“Days earlier, the B-29s were small dots in the sky with a tail,” she told me. “But that night they were so big. And the sound of so many incendiaries going off was like listening to a train rushing by. The town was like day even though it was night.
“The fire was moving fast, driven by the wind,” she said. “It was a storm rushing at us with sparkles of fire inside.”
Nineteen-year-old sister Chieko decided to remain under the train tracks to guard the family possessions.
Now six family members ran from the galloping flames. Yoshiko carried her baby boy on her back as her family “took flight before the flames, through smoke that hung so thickly in places that they could not see more than ten feet, all panting ‘huh, huh, huh’ as they ran.”She tried to hold her younger sister Etsuko’s hand, but seventeen-year-old Etsuko felt it was her responsibility to clutch a big pot of rice with both hands in case the family needed it. Etsuko fell behind and in the push and shove of the crowd, Yoshiko shouted back to her, “Little Etsuko, are you OK?”
“Big sister, please wait for me!” Etsuko screamed.
“The distance between us widened,” Hashimoto-san told me through tears. “I lost her in the crowd of people. I am eighty-one years old now. But I still hear her voice, ‘Big sister, please wait for me!’”
The seven members of the Hashimoto family now numbered five. The baby boy on Yoshiko’s back was screaming nonstop. The wind and the heat levitated whole portions of sheet-metal roofs that sliced through the air like Frisbees. Sparks, bedding, and burned clothes whizzed past them.
Gunner David Farquar, high above the flames, remembered, “The missions were so low, the fires were so intense, that oftentimes scraps and bits of burning material would end up in our bomb bays—little pieces of shingle or little pieces of scraps and bits of things that had been burned.” The tremendous heat tossed planes five thousand feet above the flames. “The turbulence was so bad that some aircraft were flipped over on their back, the whole crews,” remembered pilot Harry George. “Imagine a piece of paper in a leaf pile,” gunner Ed Ricketson said. “Now imagine an entire city.” “My chair was bolted to the floor and tied to me with the seat belt,” radio operator George Gladden said. “When the wave hit, it jerked the bolts out, and I was stuck against the ceiling with a chair tied to me.”
The fire was so hot that “superheated vapors rushing ahead of the wall of flames killed or knocked unconscious its victims even before the flames reached them.” The temperature reached 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Babies exploded on mothers’ backs, and cars on streets were “consumed like crumpled paper.”
Iwao Ishikawa remembered being trapped by the fire in a group of about forty people. “Because of this inferno, this burning hell, a young father right next to me didn’t seem to know that the child on his back was on fire,” Ishikawa said. “People on the outer edge of the group fell one by one, dead from inhalation.”
Rivers of fire flowed down the streets. Canals boiled and humans burst spontaneously into flames, blazing like matchsticks. People’s heads exploded in the heat, the liquid brains in their burst skulls bubbling an eerie fluorescence. The feet of the fleeing masses scrunched eyeballs that had popped from sockets under pressure.
Miho Yoshioka ran into a temple for safety. She remembered thinking that she saw “a lot of statues of guardian deities inside, just like the ones outside. I suddenly realized they were really burned bodies, still standing upright.”
Nineteen-year-old Kimie Ono saw a mother and child running. “Suddenly the firestorm swept out a finger to lick them, and in a second the mother and child burst into flames. . . . Their clothes afire, they staggered and fell to the ground. No one stopped to help them.”
Hidezo Tsuchikua rushed with his two children to the Futaba School, famous for its large swimming pool. He went to the roof, where flames lapped at them. Inside the school building, thousands were baked to death and “looked like mannequins, some of them with a pinkish complexion.” Tsuchikua will always remember the sight of the pool: “It was hideous. 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 children who had died.”
Yoshiko Hashimoto, with her baby boy on her back, continued to run with her parents and youngest sister toward the river. They dodged billboards and debris whirling through the heated air. Finally, they reached the bridge.
“People were burning to death on the bridge,” Hashimoto-san said. “Clothes would burst into flames. Everybody was stamping out fires. My hair caught on fire. Everyone was screaming.” And the little boy on her back had been yelping as loudly as anyone.
“Suddenly, I heard a big scream from him,” she told me. “I turned to see he had sparkles of fire in his mouth. His mouth was red inside. I scraped the burning sparkles out with my hand.”
The baby boy was the pride of the all-female family. Hashimoto-san placed him on the ground and wrapped her body around him for protection. Her mother and father did the same for her. They covered themselves with the maternity coat, but it caught fire.
“We’ll all die here!” Hashimoto-san remembered her father crying.
“At that moment I did think I was going to die,” she told me. “It’s so hard to realize you’re going to die.”
“Yoshiko! Jump in the river!” her mother screamed. “Jump! Jump!”
“It was March; the river was cold,” she remembered. “I had a baby in my arms. I didn’t have the courage to jump. But I had to.”
The metal bridge railings had been ripped out earlier to be melted down for weapons. Now the railings were logs, which were ablaze. To jump in, Hashimoto-san had to place her feet in the fire. She hesitated.
“My mother took her fire hood off and put it on my head,” she told me. “We were four girls in the family and I had the first son. Everybody loved the boy. We didn’t have many things. Our general mood was dark. For my mother, watching the baby boy grow was her only joy. I still remember her face. Her hair was standing on end, blown by the hot wind. The red of the nearby flames reflected in her face. I cannot forget her face. It was the last time I saw her.”
Yoshiko stepped onto the burning rails and leaped with her baby in her arms.
“I went from the heat to the piercing cold of the water,” she said. “The baby’s eyes opened wide. The water was cold and right above it was hot like a furnace. You know when you put something in a furnace and it immediately catches fire? That’s what it was like.
“I was swimming with one arm, holding the baby with the other arm. A raft of logs came along. I put my baby on a corner of the raft. I hung on. I repeatedly put water over his head. I sunk my head in the water and kept putting water on my baby.
“Right next to the raft was a small boat with two men on it. I screamed to those men —‘Please, save my baby. Only my baby is fine, you don’t have to take me.’ They came close to the raft. They took my baby and let me on the boat. We floated downstream.”
The two men saved Yoshiko and her little boy. She spent the night in and out of consciousness as the boat inched along with the roasted corpses.
“I heard moans all night,” she told me. “I still hear them moaning. Groaning and moaning like hungry big toads. All the rest of my life I hated hearing toads making that noise.”
Kosuke Shindo was a twenty-two-year-old student. His dad was a local air-raid warden who stood his ground and died. Kosuke ran. “I looked up and saw B-29s circling,” he remembered. “Their planes were red with the reflected fire. Those pilots must have thought it was fun to see us ant-sized people fleeing in the flames. I could almost see the smiles of the laughing faces of the American soldiers. Devils. Sons-of-bitches. I almost boiled with bitterness. Since that moment I started to hate America from the bottom of my heart.”
But the American devils in their $600,000 planes weren’t smiling or laughing. In fact, they weren’t thinking much about th
e human toll at all.
“We weren’t worried about the civilians,” Loy Collingwood later told me. “We were worried about thirty-six hundred miles with a B-29 that wasn’t as reliable as some thought and the Japanese hitting us.”
“We didn’t think of what we were doing,” added Ed Ricketson. “We were surviving. We were trying to do our job and go home. We did what our commander told us to do. We didn’t question it.”
“We weren’t gung ho for dropping bombs on people,” Collingwood explained. “But when you put the twenty-one military targets in a three-square-mile area, you can’t hit those targets without killing people.”
“At five thousand feet, you could smell the flesh burning,” remembered Chester Marshall. “It’s kind of a sweet smell. We said, ‘What is that I smell?’ Somebody said, ‘That’s flesh burning.’” Pilot Harry George disagreed: “The smell of burning flesh was putrid. It wasn’t nice at all.”
“It was what I would think looking into hell would look like,” Fiske Hanley recalled. “We felt bad, but that’s the way you win war. Total war.”
The all-clear signal sounded at 2:37 A.M., March 10. The Flyboys had dropped gasoline on Tokyo for about two hours and forty minutes. The conflagration continued through much of the night as the Flyboys headed home. “We could see the fires for a hundred miles or more still burning,” said Newell Fears.
At dawn, Yoshiko Hashimoto forced her soot-caked eyes open.
“I looked above and wondered if it was the moon, but it was the sun,” she said. “It looked like a turbid moon, the end of the world. The sun that had lost its light.”
The men who had rescued them took Yoshiko and her baby to a medical facility, one of the few still standing. She remembered seeing “bodies like dead trees, faces swollen to double, triple the size” and smelling a “stinky burnt-flesh smell.”
She and two of her sisters survived. Her mother, father, and one sister perished. Her baby recovered.
Yoshiko was lucky. Almost 100,000 others were not.
The largest single-day killing in world history had just taken place. The dead would surpass the later atomic toll at Nagasaki. Only Hiroshima would see more—slightly more—dead.
The survivors trudged through the moonscape like silent ghosts. Many had been literally toasted, their skin darkened for the rest of their lives. A low roof of smoke hovered over the still-smoldering landscape. Masuko Harino remembered gazing at “swollen, contorted, blackened bodies that resembled ‘enormous ginseng roots.’” Nobody could tell if they had once been men or women.
Iwao Ishikawa searched for his wife. “Because of the oily smoke, it was difficult to open my eyes,” he said. “I forced them open with my thumb and index finger.” He eventually found what he believed were the charred corpses of his wife and two daughters. Their clothes were burned off, but he guessed it was they because of the tiny charred body he found under his wife. “My wife was pregnant and was overdue by three or four days,” Ishikawa said. “Probably she gave birth just before she was burnt to death.”
Yoshie Kogure was fourteen years old as she staggered through the smoky ruins. “I saw so many dead bodies,” she said. “I had to push them with my feet to walk. We went to the subway station. There were people with all their clothes burnt off. There was a man standing and I wanted to ask him directions. I touched his body and he fell. He was dead and I screamed.”
It took twenty-five days for Japanese officials to count the dead. It was an inexact science. Almost two million people had evacuated Tokyo before the raid, so the officials did not have an accurate base to work from. Also, the raid disrupted the bureaucracy. Dead people without homes could not report to dead officials with no offices. One method of tallying was to add up one fire helmet, five buttons, and the metal frame of a wallet to equal “one person.”
Eventually, the authorities came up with totals of 83,793 killed and 40,918 injured. But this tallied only the identified and counted bodies. The authoritative U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report acknowledged that many dead were never found and never counted. “Later a figure of 90,000 to 100,000 came to be accepted, but even these immense totals are sometimes challenged as too low.” Curtis would write, “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” Not quite, but he came close.
In one night, at a cost of only fourteen planes lost, General LeMay’s gamble burned out sixteen square miles of Tokyo. Sixty-three percent of the commercial district was ash, 18 percent of Tokyo’s industrial capacity was gone, and a quarter of all its buildings had vanished. And there were a million traumatized homeless shinmin scavenging for their next meal.
Curtis had outsmarted the kaze and brought hell to the Land of the Rising Sun. And the fire war was just beginning.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Enduring the Unendurable
If we are prepared to sacrifice 20 million Japanese lives in kamikaze effort, victory will be ours.
— Admiral Takijiro Onishi, quoted in Hell in the Pacific
THE experts who had warned against General Curtis LeMay’s hunch had been wrong about American losses over Tokyo. Instead of 70 percent casualties, he had suffered less than 5 percent. Furthermore, flying at low altitudes had proved much less demanding on the B-29 engines and consumed less fuel. Curtis had hit the jackpot and immediately ordered more fire war. “It would be possible, I thought, to knock out all of Japan’s major industrial cities during the next ten days.”
Back in the U.S., General Hap Arnold was in an air force hospital. He had just suffered his fourth major heart attack, which many attributed to anxiety over his “$3 billion gamble.” Finally, with this napalm attack on Tokyo, Hap could see the beginning of the end. In a “My dear Curt” letter, he wrote: “I want to commend you and your Command on the superb operations you have conducted. A study of the Tokyo attack of March 10 and knowledge of the fact that by July 1 you will have nearly a thousand B-29s under your control, leads one to conclusions which are impressive even to old hands at bombardment operations. Under reasonably favorable conditions you should then have the ability to destroy whole industrial cities should that be required.”
Curtis had burned out the heart of one of the world’s great cities with 334 B-29s on his first try. Hap was now promising him three times that number to torch Japan.
Back home, New York Times headlines proclaimed, “B-29s FIRE 15 SQUARE MILES OF TOKYO,” hitting “Thickly Populated Center of Big City.” A day later, the paper’s headline drove home the same message: “CENTER OF TOKYO DEVASTATED BY FIRE BOMBS,” with “City’s Heart Gone.” The Times measured the destruction using a comparable area of Manhattan. The article referred to “jellied gasoline,” and a correspondent who accompanied the mission reported, “I not only saw Tokyo burning furiously in many sections, but I smelled it.”
Airmen in Washington were worried that if the public understood that Americans were pouring gasoline indiscriminately on civilians, there would be complaints—and with reason. One of General MacArthur’s aides, Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, described the Tokyo raid in a confidential memo as “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history.” But instead of halting such raids, Washington sent a message to Curtis stating that U.S. “editorial comment [is] beginning to wonder about blanket incendiary attacks upon cities therefore [we] urge you [to] continue hitting hard your present line that this destruction is necessary to eliminate home industries and that it is strategic bombing.” Just to make sure he got the point, the message ended, “Guard against anyone stating this is area bombing.”
At a March 23 Washington press conference, army air force spokesmen didn’t speak of human carnage. Instead, everything was reduced to dry cost-benefit statistics: “1,200,000 factory workers . . . made homeless,” and “at least 100,000 man-months” of labor lost to Japan, and “360,000,000 sq. ft. of highly industrialized land . . . leveled to ashes.”
As to the use of napalm, it was just “the economical method of destroying the small industries in these areas . . . of bringing about their liquidation.” When asked about “the reasoning behind this switch from explosives to incendiaries,” the spokesman dodged the question, claiming that the mission was still “the reduction of Japanese ability to produce war goods.”
In 1937, when Japan first bombed Chinese cities, the New York Times headlined two hundred deaths as a “Slaughter of Noncombatants.” The very idea of airplanes killing “civilian victims” was shocking front-page news. Now the press followed the American government line. Newspapers noted, “Tokyo is a prime military target, so recognized under the rules of war and . . . civilians remain there to man Japan’s armament industries at their own peril.” And in case anyone was feeling bad about napalming women and children, the New York Herald Tribune assured its readers that “the incendiary raids cause little loss of life but drive inhabitants into the country and destroy their industrial utility.”
But Radio Tokyo referred to the new U.S. policy as “slaughter bombing.” The Tokyo fire chief informed the emperor that “the United States had the capability to burn down all Japan’s cities and that he and his men could do little to stop the fires.”
Of course, if the Spirit boys had been rational, there never would have been a Tokyo fire raid. Saipan’s fall in the summer of 1944, combined with knowledge of how the U.S. had bombed Germany, made it obvious that the Americans could obliterate Japan’s cities. But even now that the worst had happened, the military retained a stiff upper lip. A foreign diplomat serving in Tokyo later wrote, “No Japanese would yet let himself say the forbidden words ‘Nippon maketa’— Japan is beaten—but one could see the thought lurking behind the wooden faces.” That included the emperor, who finally—eight days after the raid—“set forth in a general’s uniform and riding boots” to survey the damage. Hirohito silently observed his huddled shinmin atop the scorched earth. Then the Boy Soldier returned to his palace in his sparkling limousine with its imperial flag snapping in the wind. And the holy war continued.
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