay. . The result everywhere would be the decimation of noncombatant populations and extraordinary “kill ratios” favoring the US military. See the extensive discussion of censorship in Takemae Eiji, Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy (London: Continuum, 2002), espec. Nagasaki mushroom cloud. The death toll was on par with the August 6 atomic attack on Hiroshima. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey study of Effects of Air Attack on Urban Complex Tokyo-Kawasaki-Yokohama (n.p. The Japanese later called this the “Night of the Black Snow.” Ian Buruma, “Expect to be Lied to in Japan,” New York Review of Books, November 8, 2012. 16-20. Under US censorship, Matsushige’s photos could not be published until 1952 following the end of the occupation. Indeed, under US censorship, there would be no Japanese public criticism of either the firebombing or the atomic bombing. What was new was both the scale of killing made possible by the new technologies and the routinization of mass killing of non-combatants, or state terrorism. This investigation reported that the death toll from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was 260,000, but the figure was adjusted to an estimated 140,000, following a United Nations report in 1976. John W. Dower, “Sensational Rumors, Seditious Graffiti, and the Nightmares of the Thought Police,” in Japan in War and Peace (New York: The New Press, 1993), p. 117. He considers US consideration of use of the atomic bomb in all of these, noting US plans to drop an atomic bomb on Tokyo when more bombs became available by the end of August, if Japan had not yet surrendered. The death toll of that air raid alone was higher than the total number of people killed by all the other 92 urban firebombing raids on Japan during the war. Vol. This article has reflected on the political dynamics that lie behind the differential treatment of the firebombing and atomic bombing of Japan in both Japan and the United States, events that brought disaster to the Japanese nation, but also contributed to ending a bitter war and paved the way for the rebirth of a Japan stripped of its empire (but not its emperor) and prepared to embark on the rebuilding of the nation under American auspices. . Overall, by Sahr Conway-Lanz’s calculation, the US firebombing campaign destroyed 180 square miles of 67 cities, killed more than 300,000 people and injured an additional 400,000, figures that exclude the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which took 140,000 lives by the end of 1945.13 Cary Karacas and Bret Fisk conclude that the firebombing raids “destroyed a significant percentage of most of Japan’s cities, wiped out a quarter of all housing in the country, made nine million people homeless, and killed at least 187,000 civilians, and injured 214,000 more,” while suggesting that the actual figures are likely higher.14. According to Japanese police statistics, the 65 raids on Tokyo between December 6, 1944 and August 13, 1945 resulted in 137,582 casualties, 787,145 homes and buildings destroyed, and 2,625,279 people displaced.8 The figure of roughly 100,000 deaths, provided by Japanese and American authorities, both of whom may have had reasons of their own for minimizing the death toll, seems to me arguably low in light of population density, wind conditions, and survivors’ accounts.9 With an average of 103,000 inhabitants per square mile and peak levels as high as 135,000 per square mile, the highest density of any industrial city in the world, 15.8 square miles of Tokyo were destroyed on a night when fierce winds whipped the flames and walls of fire blocked scores of thousands who attempted to flee. The Japanese authorities had reasons of their own for highlighting atomic bomb imagery while suppressing imagery of the firebombing. What was banned under the occupation were close-up images of victims whether of the firebombing or the atomic bombing captured on film by Japanese photographers, that is, the human face of the atomic holocaust that was captured on film in iconic photographs of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tokyo by Japanese photographers. The fact of the matter, however, is that, with the exception of a group of atomic scientists, these criticisms were raised only in the postwar. See the special issue of the Asia-Pacific Journal edited by Bret Fisk and Cary Karacas, The Firebombing of Tokyo: Views from the Ground,The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 3 No 1, January 17, 2011. Robert Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. The death toll was higher than the 70,000 people that died in … Before and after comparison of Tokyo The master work on the world history of peace thought and activism is John Gittings, The Glorious Art of Peace. Film shot by Japanese cameramen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings was confiscated. 521–37. The first wave of planes was followed by a procession of bombers sowing death until dawn, touching off devastating firestorms: almost 17 square miles of the city were reduced to ashes. Estimates for the death toll in the firebombing of Tokyo range from 70,000 to almost 200,000, with most historians settling for around 130,000. David Fedman and Cary Karacas. The Survey’s kill ratio has, however, been challenged by Japanese researchers who found much higher kill ratios at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly when one includes those who died of bomb injuries months and years later. . In each of these, the United States to a considerable extent has monopolized the skies in the dual sense that it alone carried out massive bombing, and its homeland, even its military bases in the US and throughout the world, for more than half a century, have remained virtually unscathed. Casualty statistics were suppressed. Bodies of people trapped and burned as they fled through a street during the attack on Tokyo on the night of March 9-10. We can view this from another angle. In my view, the SBS estimates both exaggerate the killed to injured ratio and understate the numbers killed in the Tokyo raid. 150-93. It also assured that there would be no significant Japanese debate over war responsibility or the nature of the imperial or imperial-military system in general, and the decision to sacrifice Okinawa and Japan’s cities with massive loss of life in particular. . Yet for the US, victory in subsequent wars—Korea, Indochina, Afghanistan and Iraq being the most notable—would prove extraordinarily elusive. Photograph by Ishikawa Koyo. U.S. For US tax payers, donations are tax-deductible. It was also seen as payback for the Pearl Harbour attacks and the mistreatment of Allied prisoners of war. Atomic Bomb survivors at Miyuki Bridge, Hiroshima, two kilometers from Ground Zero. The Strategic Bombing Survey provided a technical description of the firestorm and its effects on Tokyo: The chief characteristic of the conflagration . The full fury of firebombing and napalm was unleashed on the night of March 9-10, 1945 when LeMay sent 334 B-29s low over Tokyo from the Marianas.5 In contrast to earlier US tactical bombing strategies emphasizing military targets, their mission was to reduce much of the city to rubble, kill its citizens, force survivors to flee, and instill terror in the survivors. In drawing attention to US bombing strategies deploying “conventional weapons” while keeping nuclear weapons in reserve since 1945, the point is not to deny the critical importance of the latter in shaping the global balance of power/balance of terror. A.C. Grayling explains the different responses to firebombing and atomic bombing this way: “. William R. Laurence, U.S. Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales: Tests on New Mexico Range Confirm that Blast, and not Radiation Took Toll, New York Times, September 12, 1945. Bret Fisk and Cary Karacas, The Firebombing of Tokyo and Its Legacy: Introduction, The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 3 No 1, January 17, 2011. By dawn, more than 100,000 people were dead, a million were homeless, and 40 square kilometers of Tokyo were burned to the ground. The official death toll was some 83,000, but historians generally agree that victims unaccounted for bring the figure to around 100,000 -- overwhelmingly civilians. From the outset of the occupation, the US imposed tight censorship with respect to the bombing, particularly the atomic bombing. On August 8, news reports from Japan, plus a damage report created by the United States, began to paint a picture of the destruction. Why, then, is the atom bombing demonized when the March 9, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo, which killed 85,000 Japanese in one night, is not?

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