Posted on 03/14/2002 8:01:56 AM PST by Bubba_Leroy
From the housewives who cart home their groceries by bicycle, to the tiny shops and simple homes, Sumida Ward's irregular grid of narrow, gently bending streets appears at first glance to have gone unchanged for many decades.
But because 57 years ago this week a fleet of American B-29 bombers dropped 1,665 tons of napalm-filled bombs on Tokyo, leaving almost nothing standing over 16 square miles, there are few places in Japan where appearances like these could be more deceptive.
In one horrific night, the firebombing of Tokyo — then a city largely of wooden buildings — killed an estimated 100,000 people. In the spring and summer of 1945, similarly devastating raids on over 60 Japanese cities occurred before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought World War II to an end.
Despite the huge toll, the firebombing of Tokyo left surprisingly few traces in the popular memory of Japanese, or Americans.
"When I go to speak to schools about what happened, the students just stare at me blankly," said Hiroshi Hoshino, a hale, silver-haired survivor of the destruction who still lives in the Sumida Ward neighborhood where his family lost everything. "Of course, everyone knows about the atomic bombings, but many people are not aware of the napalm attacks at all."
Only recently has Mr. Hoshino, now 71, banded together with other survivors to devote what he says will be the rest of his life to preserving the memory of the people killed in the March 10, 1945, bombings.
Incinerated, trampled and suffocated, people died on the very first day of the incendiary campaign in considerably greater numbers than were killed in Nagasaki. Yet in contrast to the annual memorials to the nuclear victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the anniversary of the Tokyo attack passes almost unnoticed.
This year, $800,000 in private donations enabled the victims to open a small museum last weekend.
There are many reasons why the American firebombing campaign has received so little attention. Japan's cities were incinerated after similar Allied firebombing of German cities, whereas the atomic attacks even now remain unique in history. Moreover, for Japanese, the atomic explosions subtly reinforced feelings of wartime victimhood and righteousness, making the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims important symbols to mourn.
Almost yearly, leading Japanese politicians risk diplomatic incidents with neighboring countries by publicly honoring the country's fallen soldiers.
Yet apart from the atomic bomb victims, almost nothing has been done to honor Japan's civilian dead, partly because this might raise awkward questions about Japanese leaders during the war and partly because of the avid pursuit of friendship with America after 1945.
"Until the San Francisco Treaty in 1952, Japan was under control of the occupation forces, and when they arrived, they applied media restrictions, saying that one should not report things which reflected negatively on the United States," said Shinichi Arai, a historian who has written a comparison of European and Japanese civilian bombing. Later, as the country formed a close alliance with the United States, he said, "we were too busy trying to rebuild our country, and trying to forget the past."
For Japanese leaders, remembering the firebombing victims could mean explaining things like the deliberate placement of war industries in dense residential areas, or the prolongation of the war for many months after its outcome was clear — topics that even now have rarely been discussed here.
For Americans, it would raise questions about the prosecution of the war according to standards that Washington had long denounced as inhuman. "With the firebombings, we crossed the line that we had said was clearly beyond the pale of civilization," said John Dower, a leading American historian of Japan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The American reaction at the time was that they deserved it. There was almost a genocidal attitude on the part of the American military, and it extended to the American public."
Like many other survivors, Mr. Hoshino has little time for historical debate. He focuses on still vivid recollections of his terror at age 14, hearing the shrill air-raid sirens, then, minutes later, seeing a horrible red glow light the sky.
His father was dead and his older brother away at war. Mr. Hoshino tried to lead his mother and sisters to safety, first to a shelter he had dug himself in their yard, and then, as his neighborhood began to go up in flames, through teeming streets.
"My family survived because we ran and ran, until my mother couldn't run anymore," he said. "The place we stopped to rest was an open lot near the river, and somehow the fire never reached us there."
The next day, when his eyes had recovered enough from the heat and smoke to allow him to see, Mr. Hoshino's strongest memory is of the Sumida River thick with bodies.
Ikuyo Misu, 77, a member of Mr. Hoshino's recently founded neighborhood bereavement association, began to cry as she recalled how she had fled the spreading blaze, but was separated from her younger brother, whom she never saw again.
"Ever since then, there have been parts of Tokyo I can't bear to visit," she said. "The next day, the bodies were splayed on the ground everywhere you looked, just like mannequins, but blackened. You couldn't tell male from female."
Napalm? It is my recollection that incendiary bombs were filled with magnesium.
Any experts care to comment?
A while back I recall reading something about Truman that stated that the failure of these attacks to finish off the Japanese was a very big factor in his decision to use atomics.
More like ~30,000 total casualties, of which ~7,000 were KIA.
"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." - Stalin
I'm no expert but that's how I remember it too. The Japanese vulnerability to firebombing had to do with the flammable materials they used to build their homes. But a quick Google search revealed the following:
Q: What is the single most destructive air raid of the war? A: This was an attack on the capital city of Japan by B-29 bombers on the night of March 9/10, 1945. In three hours 279 bombers released 1660 tons of incendiaries, including large numbers of oil-based incendiary devices on Tokyo. The official Japanese count found 83,793 dead and 40,918 injured. A total of 267,171 buildings were destroyed leaving one million people homeless. 15.8 square miles of the city had been burned to the ground, including 18% of the industrial area, and 63% of the commercial center.
Japan's top scientists also knew what we had developed. Germany, the US and Japan all had people familiar with the atomic theory. Japan decided nuclear would take too long to develop, and started working on biological weapons. When the first bomb was dropped, they knew exactly what we developed, but continued to hold out until the second bomb dropped. Many people inside the Japanese government at the time believe they still would not have surrendered if they had known that the second bomb was the last one we developed.
Did you cheer when 3,000 innocent Americans were mass murdered on 9/11!
Yeah, I'm a total fanatic, when a group of fanatics attack my country on 7 Dec 1941 or 11 Sept 2001 and then threaten to kill my family and destroy my country.
Are you a supporter of these mass murderers, the Islamic Fanatics, who live to kill all Americans?
It pleases me to labeled a fanatic by a supporter of the real fanactics who would destroy all Americans if they had the means!
Well, yes and no. We certainly knew we were bombing civilians, but at that point in the war a major portion of war production was done in "Mom and Pop" shops in such places as Tokyo - Mitsubishi in particular had successfully farmed out aircraft parts production in that manner. That same system was responsible for production of auto parts twenty years later, which fueled the rise of the Japanese automobile and the onset of "just in time" supply techniques (there isn't much room in Japan to store inventory). There was, in fact, more military reason to bomb Tokyo than there was to bomb Hiroshima.
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