by Jon Erwin
Public parks and large buildings offered no refuge from the flames—waves of fire rolled over multitudes of civilians. Thousands died on the open grounds of the mammoth Sensō-ji temple in Asakusa. A thousand people who sought shelter inside the Meijiza Theater, an imposing five-story ferroconcrete building in the Nihonbashi District, were killed when the roof collapsed and the whole building was incinerated.
Some victims, realizing they were trapped in a collapsing labyrinth of fire with no way out, simply stopped running, surrendered to the spirit of shikada ga nai (“it is hopeless to try to do more”), turned toward the imperial palace, and knelt down in the street to pray as the fire overwhelmed them.
Saotome Katsumoto,21 a twelve-year-old boy, found himself running through the streets with his family, desperately searching for shelter from the rain of fire. “The wind fanned the fires and the fires fed the wind,” he recalled. “Countless sparks and embers bore down on us, humming like a swarm of bees.” He was stunned by the bizarre apparitions of fleeing people. “It seems that folks completely lose their heads in such situations. While escaping we had seen people carrying tatami mats on their backs, with stone weights used for radish pickling loaded on their bicycles, or with blankets draped over their shoulders like the comic book superhero Golden Bat. But Mrs. Torii and her son were even more unforgettable. She had a futon wrapped around her, fastened with thick straw rope, and several pairs of wooden clogs tied to her waist with silk. Her son was wearing an adult’s steel helmet with two floor cushions tied around his waist at the front and back and wooden clogs hanging from the silk thread. I looked at him in open-mouthed amazement.”
A B-29 emerged from the reddish-purple flames and came straight toward the boy’s family, flying so low it seemed to be scraping the top of telegraph poles.
“Reflected in the flames, its wings gleamed bright red like dripping blood,” recalled Saotome. Bombs fell and “in an instant the whole area around me was a picture of hell” as blood and body parts littered the landscape.
“We carried on running as the bombs fell from all directions, dodging sputtering incendiaries lodged in the ground and jumping over dead bodies on the road as if we were running an obstacle race.”
When he got to the Sumida River in the late morning, Saotome was frozen in horror at the sight of a team of civil defense corpsmen at work. “Looking down, I saw that the river was full of burned and drowned corpses. The men were reeling in the bodies with hooked poles. They bound the stiff corpses with ropes, hauled them up onto the quay, and laid them down in rows like tuna at a fish market. Then I noticed that my father was standing behind me. ‘Take a good look, Katsumoto,’ he said. ‘Look and never forget. This is what war is.’ I clearly remember the way he spoke, muttering the words under his breath.”
After the bombing started, police photographer Ishikawa Koyo managed to commandeer a police vehicle and searched for a way to help people evacuate. “As I was driving at full speed along Showa Road, fire trucks and police security patrol vehicles overtook me, their sirens wailing,” he recounted decades later. “When I got to the Asakusabashi crossroads, I was confronted with a gruesome spectacle—a conflagration of raging flames swirling in the wind. At Ryogoku Bridge, I saw an endless stream of escaping people coming toward me over the bridge from the other side. The congestion and confusion defy description. A policeman was shouting in a shrill voice as he tried to guide the crowds, women were screaming, and civil defense corpsmen were barking instructions. In the sky above, as if they were mocking us, the B-29s were still flying serenely through the black smoke at such low altitude that it seemed you could hold out your hand and touch them. As they descended to drop their bombs again and again, the fires on the ground were reflected on their bodies. With the bright-red flames flickering on their huge fuselages and four engines, they looked like winged demons from Hell.”
From a hill overlooking downtown Tokyo, German Catholic priest Gustav Bitter gazed completely spellbound at the infernal spectacle. “They came in majesty,”22 he wrote of the American bombers, “like kings of the Earth. The flak from the ground poured up toward them, but they held their course, proud and regal and haughty, as if they said, ‘I am too great for any man to do me harm.’ I watched them as if I were in a trance.” Father Bitter described “the red and yellow flames reflected from below on the silvery undersides [of the planes] so that they were like giant dragon flies with jeweled wings against the upper darkness.”
Hashimoto Yoshiko, a twenty-four-year-old mother, found herself on a raft in a river, clinging to her thirteen-month-old son, Hiroshi, whose eyes were wide open in shock. “As the raft floated along, I looked up at Sanno Bridge. The flames were leaping like living creatures among the terrified crowds with a tremendous roaring sound. In the water underneath the bridge, people huddled together under a sheet of burned tinplate were frantically chanting sutras [Buddhist scriptures].”
When nineteen-year-old Kokubo Takako heard a roar of hooves, she thought she saw phantoms, and then realized it was a pack of snorting horses, some of their manes on fire, running straight toward her. “Scared out of my wits, I couldn’t breathe and my legs went stiff. It was on a narrow street with the canal on the left and burning houses on the right. There was no place to hide. As I pressed myself close to the side of a garbage box, I thought ‘I’m not even married and I’m about to be trampled to death by wild horses.’ I just cowered there and begged them to spare me.”
Kokubo made it to the edge of a canal, where a mob was panicking at the entrance to a bridge whose wooden girders were aflame. “I said a prayer to the memorial tablets in my bag, jumped onto the flaming bridge and dashed across it,” she remembered. “Behind me I heard someone shout ‘It’s all right, we can make it across!’ and everyone followed me. When I got to the other side and turned around to look, the bridge was no longer there. It had collapsed and fallen into the canal together with the people on it. The moaning, screaming, and desperate cries of children calling out for their mothers were unbearable. The burning bridge had crumbled and fallen into the water over them with a terrible crackling and hissing. It was like a scene from Hell. Red flames were swelling above the water and twisting over it like huge snakes. Trying desperately to find something to cling on to above the surface, people were throwing up their hands and shaking their heads from side to side as they squirmed for dear life.”
Koyo Ishikawa, a Tokyo policeman, spent the night amid the ruins of a house, lying still in a sunken bathtub, soaked in water. “I could hear the sound of houses burning,23 houses collapsing, B-29s overhead and firebombs exploding,” he said. At one point he peered out and saw a woman running for shelter. “All of her clothes suddenly caught fire at once,” he remembered. “The wind blew her down and she rolled, burning and screaming.”
There were many accounts of babies being carried on their mothers’ backs and catching fire. On the banks of the Sumida River, hundreds of people sought refuge only to be pushed into the water by newcomers and drowned.
Seizo Hashimoto, a thirteen-year-old boy, saw a woman dressed in a red kimono “seized by the firestorm, whipped and twisted in the air,24 and ignited: a human torch.”
A Dutch diplomat, watching the scene from a few kilometers away, described the cylinders of incendiary napalm jelly floating down “like a cascade of silvery water.”25
Kikujima Koji, a thirteen-year-old boy, was swept with his family into a mob trying to escape over the Kototoi Bridge that spanned the Sumida River. “We were caught between the people pushing us26 forward from behind and the wave of people and their luggage bearing down on us from the front. Unable to move forward or backward, the six of us became nailed against the railings on the right of the bridge. Two fire trucks had also been brought to a standstill next to us and a fireman was yelling in a hoarse voice. The night sky was scorched red with fire. From the direction of Asakusa, a blizzard of sparks and embers was blowing over the bridge and our heads. In no time people’s belongings caught fire and
there was no way of putting them out.”
Pilot Robert Morgan witnessed the same scene from a few thousand feet above: “On a bridge spanning the Kototoi River,27 a mob fleeing in one direction collided with a mob headed toward them. Seven tons of fresh firebombs incinerated the whole vast horde.”
Several thousand people perished at this one spot of Tokyo. According to Morgan, “It was claimed, in later years, that screams could be heard aboard some of the B-29s trailing in at 7,000 feet.”
The fires in various Tokyo neighborhoods connected and created a conflagration consisting of waves of fire preceded by a wall of superheated vapors that ignited everything flammable in their path.
“A fully developed firestorm is a horrifically mesmerizing sight,”28 wrote Barrett Tillman. “It seems a living, malicious creature that feeds upon itself, generating ever higher winds that whirl cyclonically, breeding updrafts that suck the oxygen out of the atmosphere even while the flames consume the fuel—buildings—that feed the monster’s ravenous appetite. Most firestorm victims do not burn to death. Rather, as carbon monoxide quickly reaches lethal levels, people suffocate from lack of oxygen and excessive smoke inhalation. In those frightful hours humans watched things happen on a scale that probably had never been seen. The superheated ambient air boiled the water out of ponds and canals while rains of liquid glass flew, propelled by cyclonic winds. Temperatures reached 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, melting the frames of emergency vehicles and causing some people to erupt in spontaneous combustion.”
Hideo Tsuchikura, a factory worker, peered out of his makeshift shelter inside a water tank atop a school building and looked out at the city. He recalled seeing “fire-winds filled with burning particles29 rushing up and down the streets. I watched people—adults and children—running for their lives, dashing madly about like rats. The flames raced after them like living things, striking them down. They died by the hundreds right in front of me. Wherever I turned my eyes, I saw people running away from the school grounds seeking air to breathe. They raced away from the school in a devils’ cauldron of twisting, seething fire. The whole spectacle with its blinding lights and thundering noise reminded me of the paintings of purgatory—a real inferno out of the depths of Hell itself.”
In a prison cell inside a filthy horse stable on the outer edge of the imperial palace grounds in the center of Tokyo, Raymond F. “Hap” Halloran, a captured American navigator, experienced the horror of the firebombing at ground level. He was twenty-three years old and enduring his sixth week of torture, starvation, and solitary confinement in enemy captivity.
Every day his captors beat him with rifle butts. They beat all parts of his body. Every day he feared execution as a war criminal or dying of his wounds, lost and forgotten in a black hole of despair. Every day, for much of the day, he cried uncontrollably. It was an involuntary reflex to the horrors he was enduring, but somehow he felt it gave him an outlet of relief. And every day, throughout the day, he uttered short prayers and dialogues with God, repeating them over and over. They were variations on a central thought, a single phrase he repeated over and over: God, I need Your help now, please.
Hap Halloran and Red Erwin did not know each other. Their crews had been based on different islands; Halloran on Saipan and Erwin on Guam. But they shared an unshakable faith in God and the power of prayer.
Sixty years later, several years after my grandfather died, I met Hap Halloran at a reunion of B-29 veterans. He was a tall, powerfully built man who exuded confidence, vitality, and humor. At first he punctuated our rapid-fire conversation with reassuring, infectious bursts of booming laughter.
On January 27, 1945, the day Hap Halloran was shot down over Japan, he was aboard a plane that had two nicknames—V-Square 27 and Rover Boys Express—assigned to the 878th Bomb Squadron, 499th Bomb Group, 73rd Bomb Wing. They were on their fourth combat mission. As they neared the target, the squadron was intercepted by swarms of fighters in a fierce, running air battle.
Hap told me, “Our target was the Nakajima Aircraft Engine Plant west of the Tokyo outskirts. It was heavily defended with fighters and antiaircraft fire. We had lost planes previously over that target and our apprehension was strong. On that particular day, January 27, we only had sixty-seven planes. I’ve heard it described as the toughest mission over the toughest target. At the preflight briefing, they told us, you’ll experience light flak and antiaircraft fire over the target today, and there will be very few, if any, fighter planes at your altitude. You know, ‘Good luck!’ They were wrong. It turned out there were over three hundred fighters up to meet us that day.”
When they began their bomb run, at about 30,000 feet and just after passing Mount Fuji, as the bomb bay doors were opening, a twin-engine interceptor, a Kawasaki Ki-45 Toryu (“Dragonslayer”), flying at the edge of its operational altitude, made a single catastrophic pass at Halloran’s B-29. The enemy plane shredded the American plane with 37-mm cannon fire that killed one gunner, wounded two crewmen, blew out the nose of the plane, and disabled the instruments, electrical system, and three of the four engines. The bomber was unflyable.
The crew began abandoning the aircraft at 27,000 feet over a northeast suburb of Tokyo, plunging into a blast of –58 degrees Fahrenheit, a sudden 128-degree drop from the cabin temperature of 70 degrees. Before jumping out, Halloran, not sure when he would eat again, wolfed down a turkey sandwich and chocolate pudding he’d brought along. He snapped on his parachute and hurled himself into the thin air.
Halloran knew that Japanese pilots often killed parachutists in midair, so he dropped 23,000 feet in free fall before pulling the rip cord at about 3,500 feet. Drifting under his parachute, his heart sank when he saw three Japanese planes closing in on him, so close that their propeller wash sent his parachute into a violent swinging motion. Two peeled off, but the third came to within 200 feet of the helpless airman, seemingly for the kill.
There was nothing he could do, so for some reason, Halloran decided to wave at the Japanese pilot. “He throttled back and was just below me slightly and I was hanging in the chute. I could look right down onto him, and I thought he was going to shoot me. But he stayed below me. And he raised his hand in a salute. I thought, What’s going on here? I couldn’t even conceptualize what just happened. Then he pulled away.”
For some reason, the pilot spared Halloran’s life and offered him the salute of a chivalrous brother airman. But looking down, Halloran could see throngs of people, as many as two thousand, following his parachute. He braced himself and made an extremely hard landing.
At this point in the story, Halloran’s voice wavered and tears formed in his eyes. “I was laying there, and they moved in,” he said. “I was beaten severely with clubs and metal bars. And rocks.”
He paused. “You know, it was pretty tough—”
Halloran began to cry, burying his face in his hands and trembling severely. Just a few minutes before, he was an avuncular, room-filling presence whose laughter boomed off the walls. Now he was a huddled, sobbing figure, transported in time into the body of a twenty-three-year-old who was being beaten to death.
His head sank low as he sobbed uncontrollably. He appeared to feel once again the waves of pain he absorbed over and over on that day sixty years ago.
Slowly Halloran composed himself. “I had no control,” he explained, regaining the narrative. “There was nothing I could do. I faded in and out. Then I looked up and saw these strange faces and thought it was just like a bad dream. I was helpless. Then, after a while, some soldiers came in and I was loaded onto a truck. Another minute or two and I would have been dead.”
Halloran was in critical condition with blunt-force injuries all over his body, but he was denied medical care. Instead, he was taken to the downtown Tokyo headquarters and torture chambers of the dreaded Japanese military police, the Kempeitai, an organization described by POW Fiske Hanley as a group of “sadistic goons, especially picked for their brutality.”30
Guns were placed to
Halloran’s head, and he was ordered to sign both a confession that he had intentionally bombed civilians and a waiver of Geneva Convention rules requiring humane treatment for prisoners of war. He was then placed in a cage and tortured and interrogated for weeks. When he was given any food, it was infested with bugs. He soon lost 100 pounds in weight. Chained up in a horse stable beside the moat surrounding the imperial palace, Halloran and other imprisoned airmen spent the night of the March 9–10 firebombing in a state of terror as they sensed all of Tokyo was on fire.
Several weeks later, Halloran was subjected to an especially fiendish humiliation. He was stripped naked and placed on public display as an attraction at the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo, the oldest zoo in Japan. In 1943 the zoo had closed after all the animals had been poisoned, strangled, or starved to death by city officials who were afraid the beasts would run loose in the streets in the event of an air raid. Now the zoo was reopened, with Hap Halloran as the sole exhibition.
“I was in a tiger cage,” he said. “It reminded me of the Cincinnati Zoo with the bars in the front. I was all alone. I couldn’t stand. My hands were tied to the bars, and I had running sores from the fleas and bedbugs. I was trying to look like an air force guy and give it my best and look as good as I could—but I probably didn’t look very good.”
For two days, Tokyo citizens filed by to gawk at Halloran in the tiger cage. “Most of the people who walked by were elderly ladies,” he recalled. “A few of them had babies. But somehow, either truthfully or by desire, I saw compassion in the eyes of some of those ladies as they turned sideways and looked up at me. Maybe I saw it. Maybe I was just hoping for it. Maybe they had a son somewhere who also was going through pain.”
Through all his ordeal as a prisoner, Hap Halloran prayed a short, simple prayer over and over, as he did on the night of March 9–10, 1945, when Tokyo fell into the fires of hell: God, I need Your help now, please.