Posted on 03/09/2025 6:15:43 AM PDT by DFG
On the night of March 9, 1945, U.S. warplanes launch a new bombing offensive against Japan, dropping 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo over the course of the next 48 hours. Almost 16 square miles in and around the Japanese capital were incinerated, and between 80,000 and 130,000 Japanese civilians were killed in the worst single firestorm in recorded history.
Early on March 9, Air Force crews met on the Mariana Islands of Tinian and Saipan for a military briefing. They were planning a low-level bombing attack on Tokyo that would begin that evening, but with a twist: Their planes would be stripped of all guns except for the tail turret. The decrease in weight would increase the speed of each Superfortress bomber—and would also increase its bomb load capacity by 65 percent, making each plane able to carry more than seven tons.
Speed would be crucial, and the crews were warned that if they were shot down, all haste was to be made for the water, which would increase their chances of being picked up by American rescue crews. Should they land within Japanese territory, they could only expect the very worst treatment by civilians, as the mission that night was going to entail the deaths of tens of thousands of those very same civilians.
The cluster bombing of the downtown Tokyo suburb of Shitamachi had been approved only a few hours earlier. Shitamachi was composed of roughly 750,000 people living in cramped quarters in wooden-frame buildings. Setting ablaze this “paper city” was a kind of experiment in the effects of firebombing; it would also destroy the light industries, called “shadow factories,” that produced prefabricated war materials destined for Japanese aircraft factories.
The denizens of Shitamachi never had a chance of defending themselves. Their fire brigades were hopelessly undermanned, poorly trained and poorly equipped. At 5:34 p.m., Superfortress B-29 bombers took off from Saipan and Tinian, reaching their target at 12:15 a.m. on March 10. Three hundred and thirty-four bombers, flying at a mere 500 feet, dropped their loads, creating a giant bonfire fanned by 30-knot winds that helped raze Shitamachi and spread the flames throughout Tokyo. Masses of panicked and terrified Japanese civilians scrambled to escape the inferno, most unsuccessfully. The human carnage was so great that the blood-red mists and stench of burning flesh that wafted up sickened the bomber pilots, forcing them to grab oxygen masks to keep from vomiting.
The raid lasted slightly longer than three hours—and continued again the next day. “In the black Sumida River, countless bodies were floating, clothed bodies, naked bodies, all black as charcoal. It was unreal,” recorded one doctor at the scene.
This is what won the war- not hiroshoma and nagasaki. That just ended the war.
They got what they deserved... And now we get along.
“blood-red mists”
Total BS. Someone has been watching too many movies.
Japan paid a very heavy price for their aggression and the unspeakable cruelty they inflicted. We made them change their ways. Right now the world does hand wringing about what to do about the Palestinian “problem”. If one wants peace you have to make peace and sometimes the endeavor ain’t pretty.
I was told that the Tokyo, Kawasaki, and Yokohama fire bombing in March 1945 killed more people than the two atomic bombs combined. Japanese people suffered so much because of the few globalist deep state a-holes.I talked to many who lived through it and they didn’t want it. They were just glad when the war was over. I”m sure many Ukes feeling that way now.
> ... And now we get along. <
Say what you want about FDR/Truman. They knew how to fight, and end, a war. Contrast that with George W. Bush’s behavior after our Pearl Harbor: the 9/11 attacks.
Bush chose a failed combination of appeasement (“Islam is peace”) and nation-building. And so the West is now NOT getting along with Islam. To the contrary, they are on the march and we are in retreat.
I have never believed in bringing a war to innocents.
The dropping of the bomb was carefully watched by the USSR who already had the recipe thanks to Julius and Ethel.
Expensive wars ensued that put America in today’s situation:
drained and broke thanks to the lousy elected looting politicos.
Count the mansions.
For the future increase the term of president to two six-year terms, senators to two Four-year and HR to four two-year terms.
Expenses and salaries for the congress, their staffs and all expenses should be paid out of the respected state’s treasury.
It would solve many problems.
Gee. Who’d a thunk it that bombing Pearl Harbor and the rest of Oahu would have precipitated the bombing of Tokyo?
They started it
The atomic bombs saved millions of Japanese lives.
If not for the atomic bombs, there would have been much more firebombing.
B-29 crews reported floating debris as high as 20,000 feet over the burning cities. Not everyday you see a screen door floating at 20,000.
> I talked to many who lived through it and they didn’t want it. <
Yep. A relevant quote from Hermann Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man:
“Of course people don’t want war. Why should a poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best thing he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?”
Nailed it.
Expected, but a LOT of denial in the comments on this one.
It was a horrific war crime. It didn’t get prosecuted because we won.
To deny that point is to deny reality, and engage in stupid justifications.
Setting fire to Hamburg and Dresden, to name just two cities, killed some 60,000 people — without an atomic bomb, compared to which, fire is a safe and effective way to settle arguments.
If only warriors respected the rules of the game — e.g., no nukes — we might have wars with some possibility of survival of life on earth.
> I have never believed in bringing a war to innocents. <
Studies done after WW2 showed that the Allied bombing of German cities did nothing to break the morale of German citizens. Albert Speer - Hitler’s armaments minister - once said the Allies should have focused all their no bombers on Germany’s ball-bearing industry.
That would have brought the German war machine to a screeching halt, said Speer.
On the other hand, unlike with Germany, Japanese cities were filled with small factories that contributed to the war effort. So maybe those cities were legitimate war targets. (?)
The sad part was that many of the war criminals were never punished.
I worked years ago with an older woman, Japanese by birth, who had been a young tween/teenager in Tokyo during the firebombing. I don’t recall now how the conversation started and unfolded; I certainly didn’t try to press her for details. But I recall her telling how her mother had sent her out for water the next day. She had to move through streets and across bridges carpeted with the incinerated bodies of victims, and she spoke of crossing small canals and creeks choked with the same.
Her mother and siblings were far enough out that they survived, but still .... I didn’t press her for what had happened to her father and older male relatives who may have been in the Japanese military.
Some years after the war, after she had grown up to marriageable age, she married an American serviceman and ended up emigrating to the U.S., becoming an American citizen, and a great Republican and Reagan supporter. I think her husband may have been career military and that she had spent most of her adult life doing the Army wife thing. She was an American patriot in the way the best of our immigrants have always been. As to the war, it was a catastrophe for Japan and an almost immeasurable tragedy for the Japanese civilians who were caught in it.
Whether she had been raised in the cult of emperor worship, I don’t know, but the military junta that launched Japan’s invasion of China and ultimately led to Pearl Harbor and the blitz across the South Pacific to overrun the European colonies was not in the habit of consulting the people in the rice paddies and factories. Even among the educated Japanese elites, plenty of people knew Japan was making a mistake. Admiral Yamamoto, of course, became the iconic U.S. symbol of the “good Japanese” had who tried to warn the warlords who were drunk on bushido.
Her clincher — and I imagine this was deeply embedded after so many years in the U.S. — is that she knew who started the war. She knew what Japan had done in China. She knew how the Japanese had treated POWs and people in the territories Japan had overrun in the Pacific. Sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind is a fearful thing.
Germany at least went through de-Nazification. Japan kept the emperor and has still never made a deep reckoning with its war record. The former U.S.S.R. has never gone through the full immersion depramming either, although the dissident counterculture in Russia was strong enough that a lot of this has happened organically. The worst liars with regard to totalitarianism and the story of communism in the last century are now probably in American universities; Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Stanford and the rest need the equivalent of de-Nazification.
And then there’s the Islamic world, especially the Arab and Middle Eastern parts of it.
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