The authorities began the macabre task of counting, collecting, and disposing of the dead. Corpses were stacked like cordwood. They looked like charcoal mannequins, shrunk to three-quarters of their size, their facial features burned beyond recognition. Men could not be distinguished from women; smaller figures, children, died alongside their parents. The bodies were burned on the spot, or loaded into trucks to be buried in mass graves, or cremated in bonfires on the outskirts of the city. Walking back through the carnage toward her home, Tomoko Shinoda saw a pair of black work gloves on the ground. Stooping to inspect them, she saw that they were human hands. She came across a fire truck, once red, now blackened; the firemen, also blackened, had all burned to death in the vehicle. Sumida Park, recalled Sumi Ogawa, was “a graveyard with lumps of earth piled up in rows. People dug large pits and poured kerosene on corpses to incinerate them.”86 Michiko Kiyooka, a twenty-one-year-old woman living in Asakusa, warmed herself by a still smoldering heap of dead. “I could see an arm,” she said. “I could see nostrils. But I was numb to that by then. The smell is one that will never leave me.”87
The authorities pried open the doors of the various schools and other buildings that had served as shelters, to find hundreds of dead. In a swimming pool by the Futaba School, people had leapt into the water to escape the heat and flames. “It was hideous,” a witness recounted. “More than a thousand people, we estimated, had jammed into the pool. The pool had been filled to its brim when we first arrived. Now there wasn’t a drop of water, only the bodies of the adults and the children who had died.”88
According to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, the air raid killed 88,000, injured 41,000, and left almost a million homeless. About 267,000 houses were completely burned down. Sixteen square miles of the city lay in ashes.89 In later revised estimates, the Japanese government put the death count at more than 100,000; other estimates ranged as high as 125,000. The actual number is not known, partly because the fires consumed most official registration records for the districts that were destroyed, and partly because the police and army personnel despaired of making an accurate body count. One Tokyo official told USSBS interrogators after the war, “The condition was so terrible I could not well describe it. After a raid I was supposed to investigate, but I didn’t go because I did not like to see the terrible sights.”90 It seems likely that the March 9–10 firebombing of Tokyo killed more people, at least initially, than the atomic bombings of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. If the highest death toll estimates are accurate, the Tokyo raid may have killed more people (initially) than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It was the most devastating air raid of the war, in either Europe or the Pacific. It left more dead than any other single military action in history.
The Japanese press downplayed the scale of the catastrophe. Coverage dwelled on the fact that the Imperial Palace had not been hit, and the emperor was unharmed. Headlines accused the Americans of “blind bombing” or “slaughter bombing.” Editorials expressed confidence that the spirit of the Japanese people would be aroused to new heights by the enemy’s atrocious conduct. The Asahi Shinbun assured its readers: “Our accumulation of war power for the final battle in the homeland will not be blocked by such an enemy attack. Rather, it will stir our fighting spirit and our resolve to destroy the enemy.”91
AT HIS OPERATIONS CONTROL HUT IN GUAM, LeMay paced the floor and awaited news of the mission. Most of the staff had gone to bed, but LeMay stayed up, smoking cigars and drinking Coca-Colas. He told Major McKelway that he could not sleep: “A lot could go wrong.”92
The first bombs-away radio messages arrived shortly before two in the morning, Guam time. The news was encouraging; plane losses seemed to be lower than expected. Seven hours later, when the first returning B-29s landed, the airmen rendered their verdict: “Tokyo caught fire like a forest of pine trees.”93 General Power, the mission leader, returned with photographs of the fires in progress. A U.S. submarine south of Honshu reported heavy smoke at sea level, a full 150 miles off the coast. Three B-29 photo reconnaissance planes flew over Tokyo at midday on March 10, snapping thousands of photos in clear weather. Later that night, when the poststrike photographs were delivered to the operations control hut on Guam, they were laid out on a table under electric lights. They depicted an ugly whitish-gray scar running along both sides of the Sumida River, covering about 16 square miles of the city. LeMay, a cigar clamped in his teeth, his face “expressionless,” leaned over the table and put his hand down on that part of the photograph. “All this is out,” he said. He ran his hand down the whitish-gray band. “This is out—this—this—this.”94
Just fourteen Superfortresses failed to return, out of the 334 that had taken off. That was a loss rate of 4.2 percent, lower than the cumulative average in past missions. Given that LeMay and his airmen had dreaded much higher losses, the safe return of 320 planes was a welcome surprise, vindicating LeMay’s theory that the Japanese would be caught by surprise. (After the war, the Americans learned that the Japanese fighter planes had been uncontrollable in the wild thermal updrafts created by the fires; they could not even get near the B-29s, let alone attack them.) Morale among the pilots and aircrewmen soared, especially after they saw the aerial photos depicting one-fifth of the enemy’s capital in ashes. The photos were blown up to large scale, marked up with arrows and comments, and pinned to corkboards in the administrative offices and briefing huts on Saipan, Guam, and Tinian.
LeMay was eager to continue the blitz immediately, before the Japanese could take countermeasures. He had hoped to turn his planes around the same day to hit Nagoya on the night of March 10, but that was not feasible. The first planes took off on the afternoon of March 11, just thirty hours after the last B-29s had returned from the Tokyo mission. The Nagoya strike was another “maximum effort” mission: 313 B-29s were launched, and 286 reached the target. Tactics were much the same as over Tokyo two nights earlier. The attackers dropped 1,790 tons of incendiaries, slightly more than had been dropped on Tokyo. For a combination of reasons—less wind, lower building density, a better firefighting response—Nagoya was spared the holocaust suffered by Tokyo. Hundreds of fires failed to merge into a general conflagration, and they burned out “only” two square miles of the city. By any standard other than the disaster in Tokyo, however, the Nagoya fires were devastating. Several of the city’s most important industrial targets were damaged or destroyed.
After flying two fifteen-hour missions in forty-eight hours, Charles Phillips was as tired as he had been since he had learned to fly. “We had seen tremendous fires two nights before,” he wrote in a letter home, “so the sight of a big city like Nagoya burning fiercely was nothing really new. It is still just as awesome as the last time. Again, we could look down and count the very blocks in the city that we had touched off. The city had become an inferno. Smoke billowed up something awful and again we could actually smell Nagoya burning from inside our aircraft.”95
Osaka, the nation’s second largest city, was the objective on March 13. Two hundred four Superforts reached the city, dropping 2,240 tons of incendiaries from low altitude. Cloud cover obscured the city, but radar bombing proved accurate, with a “thicker and more uniform pattern” than in past missions.96 Nine square miles of Osaka were burned to the ground. Among the important targets destroyed was the Osaka Arsenal, which provided about one-fifth of the Japanese army’s total artillery shells. Thermal updrafts over the city were even more severe than over Tokyo four nights earlier. One pilot described “a great mushroom of boiling, oily smoke, and in a few seconds we were tossed 5,000 feet into the air.” A 313th Wing B-29, the aptly named Topsy-Turvy, was flipped onto an inverted position, with the crew hanging upside down from their shoulder straps.97 It plunged 10,000 feet—almost to the ground—before the pilot was able to regain control and turn for home. The Topsy-Turvy returned safely to base. Remarkably, only two B-29s were lost on this mission and thirteen damaged.
On the night of March 16, an armada of 307 B-29s hit
Kobe, a major seaport and industrial hub, the sixth largest city in Japan. Twenty-three hundred tons of incendiaries burned down three square miles of the city. The Japanese fighter response was heavier than in past raids, but the intercepting planes were unable to make effective attacks, and only three B-29s on the mission failed to return.
The fifth and last mission of the blitz was a return to Nagoya on the night of the nineteenth. Two hundred ninety Superforts dropped 2,000 tons of bombs on the city. The raid targeted a smaller district with tight patterns of incendiaries and high-explosive bombs. Virtually all remaining incendiaries in the Marianas bomb dumps were loaded into the planes. The raid destroyed three more square miles of Nagoya, damaging or destroying high-priority targets such as the Nagoya Arsenal, the freight yards, and an Aichi aircraft engine plant.
That concluded the March 1945 firebombing blitz, at least for the moment. Everyone involved—including the pilots, aircrews, administrative staffs, and ground support personnel—was completely worn out. A pause was needed, or operational accidents would become critical. Moreover, the entire stock of Marianas incendiaries had been expended in the five missions, and the supply would have to be replenished by sea. In the meantime, the B-29s would have to return to conventional bombing with general purpose “iron bombs.” It would not be possible to resume firebombing raids on Japanese cities until mid-April. In the interim, the B-29s would be pressed into service to support Operation ICEBERG, the invasion of Okinawa.
In five “maximum effort” firebombing missions flown in ten days, the B-29s had completed 1,595 sorties and dropped nearly 10,000 tons of bombs on Japan. The raids had burned down 32 square miles in four large Japanese cities. The 334 planes launched on the first incendiary night mission against Tokyo were almost double the number launched in any previous mission. Almost overnight, the Twentieth Air Force had progressed from fifty-plane raids to three-hundred-plane raids. Flying a 3,000-mile round trip that took them just a mile above some of the most heavily defended airspace in Japan, U.S. plane losses had amounted to only 1.3 percent, and aircrew losses to 0.9 percent. In May and June, new firebombing raids would be launched on an even larger scale, and loss rates would decline steadily.
The success of the incendiary raids vindicated and consolidated the autonomy of the JCS-controlled Twentieth Air Force. The B-29s would be enlisted in future tactical missions—most notably, bombing Kyushu airfields in support of the pending Okinawa operation—but LeMay now insisted with greater confidence that he should be allowed to get on with the task of wiping out Japanese cities. He planned to run his airmen and airplanes to the outer limits of their endurance, telling his superiors in Washington that his command could surpass a rate of more than 6,000 sorties per month by August 1945. Years later, he speculated that if the navy had provided sufficient logistical support to keep his B-29s flying uninterrupted maximum-effort missions against Japan, the nation might have surrendered sooner than August 1945: “I think it might have been possible.”98
For eighteen months, the Japanese government had been encouraging evacuations from Tokyo and other cities. Now the trickle became a flood. Hundreds of thousands had no home, and had no choice but to leave; many others joined the exodus for fear of future such disasters. The population of Tokyo dropped by more than one-half between January and August 1945. Nationally, the total number of urban refugees who moved out of the cities (and what remained of the cities) probably exceeded 10 million by war’s end. At urban factories, worker absenteeism spiked. The Tokyo fire chief gave his confidential opinion that the capital was indefensible against such raids. The principle that people should stand and fight the fires was abandoned, both by the citizens and by the authorities. Now it was recognized that the best tactic for survival was to run, as soon as the air-raid sirens started up.
One afternoon in late March, an armed motorcade carried Hirohito beyond the moats of the Imperial Palace, and the emperor inspected the scorched ruins of the stricken “low city.” Press reports, with doughty understatement, conceded that the damage was “not small” or “considerable.”99 But the regime had informers everywhere, and most Japanese citizens knew enough to guard their tongues. Within earshot of neighbors and strangers, it was considered safest to say, “It doesn’t seem too bad.”100
Chapter Thirteen
WITH ITS MISSION AT IWO JIMA COMPLETED, TASK FORCE 58 RETURNED to Ulithi for a short interlude of rest, repairs, and replenishment. The great fleet filled the northern anchorage, almost to capacity. At night, in spite of wartime blackout procedures, a witness could see many lights showing on the anchored warships. On the islands around the periphery of the spacious lagoon, movies were screened each night in outdoor amphitheaters. With the war moving north, all had grown heartily tired of blackout restrictions, and were increasingly inclined to let them slide.
On March 11, about an hour after sunset, Admiral Jocko Clark was on the flight deck of his flagship Hornet when he heard aircraft engines overhead. Looking up, he saw a green twin-engine bomber with red disks under its wings. It was descending rapidly toward the Randolph, another Essex-class carrier anchored a quarter of a mile away. The kamikaze crashed the Randolph’s starboard quarter, just beneath her flight deck, gouging a 40-foot hole in the deck and starting fires in the machine shops and after hangar spaces. Twenty-seven of her crew were killed and fourteen aircraft destroyed. Half an hour later, a second Japanese plane crashed and exploded on nearby Sorlen Island, injuring fourteen men and damaging ground installations. The pilot may have mistaken the brightly lit island for an anchored ship.1
The attackers had flown all the way from Kyushu, a distance of more than 1,600 miles, in a Fifth Air Fleet suicide mission designated “Operation TAN.” Twenty-four Yokosuka P1Y “Galaxy” bombers (Allied codename “Frances”) had lifted off that morning from the main runway at Kanoya Air Base. Ten had suffered engine problems and were forced to turn back, or made emergency landings on other islands. Several others disappeared while en route. At 6:52 p.m., after a nine-hour flight, the lead pilot radioed Kanoya to report that the remaining planes had achieved complete surprise over Ulithi Atoll. Based on an overoptimistic assessment of that report, the Fifth Air Fleet staff concluded that eleven American aircraft carriers must have been struck.2 In fact, the Randolph was the only victim.
The ultra-long-range attack highlighted a tactical advantage possessed by the kamikazes: without need to conserve fuel for the return flight, their flight radius was effectively doubled. Admiral Clark called it “a feat of great daring, quite characteristic of our Japanese adversaries.”3
Three days later, Task Force 58 returned to sea. The grand sortie took the better part of the day, with five semiautonomous carrier task groups filing out of Mugai Channel one at a time. They forged north through an intertropical front, bucking rough seas under thick cloud cover. The task groups were commanded by the brownshoe admirals Jocko Clark, Ralph Davison, Ted Sherman, and Arthur Radford; a smaller fifth group (58.5), specializing in night operations, was led by Rear Admiral Matt Gardner. Task Force 58 commander Marc Mitscher rode in the carrier Bunker Hill as part of Sherman’s Task Group 58.3. Their mission was to hammer Japanese airbases in Kyushu, Shikoku, and southern Honshu, in hopes of blunting the Japanese air response to Operation ICEBERG, the invasion of Okinawa, scheduled to begin two weeks later.
On the night of March 17–18, as the task force approached the southern coast of Kyushu, Japanese reconnaissance planes dropped floating flares around the perimeter of the task force. Enterprise night fighters shot down two snoopers, but radar scopes revealed many more skulking around the edges of the American fleet. Tactical surprise, in this round, was a lost cause.4
Admiral Matome Ugaki, the Fifth Air Fleet commander, monitored the various sighting and radar reports from his headquarters at Kanoya Air Base. Long distance patrols had confirmed that the bulk of the American fleet had left Ulithi on March 15. After sunset on March 17, night patrols made contact with the leading elements of the American flee
t. Ugaki was not in doubt: he expected heavy raids to fall on his airfields on the morning of March 18.
Two weeks earlier, the army and navy sections of the Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo had established a conservative policy for the deployment of air power in the homeland. The best and most experienced squadrons were to be held back until an invasion force approached Japanese shores. They were not to be sent to repel a mere “carrier raid.” Even if U.S. carrier planes appeared over the homeland, Japanese pilots and airplanes should avoid contact to the extent possible, and “positive operations will be avoided to preserve strength.”5 In other words, the Japanese aviators were to survive to fight another day, even at the cost of allowing uncontested raids on their airfields: “Anti-fighter plane combat for the purpose of air defense of strategic points will not be carried out, in principle, with combat strength, except when the situation is particularly favorable or when it is urgently needed.”6
But Ugaki had never accepted the logic of this tame, self-protective strategy. He anticipated that American fighter sweeps would fall heavily upon the air bases of southern Japan, making it impossible to carry out the offshore scouting and reconnaissance that would determine whether or not an invasion was coming. As Task Force 58 moved into its launch position east of Kyushu, Ugaki worried that the American carrier strikes would “be so relentless that we wouldn’t be able to preserve our strength even if we tried to do so. I couldn’t stand to see [aircraft] destroyed on the ground.” Therefore, Ugaki took the decision, upon his own authority, to counterattack with the Fifth Air Fleet’s “whole strength.”7
Before dawn on March 18, from a position about 90 miles off the southern tip of Kyushu, the American carriers launched 130 Hellcats and Corsairs. The initial fighter sweep encountered scant opposition in the air, and the pilots saw few planes on the ground, so they contented themselves with shooting up ground installations. A bombing strike followed about forty minutes later, consisting of sixty dive and torpedo bombers escorted by forty fighters. That afternoon, a second round of strikes was sent farther inland, to airfields in northern Kyushu. The flyers returned with claims of 102 enemy aircraft shot down and 275 destroyed or damaged on the ground.8
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