March 10, 1945, more than 300 American warplanes dropped 500,000 napalm bombs on civilians in Tokyo
Can the most destructive bombardment in world history be hiding in plain sight? It is tempting to make this claim about the onslaught on Tokyo by the US Air Force over the night of 9–10 March 1945 that resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 people.
The victims thus exceed those directly killed by the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic bombs in August, and by the British–American air raids on Dresden on 13–15 February (which a team of German historians now estimates at a maximum of 25,000).
Beyond numbers, the “great Tokyo air raid” (Tokyo daikushu) also has a singular horror. The tide of war had long turned decisively against Japan.
The capture of the Mariana Islands in November 1944 had made it possible for America’s powerful B-29 bombers to launch long-range raids on its territory.
Pounding attacks on the port city of Kobe and Tokyo itself in February, causing extensive damage, were a foretaste.
To total air superiority and immense explosive power was added a change of tactics from high-altitude to lower-flying bombing.
Three more ingredients completed the mix: clear skies, the preponderance of wood-and-paper buildings in the target areas (including the industrial flatlands in the city’s east), and strong winds conducive to the quick spread of fires.
On a highly combustible city, 325 B-29s dropped around 2000 tons of incendiary bombs in two hours.
A recipe for carnage, then, from burning by napalm to suffocation by noxious smoke to laceration by molten glass.
Individual fires met, and exploded into infernos. Many people sought relief in the river, only to be boiled to death, asphyxiated or drowned.
There were few places to hide; shelters dug under homes were more often death traps. By early morning, the relentless barrage and conflagration had flattened much of the cityscape.
Survivors buried relatives where they could, set up impromptu shrines, sought shelter and relief.
Firefighters and hospitals continued to work against the odds. Officials made records, collated statistics, issued orders. The hard core of a militarised and police state pulled ever tighter around itself and over its exhausted citizens.
The air campaign was repeated across Japan over the ensuing weeks. Sixty-six urban centres were pulverised, at huge cost to lives and infrastructure. Each city, every neighbourhood, was afflicted from on high in its own way.
Military options narrowed to last-ditch homeland defence, diplomatic ones to the desperate search for an exit short of absolute defeat, human ones to survival.
Then, the double use of a “new and most cruel bomb” in early August led to political crisis and surrender from on high. Eight years of war were over. Japan entered the unknown.
What happened in Tokyo took its place among the many horrors of those years across the world. But where was that place? The short answer is, elusive at best.
Inevitably, the brute realities of the war’s outcome imposed a taxonomy of suffering that would shape perceptions of the global conflict for years to come.
The millions of dead Japanese and German civilians, including tens of thousands who in the immediate postwar period were slaughtered in or expelled from lands their armies had conquered, featured hardly at all.
In the convulsive era of occupation, cold war, and recovery after 1945, both winners and losers had a lot on their minds.
Japanese and Germans gradually negotiated their way towards admission to the new order. There was little moralism and a lot of rationalisation.
Most, consumed by the business of living, deferred a backward look. Memories were buried, discarded, revised, sentimentalised, privatised.
And in circumstances of dependency and political constraint, much was either off limits or already taken care of.
By the time the covers began to lift, and people could in principle think and speak more freely, many routes to the past were overgrown.
Tokyo boomed and bloomed. But the catastrophe that had visited the city in March 1945 remained largely out of sight. Indeed, each addition to the skyline made it more remote.
When the Olympic Games in 1964 marked new Japan’s opening to the world, Tokyo celebrated its ability to rise from the depths.
It was a way to enfold the century’s two colossal disasters, the “great Kanto earthquake” (Kanto daishinsai) of September 1923, whose toll was also well over 100,000, being the first.
The link was real: in each case, incineration had consumed the wooden shacks of the working class “low city” (shitamachi) between the Sumida and Arakawa rivers.
There were other reasons for relative silence. The firebombing, though devastating, was a late episode in the war yet several months from its end.
August’s climactic events would deliver to Hiroshima and Nagasaki an unwanted, existential status as both “victim” and “peace” cities.
Tokyo escaped that fate and the dilemmas it entails. The calamity and its dead, however, were left in the margins of remembrance.
In the atomic cities, Hiroshima especially (Nagasaki had more going for it), politicised memory was an unavoidable drag.
But there was a certain convenience for Japan’s elite that the main symbol of national suffering, and site of pietistic peace pilgrimage, was far from the capital.
Sustained memorialisation of Tokyo’s experience of war might invite unwelcome questions, not least about Japan’s own aerial assaults, from Chongqing in 1938–43 to the late madness of suicide planes. Better let tortured souls lie.
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