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It's a little known snippit from history, but about five months before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima, the United States bombed Tokyo with the full intent of causing as many civilian casualties as possible. This post is about that, and I entreat you to comment about it afterward.
In the wee hours of March 10, 1945, 300 B-29s dropped over 2,000 tons of incendiaries on one section of Tokyo (a space seven-tenths the size of Manhattan) and in 2 1/2 hours cremated over 100,000 men, women, and children alive.
The fires started out simply, but as the winds whipped them up, they began to quickly spread. The fire front spread so fast, in fact, police often did not have time to evacuate threatened blocks even if there was an easy way out. Many people opted to jump into some of the canals through out the city, and though several did drown, more were killed when the waters became so hot that they were boiled alive. In other cases, people crowded onto the bridges, only to be killed as the steel slowly turned white hot.
The fires were so intense, that to this day no one is quite sure how many people were killed. Reports tell of bodies being welded into pools of molten glass, and one photo shows a woman (unidentifiable) with the charred remains of her baby laying beside her. Conservative historians put the death toll around one hundred thousand, while Tokyo's own records push that number higher, in excess of two hundred thousand dead with countless wounded. What is known, is that the attack was no accident. No, it was intended to do just what it did.
General Curtis LeMay was having problems. Precision bombing wasn't doing as well as it was in Europe, and his superiors were starting to give him a hard time about it. "This outfit has been getting a lot of publicity without having really accomplished a hell of a lot in bombing results," he complained on March 6, before deciding to order the use of Napalm on a civilian target. When later asked about the results, he stated the civilians were "scorched and boiled and baked to death." Over the next few months up to the dropping of the atomic bomb, the firebombing was repeated on several other smaller cities, some of which were wiped off the map.
While LeMay proclaimed that the tactic was working, breaking the cottage industry that had thwarted his precision bombing campaigns, the truth is that it was having mixed results. The Japanese military still maintained the ability to continue the war, and while it could be argued the attack on Tokyo did limit their capability, it did not justify the loss of the one hundred thousand civilians.
It's worth noting, that while the bombings of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki are widely discussed in the history books, more often than not the bombings of March 10th have nothing so much as a foot note.
In a way it's ironic. In the 1930s, as we do today, Americans took great pride in the principle that civilian populations should not be targeted for bombing. "Inhuman barbarism," President Roosevelt called it in 1939 when told of the attacks both by the Japanese and the Germans. Indeed, that was one reason to fight the Japanese: they targeted civilians, we didn't.
In the wee hours of March 10, 1945, 300 B-29s dropped over 2,000 tons of incendiaries on one section of Tokyo (a space seven-tenths the size of Manhattan) and in 2 1/2 hours cremated over 100,000 men, women, and children alive.
The fires started out simply, but as the winds whipped them up, they began to quickly spread. The fire front spread so fast, in fact, police often did not have time to evacuate threatened blocks even if there was an easy way out. Many people opted to jump into some of the canals through out the city, and though several did drown, more were killed when the waters became so hot that they were boiled alive. In other cases, people crowded onto the bridges, only to be killed as the steel slowly turned white hot.
The fires were so intense, that to this day no one is quite sure how many people were killed. Reports tell of bodies being welded into pools of molten glass, and one photo shows a woman (unidentifiable) with the charred remains of her baby laying beside her. Conservative historians put the death toll around one hundred thousand, while Tokyo's own records push that number higher, in excess of two hundred thousand dead with countless wounded. What is known, is that the attack was no accident. No, it was intended to do just what it did.
General Curtis LeMay was having problems. Precision bombing wasn't doing as well as it was in Europe, and his superiors were starting to give him a hard time about it. "This outfit has been getting a lot of publicity without having really accomplished a hell of a lot in bombing results," he complained on March 6, before deciding to order the use of Napalm on a civilian target. When later asked about the results, he stated the civilians were "scorched and boiled and baked to death." Over the next few months up to the dropping of the atomic bomb, the firebombing was repeated on several other smaller cities, some of which were wiped off the map.
While LeMay proclaimed that the tactic was working, breaking the cottage industry that had thwarted his precision bombing campaigns, the truth is that it was having mixed results. The Japanese military still maintained the ability to continue the war, and while it could be argued the attack on Tokyo did limit their capability, it did not justify the loss of the one hundred thousand civilians.
It's worth noting, that while the bombings of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki are widely discussed in the history books, more often than not the bombings of March 10th have nothing so much as a foot note.
In a way it's ironic. In the 1930s, as we do today, Americans took great pride in the principle that civilian populations should not be targeted for bombing. "Inhuman barbarism," President Roosevelt called it in 1939 when told of the attacks both by the Japanese and the Germans. Indeed, that was one reason to fight the Japanese: they targeted civilians, we didn't.
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