Tokyo Firebombing – March 1945
When Cpl Manuel Flores and the ground echelon of the 2nd Combat Cargo Group arrived in Tokyo Bay, 30th September 1945, they drove through the center of Tokyo. They witnessed district after district of shear destruction and devastated and starving families. How did it come to this? Manuel and his comrades must have felt that this was really a nightmare, beyond comprehension, and not real.
Just one year earlier, Tokyo was barely touched by the war. What happened? The Boeing aircraft company, under contract with the US War Department developed and deployed the B-29 Superfortress. The B-29 was designed with state-of-the-art technology, which included a pressurized, dual-wheeled tricycle landing gear, and an analog computer-controlled gun system that allowed one gunner and a fire-control officer to direct four remote machine gun turrets. The $3 billion cost of design and production (equivalent to $45 billion today), far exceeding the $1.9 billion cost of the Manhattan Project, made the B-29 program the most expensive of the war.
During the summer of 1944, he US Marines captured the Marianas chain of islands, consisting primarily of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam which became air bases from which to launch B-29 Superfortress operations against Japan. The islands were about 1500 miles from Tokyo, a range which the B-29s could just about manage. In addition, a direct supply line from the United States by ship was established to enable a massive bombing campaign against Japan.
Four B-29 Bomb Groups (part of the 20th Air Force) were sent on their first mission to Japan on 24 November with 111 planes. The target was the Nakajima Engine Plant at the arsenal sector of Tokyo. Also, for the first time, the B-29 encountered the “Jet Stream”, which was a high-speed wind coming out of the west at speeds as high as 200 mph at precisely the altitudes at which the bombers were operating. This caused the bomber formations to be disrupted and made accurate bombing impossible. Because of the jet stream winds and bad weather, only 24 planes attacked the primary target; the majority dropped their bombs on the secondary target of the Tokyo Docks.
US Pacific Bomber Command attempted to duplicate the 8th Air Force bombing campaign over Europe to bomb Japanese military, industrial, transportation and oil facilities. By February 1945, it was evident that it was NOT working, primarily because of the jet stream. A new commanding General, Curtis Lemay, decided to change the strategy and on the night of March 9 -10, 1945, 302 B-29s conducted a nighttime low-level bombing using incendiary bombs.
The result of the attack caused massive destruction and casualties beyond any previous bombing of the war! The individual fires caused by the bombs joined to create a general conflagration, which would have been classified as a firestorm but for prevailing winds gusting at 17 to 28 mph. When it was over, sixteen square miles of the center of Tokyo had gone up in flames and nearly 100,000 people had been killed. Fourteen B-29s were lost. The remainder of March 1945 through July 1945 witnessed the continued “fire-bombing” of Tokyo and all major industrial cities in Japan.
by Charles River Editors (Author)
Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, commander of the B-29s of the entire Marianas area, declared that if the war is shortened by a single day, the attack will have served its purpose." – The New York Times. As American forces pushed the Japanese back across the Pacific from 1942-1944, their island-hopping campaign ultimately made it possible for the Air Force to conduct bombing runs over the Japanese mainland. The first serious air raids came in November 1944, after the Americans had captured the Marianas Islands, and through February 1945, American bombers concentrated on military targets at the fringes of the city, particularly air defenses. However, the air raids of March 1945, and particularly on the night of March 9, were a different story altogether. In what is generally referred to as strategic or area bombing, waves of bombers flew low over Tokyo for over two and a half hours, dropping incendiary bombs with the intention of producing a massive firestorm. The American raids intended to produce fires that would kill soldiers and civilians, as well as the munitions factories and apartment buildings of those who worked in them. 325 B-29s headed toward Tokyo, and nearly 300 of them dropped bombs on it, destroying more than 267,000 buildings and killing more than 83,000 people, making it the deadliest day of the war. The firebombing that night and morning left 25% of Tokyo charred, with the damage spread out over 20 miles of the metropolis. In fact, the damage was so extensive that casualty counts ranged by over 100,000.
Additional raids, this time largely on the north and west, came in April, and in May, raids hit Ginza and the south. Altogether, American bombers flew more than 4,000 missions over Tokyo before surrender. The damage was spread widely, but it was worst in the low city, where some neighborhoods were virtually depopulated as survivors fled to the relative safety of the countryside. Honjo and Fukagawa each lost roughly 95% of their pre-raid populations.
In 1940, Tokyo was a city of perhaps 6.8 million, but two years after the end of the war, when the population had already begun to increase again, it was still no more than 4.1 million. As with dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing of Tokyo has remained controversial since the end of World War II. Japan had wisely spread out its industrial facilities across Tokyo so that one concerted attack could not deal a severe blow to its military capabilities. However, by spreading everything out, as the Germans had also done, Allied planes hit targets in residential zones, greatly increasing the casualties. Thus, by destroying as much of Tokyo’s wartime manufacturing as possible, the American air force also destroyed half the city.