THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, AT NORTH FIELD, the pilots and aircrewmen of the 314th Bombardment Wing were driven in canvas-covered trucks to their planes on the hardstands. The crews boarded their aircraft and began their meticulous gear inventories and checklists. Mechanics rotated the great propeller blades, flushing excess oil from the engines. Thirty minutes before the first scheduled takeoff, the Wright Duplex-Cyclone engines began firing to life. They coughed, caught, whirred, and backfired thunderously, expelling clouds of exhaust smoke. Then the doors, hatches, and bomb bays were slammed closed, and the lead planes began inching out of their hardstands and trundling down the taxiways. Dust whipped up by the propellers got into the eyes, mouths, and noses of the ground crews and the many sightseers gathered along the length of the runway. The commingled roar of so many great engines caused the air and ground to vibrate. One witness was reminded of the Indianapolis 500.65 Soldiers and marines sat on hillocks along the runways, as if they were spectators at an outdoor concert.
At 6:15 p.m., when the sun was very low in the western sky, a green flare shot up from a control tower, and the lead Superfortress began its takeoff run. The pilot eased the four throttles forward and lifted his feet from the brakes. He balanced on the rudder pedals to keep his machine accelerating down the centerline of the runway. He held the yoke tight, keeping the plane down so that it would gain more speed. At a certain point, the aircraft was moving too fast to stop, and must either take off or crash. At 160 miles per hour, the nose wheel tilted up, and the rear wheels lifted clear of the asphalt. The copilot hit the gear switch, and the struts and wheels folded neatly upward into their wells. No sooner had the first plane lifted off than the next one began its run. And so it continued, for more than an hour.
Once over the bluffs, the pilot nosed down just slightly in order to gather speed, and then raised the flaps very slowly. The heavy aircraft dipped low over the ocean, and the prop wash made four visible white wakes on the sea. Then it began climbing, ever so slowly. The takeoff weight of most B-29s on the March 9 mission was the maximum allowable 140,000 pounds—70 tons.
The first planes to take off were those of the nineteenth and twenty-ninth groups of the 314th Bombardment Wing, based on North Field, Guam. Forty minutes later, the lead planes on Saipan and Tinian began their takeoff runs. The interval between the first planes to take off from Guam and the last to take off from Saipan was a full two hours and forty-five minutes. Finally, well after dark, 334 Superforts were airborne and on their way to Tokyo.66
Since they were not flying in formation, there was no rendezvous. Each pilot simply turned north, climbed to his assigned altitude, and flew a course heading. During the seven-hour flight to Japan, they encountered some overcast and air turbulence, but the conditions were not severe enough to be dangerous. Flying just 5,000 to 7,000 feet above the ocean, the engines hummed along at low power settings. The crews kept a careful watch at the windows and blisters, peering out into the darkness for any sign of planes that might stray too close. One pilot recalled that he was constantly on edge as he scanned the sky through his greenhouse nose canopy—left and right, ahead, below, and above, peering into the darkness and imagining another B-29 suddenly looming into his field of vision. “The chances of collision seemed very high. It was spooky.”67
In the lead “pathfinder” planes, the radar operators hunched over their APQ-13 radarscopes and tracked the approaching land mass of southern Honshu. Even in complete darkness, the coastline showed up clearly on the green circular screens: the Boso Peninsula, Cape Nojima, and the deep coastal indentation represented by Tokyo Bay. As the pathfinders made landfall, they flew dead north over the heart of Tokyo Bay, the Sumida River estuary, and the dockyards. Cloud cover was less than expected, varying from about 10 to 30 percent over the target, so the lead bombardiers had no trouble identifying their aiming points.
The bombing run was at full throttle, in a shallow dive for speed, the better to spoil the aim of the antiaircraft gunners and the attack maneuvers of pursuit planes. The engines ascended to a higher pitch, and speed inched up to 300 knots. The bomb bay doors fell open. The radar men watched their scopes and communicated through headsets with the bombardiers. At a quarter past midnight, the first M47 bombs fell clear. Bursting open at 100 feet above the ground, they ejected searing white magnesium. The blazes formed a large iridescent “X,” marking a target area of about 10 square miles. One of the leaders radioed back to Guam: “Bombing the target visually. Large fires observed. Flak moderate. Fighter opposition nil.”68
When the following planes arrived over Cape Nojima, the fires in Tokyo cast a pink glow over the northern horizon. As the “T-Square 12” passed over the Sumida estuary, Captain Charles L. Phillips Jr. saw a swirling mass of pyrocumulus clouds, illuminated from below by spectral reddish-orange light. The city’s street plan could be seen, a network of dark lines crisscrossing a blanket of fire. Phillips and his crew could smell smoke and even the sickly sweet reek of burning flesh. “Those of us in the forward crew compartment could actually see pieces of window and door frames flying by the airplane.”69
As the T-Square 12 entered the cloud, it lurched upward. Caught in a buffeting thermal updraft, the plane rose more than 6,000 feet in four minutes. Phillips throttled all four engines back to idle, but the T-Square 12 was still climbing and “bouncing around like a leaf in a windstorm.”70 Phillips called it “the wildest flight with the most severe turbulence I’ve ever experienced in over 7,000 hours of flight. It seemed certain the wings would be torn off our B-29.”71
For a plane caught in that incredible updraft, there was nothing to do but climb. A pilot could attempt to hold his airplane down at his assigned altitude, but that would mean diving steeply through the updraft, resulting in airspeeds well above the recommended maximum “placard speed” of 300 miles per hour. A few B-29s were actually tossed onto their backs, fully inverted, with airmen hanging in their straps and loose gear pinned to the overheads. If they held together, they did a complete loop and came out of the dive. One pilot reported that he had surpassed an airspeed of 450 miles per hour—which the Boeing engineers had reckoned as fatal to a B-29—and gained control only 200 feet over Tokyo Bay.72
The T-Square 12 released its full load of M69 clusters. Suddenly 6 tons lighter, the aircraft lurched upward at an even greater velocity, and the altimeter needles raced clockwise around the dial. Phillips and his copilot were not wearing their shoulder straps. At 14,000 feet, the updraft abruptly ceased and the plane suddenly began diving again. Both pilots were lifted bodily from their seats and floated up toward the overhead, as if they were astronauts in zero-G space. “We both held on for dear life,” wrote Phillips. “The situation lasted for several seconds. Then we sank back into our seats and regained control of the airplane. After a rather steep left turn we headed out toward the Pacific Ocean and our route home.”73
THE AIR-RAID SIRENS HAD STARTED UP about an hour before the first planes had arrived, when Japanese coastal radar stations had first detected the incoming raid. Civil defense wardens ran through the streets and cobblestone alleys, using wooden clackers to call the citizens to their assigned posts. At first, many refused to leave their beds and homes, assuming that it was another false alarm. But as the first pathfinder B-29s arrived over the city, flying so much lower than ever before, the drone of their engines drew people out into the streets. Looking up, they saw the big silver bombers, their bellies reflecting orange, pink, and violet light from the fires below. They were four or five times closer than they had been in previous raids. A witness recalled: “It was as if we could reach out and touch the planes, they looked so big.”74 Searchlights reached up for them, and bursts of flak appeared above them. Some saw the M69s, twisting and turning as they fell, with long cotton gauze streamers flapping behind them.
A strong, dry wind was gusting that night, and the initial fires spread quickly. Thirty minutes after the first pathfinder bombs had fallen, according to the Tokyo fire chief, the situatio
n was “completely out of control; we were absolutely helpless.”75 The fire brigades went into action, but their efforts were pitifully inadequate, especially as a shower of new napalm incendiaries fell from newly arrived Superforts. Wind-fanned fires spread and merged, engulfing the densely built wood-and-paper neighborhoods, from Asakusa in the northwest to Honjo in the northeast, from Fukagawa in the southeast to Nihonbashi in the southwest—advancing like a storm, leaping from house to house, wall to wall, roof to roof, across the narrow cobblestone alleyways, growing in heat and intensity as it devoured the mother lode of fuel that it found in its path. The workshops and small factories, stocked with combustible grease, lubricating oil, and gasoline, exploded as if they had been bombed. Walls of fire raced over rooftops and down streets, and roasted people where they stood, or consumed their homes with such speed that they never had a chance to get out. An air defense manual published by the home ministry had advised that “the first minute is the most crucial for dealing with firebomb attacks,” which was certainly true—but the manual had told citizens to stay and fight the fires, rather than flee. They were to “throw water on flammable things near you to prevent a fire from spreading if it breaks out.”76 Against a disaster of this magnitude, such measures were futile. Their only real hope of survival was to run, and to be lucky in the direction they chose.
Survivors attested that they were surrounded by a constant, crashing pandemonium, so loud that they had to shout to be heard. The fire crackled, howled, hissed, and roared. Sparks, embers, and firebrands swirled in wind eddies and landed on their heads and backs. The ambient temperature rose and kept rising, as if the door of a giant oven had opened. The fire radiated waves of infrared heat that desiccated all material in its path, and caused flammable material to ignite even ahead of the flames. The asphalt under their feet was sticky and bubbling; eventually, it would liquefy completely. The instinct was to run blindly from that heat, but those who survived often made choices based on a plan—to get to the widest streets, or to a swimming pool, or the river, or one of the parks. Takeshi Nagamine, a student at Waseda University, believed that he and his family survived because his father was aware that a strong wind was blowing from the west, and knew the fires would advance upon them from that direction. He led them to Sumida Park, calculating that the fire would circumvent it. They lived. Others ran toward the schools, which doubled as disaster shelters—but for many civilians that decision proved fatal.
Kazuyo Funato, a sixth grader who lived above her father’s toy shop in Asakusa, followed her parents and five siblings into the street. They ran downwind, toward Sunamachi, but the fires seemed to advance upon them from every direction at once. Her father led them toward a local park, but they found their way blocked by a mass of people coming the other way across a narrow footbridge. Forced to turn back, they ran blindly, and in the maelstrom the family was unable to stay together. “The wind and flames became terrific,” said Kazuyo:
We were in Hell. All the houses were burning, debris raining down on us. It was horrible. Sparks flew everywhere. Electric wires sparked and toppled. Mother, with my little brother on her back, had her feet swept out from under her by the wind and she rolled away. Father jumped after her. “Are you all right?” he screamed. Yoshiaki shouted, “Dad!” I don’t know if his intention was to rescue Father or to stay with him, but they all disappeared instantly into the flames and black smoke.77
Michiko Okubo, twelve years old, came across another girl aged four or five, who must have been separated from her family while running from the fires. Michiko took the girl’s hand, saying, “Let’s get away from here together.” Hand in hand, they ran. She looked up and saw an incendiary falling toward them, “spewing flames and making a shrill noise.” The younger girl’s hand slipped from hers. She turned and saw several people engulfed in flames: “A fragment of the little girl’s padded hood drifted high into the sky.” Recalling the scene decades later, Michiko wrote, “I have never been able to forget the feeling of her soft, little hand, like a maple leaf, in mine.”78
Many thousands ran toward the canals, or the Sumida River. On the narrow old bridges, great masses of people tried to flee in both directions at once, creating a stalemate, and all were immobilized before the advancing fires. Walls of flame swept over them, sucking the oxygen from the air and killing them all together. They gasped for breath, but the air was too hot to breathe, and then they choked, coughed blood, and convulsed. Many leapt from the bridges, and found momentary relief in the water, until other jumpers dropped on top of them, and they drowned. Survivors recalled a seething mass of people flailing in the water. “It was a hellish frenzy, absolutely horrible,” said firefighter Isamu Kase. “People were just jumping into the canals to escape the inferno.”79 In the smaller and shallower canals, the water boiled over, leaving the dead exposed in heaps.
The Asakusa Kannon Buddhist Temple, one of the largest and most famous in Japan, had survived the 1923 earthquake and fire even as the surrounding neighborhood had burned to the ground. Thousands now ran to the temple and its spacious plaza, hoping to find refuge. Throngs entered the building, until it was jammed full. More came, trying to push into the doorways, while those inside fought to keep them out. As the fires closed around the structure, sparks and embers fell on the panicked crowd outside the big wooden doors. More napalm incendiaries fell from the B-29s passing overhead, and some landed directly on the tile roof of the temple. The great wooden edifice began to burn, and the flames advanced quickly. Burning timbers fell from the ceiling onto the heads of those trapped in the temple. The mob clamoring to get in was opposed by a surging mass of panicked people trying to get out. As the heat grew intolerable, many were crushed or trampled. The temple burned to the ground.
At the Sumida Telephone Exchange, one of Tokyo’s six major switchboards, regulations required the staff to remain at their posts and fight the fire. The switchboards were operated by young women, many still in adolescence. They had been trained to defend the facility with wet mops and buckets of sand and water. As the B-29s roared overhead and fires engulfed the surrounding neighborhoods, the operators remained at their posts. Women carried water in buckets from the bathrooms, and even the teakettle in the kitchen. A row of sturdy telephone poles had been set up as buttresses to keep the building from collapsing if hit by bombs. But the poles burst into flames, and the fires spread to the walls. Without orders to evacuate, the workers felt obliged to remain and try to fight the fires. “When everything was burning, there was no order issued to evacuate the office,” recalled Hiroyasu Kobayashi, a maintenance worker. “No order came releasing you. You must defend your position to the death! That’s it.”80 The night supervisor finally gave the order to evacuate the building, but for most of the staff it was too late. Only four switchboard operators survived; thirty-one died in the fire. Most were between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. Kobayashi was one of the few employees to escape the telephone exchange. Later, he was asked by his employer to explain why he had fled. “But when they investigated, they found that even the coin boxes on the public phones had melted completely. Then they understood.”81
A few in the heart of the burned-out districts managed to survive by sheer luck. They found a route of escape early, and got upwind of the fires. They found an open space, where a ditch or a concrete structure provided just enough shelter against the heat and flames, or a safety lane beneath an elevated railway. They stayed low, where there was still enough oxygen to breathe, and endured the heat long enough to outlast the fires. Kazuyo Funato, the sixth grader, found shelter in a trench behind a school. Her younger sister kept crying, “It’s hot, hot!”82 But they stayed put, wisely, and survived. A boy survived by lying down in a gutter on a wide street, with the curb interposed between himself and the flames. Several hundred headed for the expansive rail yards of the Ryogoku Railroad Station, where they found open ground surrounded by concrete and steel structures that did not burn.
Tomoko Shinoda, a housewife, was hur
rying past Oshiage Station when she was told to stay there. “It was so hot and suffocating that I pressed my cheek to the ground. The air was cool and clean down there.”83 She remained all night, wedged against a stranger. Around dawn, she stood up, and the stranger toppled over. “I shook him, but he was dead. They said he died from smoke and the heat of the flames.”84 Hidezo Tsuchikura, a factory worker, made his way to the roof of the Futaba School with his two young children. As the fires approached, embers and burning debris dropped on their heads, and the children wailed in pain and begged to be taken home. Tsuchikura pried open the rooftop water tank and scooped water over his children, putting out fires on their clothing. Then he plunged them into the tank, one at a time, repeatedly. “For the next ninety minutes or so we kept repeating this procedure. The air was so hot that as I doused the children and put them back on the roof the water steamed almost immediately from their clothes.” Tsuchikura and his children survived without serious injury.85
Burning with such intensity, and on such a scale, the fires burned themselves out fairly quickly. By dawn on March 10, they had mostly subsided. The stricken area was choked with smoke so thick that the survivors found it painful to keep their eyes open. People shuffled pitifully through the streets, skin burned and blistered, smeared with grime, clothes partially burned, eyes red and raw. Some squatted on the ground, not wanting to sit because the ground was still too hot. The city was a smoldering wasteland—mounds of ashes and rubble, interspersed with a few blackened and gutted concrete walls, brick chimneys, and steel safes. Those middle-aged or older were reminded of the 1923 disaster. Survivors gravitated toward their homes, or the sites where their homes had once stood, but some neighborhoods were so thoroughly razed that the landmarks were gone, and they could not find their way. They noticed distant city vistas, faraway buildings that they could not have seen the previous day.
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