Tokyo Fire Raid
By The Tokyo fire raid was sixty years ago yesterday. 334 USAAF B-29s, each stripped of armament because the Japanese didn’t have the gas to fuel interceptors, flew over Tokyo and dropped incendiary bombs on civilian neighborhoods. Somewhere between 80000 and 200000 were suffocated or burned to death in a few hours. I have read that it is the greatest loss of life in the shortest period in human history. It was certainly worse than the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The fire raids over Japan were chiefly the work of a man named Curtis LeMay, an Army Air Force general who is, by any honest account, one of the worst war criminals of World War II. The fire raids killed over a million Japanese citizens with no noticeable effect on the Japanese war effort. Robert McNamara played a role in determining tactics and targets, which he discusses in Fog of War. The best book I’ve read on strategic bombing is Robert Pape’s Bombing To Win, although I’d also recommend Tami Biddle’s Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, and of course W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction. As my students know, the Tokyo fire raid in particular has held a strange fascination for me over the last year. I don’t know why.
This is a picture of B-29s against the backdrop of Mt. Fuji. I don’t know what day it was, and and I don’t know where they were going.