Those conditions were met over Tokyo on the night of March 9–10, 1945.
Civil Defense
Humans are supreme procrastinators, and no better example exists than in the near universal indifference to the threat of bombing. Despite months, years, or even decades of awareness, no capital city was prepared for enemy air attack in the Second World War. London, within easy range of France, waited until the last minute to begin adding more firemen, standardizing equipment, and refining procedures. Britain only consolidated the national auxiliary fire service with local organizations in 1941. That same year the Berlin Feuerschutzpolizei had fewer than 2,000 firemen, apparently owing to Hermann Göring’s boast that Reich airspace would remain inviolate.
Despite the European examples, Japan failed to heed the obvious lessons. Once cities began burning, the nation’s near total lack of civil defense would have generated a political firestorm in most other nations. Instead, Japan’s population had no option but to endure the genuine conflagrations that winged their way north from the Marianas.
As was often the case in Japan, civil defense lacked central command. Control was split between a national organization in Tokyo and those nominally at the prefecture level but actually run by community associations. The result was inefficiency and duplication of effort.
It needn’t have been so, as the national government knew a great deal about catastrophe. In 1923 an 8.3-magnitude earthquake—“the Great Kanto”—destroyed 60 percent of Tokyo and 80 percent of Yokohama, killing as many as 140,000 people. Whipped by winds, widespread fires consumed vast areas, including much of the region’s industrial facilities, causing long-term economic effects. Rebuilding took a decade, with lesser but still significant quakes striking the main island of Honshu in 1927 and 1933 that killed 6,000 or more.
Incredibly, twenty-two years after the Great Kanto Earthquake, merely six Japanese cities maintained full-time fire departments; the others relied on volunteers. However, even Tokyo’s measures were inadequate. As one historian has written, the Tokyo fire department was driven “by ritual more than science.” Dating from the 1880s, the department’s formal uniform included a sword, evidence of its founding by an order of medieval knights. While the agency never lacked for Bushido élan—frequently a company’s flag-bearer was the first into a burning building—the firemen desperately needed modern equipment.
Tokyo had begun occasional air raid drills circa 1930 but held relatively few until July 1941. However, the latter were likely morale-building efforts to inure the population to prospects for war. In any case, the Ministry of Home Affairs slowly increased the size of existing fire departments and created new ones in selected industrial areas, although still relying upon amateur forces.
But the expansion of civil defense created its own problems. A postwar assessment concluded, “Men were recruited so rapidly that proper training was not possible. Peacetime fire departments were increased from three to five times their normal size. Tokyo’s department was enlarged from 2,000 firemen to 8,100 men, including 2,700 junior firemen in 287 stations. An effort was made to increase personnel to 12,500, but the manpower shortage in Japan made it prohibitive.”
By contrast, in 1945 the Fire Department of New York was composed of more than 9,000 men. Organized into 365 companies (225 engine, 126 hook-and-ladder, and several rescue, specialist, and support companies), they could access more than 91,000 hydrants throughout the city.
Japanese administrative policy only complicated the situation. As in Germany, in major metropolitan areas the police oversaw fire protection, but the Japanese variant lacked the Nazi advantage of competence. Consequently, Allied analysts deemed Japanese efforts unprofessional because local police were incompetent in firefighting. The situation was compounded by vastly different missions and mind-sets: the police focused on controlling a large population rather than protecting it from external threats of biblical proportions.
While Japan’s actual firefighting structure made sense—cities were divided into divisions, battalions, and stations—equipment proved wholly insufficient. Not even the Tokyo department’s considerable expansion was adequate. From 280 trucks, carts, and portable pumps in 1943 the capital’s inventory grew to 1,117 two years later, as Tokyo received nearly all the wartime production. Excepting a few American-made rigs dating from the 1920s, the 559 domestically produced 450 gallon-per-minute pumps were among the largest in Japan—a fraction of what American rigs could produce. The deficit was taken up by commandeering lesser equipment from outlying towns.
The “large equipment” was laughable, even in high-priority areas. A fire company’s typical inventory included a four-pound axe, two twelve-foot ladders, two pike poles, two four-foot crowbars, an eighteen-foot length of one-inch rope, a fifty-foot length of one-and-a-half-inch rope, two smoke masks, three spare nozzles, forty sections of two-and-a-half-inch single-jacketed linen hose, and two hose carts. Almost any American fireman visiting Japan would have been astonished at the absence of basic gear. One survey noted, “The common portable fire extinguisher of the CO2, carbon tetrachloride, foam, and water pump can types were not used by Japanese firemen.”
In one of the most urbanized nations on earth there were four aerial ladders: three in Tokyo and one in Kyoto. But in 1945 only one of Tokyo’s trucks was operational, a German-built eighty-five-foot extension. Their 500-gpm pumps were therefore largely useless.
As an island nation, Japan should have led the world in marine fire protection. But in 1942, Tokyo had merely three small pumper boats to cover perhaps 100 miles of waterfront, canals, and rivers. By 1945, eight “navy-type patrol boats” had been obtained, featuring 500-gpm pumps. The boats produced the largest water streams in the country, but still barely one inch wide. In vivid contrast, at the same time New York City operated ten boats, most capable of 7,000 gpm and two producing 18,000 and 20,000 gpm.
Even where fire trucks were available, many were idle. A shortage of mechanics and spare parts rendered approximately 20 percent inoperable during 1944–45. Kyoto may have been the only city with fully powered equipment, the others relying wholly or largely upon manually operated gear. Moreover, backup equipment was seldom available.
Before the March fire raids, every department save Tokyo’s was limited to two hours of gasoline per engine. It was a penurious policy: during the March 14 attack on Osaka, forty-eight pieces of equipment burned where they stood, out of fuel. Thereafter a five-hour supply was approved for the remaining pumpers. Even then, fuel drums were seldom delivered where needed in the smoke and confusion of a major conflagration.
No Shelter
Given Japan’s inability to defend its airspace, and the universal ineffectiveness of fire protection, the last resort was air raid shelters. But there, too, the government failed on a colossal scale. In 1940 an American military attaché in Tokyo noted that the few bomb shelters were “totally inadequate.” His report demonstrated how little the Japanese had learned from the hard experience of earthquake-induced fires.
Some official explanations for poor preparations sound disingenuous. Home Affairs Minister Genki Abe reflected, “The reason we had no definite policy of air raid shelter protection . . . is that we did not unduly wish to alarm our citizens concerning the necessity for underground shelters, as we feared it would interfere with normal routine life and have some effect on war production.” He conceded that after the late May raids on Tokyo, most residents considered civilian defense “a futile effort.” Lacking sufficient steel and concrete for major shelters, a poor substitute was tunnels bored into the sides of large hills.
Meanwhile, in the summer of 1944 Japan began cutting blockwide firebreaks through some urban areas. Tokyo reported 615,000 buildings razed to clear areas for firebreaks, though four times that number were destroyed by bombing. The one advantage was that the wide swaths provided relatively uncluttered escape routes for people who otherwise would have been trapped in congested streets.
There was one notable excepti
on. In late 1942 an air raid shelter was constructed inside the Imperial Palace, and the royal couple spent increasing time there from December 1944, after XXI Bomber Command began operations. However, rather than publicly conceding the need for the all-highest to seek refuge in a bunker, the facility was designated “the library Obunko.”
Thus did the subjects of the reclusive Showa tenno hope to survive the destruction of their cities and their nation.
Tokyo Aflame
Mission 40 from the Marianas was code-named Meetinghouse. It set such a standard of success that each subsequent fire raid was called “a Meetinghouse.”
Of 325 B-29s airborne on March 9, 279 unloaded 1,665 tons on the Tokyo urban area while twenty planes diverted to alternates. LeMay’s weight-saving measures worked dramatically well. The fuel saved by stripping guns from most B-29s and cruising at lower altitudes had doubled the February ordnance average to nearly six tons per bomber.
Approaching the Japanese coast beneath a quarter-moon, B-29 crews tugged on flak vests—heavy, cumbersome garments with steel plates that could stop a shell splinter. Some also donned helmets that interfered with earphones, but the airmen were flying into the enemy’s most cherished piece of sky at a frighteningly low altitude.
The primary target was a section of downtown Tokyo measuring three by four miles, recalled by historian John Toland as “once the gayest, liveliest area in the Orient.” Though wartime shortages had closed most businesses, the area teemed with life: an estimated 750,000 workers crammed into twelve square miles of low-income housing and family-operated factories. It was probably the most densely populated place on earth.
The sirens blared at midnight but evidently few Japanese were concerned. They were accustomed to repeated alerts, mostly annoying false alarms. Furthermore, radio reports only mentioned American aircraft orbiting at Choshi, a port city fifty miles northeast—no immediate threat to the capital.
Choshi was one of the coast-in points for XXI Bomber Command.
The first bombers were pathfinders, sweeping in low and fast over Tokyo, doing nearly 300 miles per hour at 5,000 feet. Their navigators had worked to perfection with an identical time over target of 12:15 A.M. Approaching at right angles to each other, the B-29s’ bomb bay doors snapped open and the bombardiers toggled their loads. Bundles of M47 incendiaries spewed into the slipstream, cascading onto the urban congestion that was Tokyo. As the napalm sticks ignited they formed a fiery cross on the ground.
The pathfinders did their work well, marking targets for the following bombardiers. Among the best work was the load that marked the Tokyo Electric Power Company. The firebombs seared the buildings, which were engulfed in flames, providing an almost unmissable aim point.
For trailing bombers, X literally marked the spot. Each group and wing had designated target areas, as mission planners had divided the sprawling city into fire zones to avoid excessive concentration in one locale. Attacking between 4,900 and 9,200 feet, 93 percent of the B-29s struck the briefed urban-industrial area. As LeMay foretold, the defenses were wholly saturated. Searchlights swept their pale white arcs skyward, occasionally illuminating a passing bomber, but seldom long enough for flak gunners to draw a bead.
It was Major Arthur Ray Brashear’s tenth mission. The 499th Bomb Group’s target was the First Fire Zone between the Ara and Sumida Rivers. His navigator’s notes summed up most fliers’ reactions to the defenses: “Night incendiary at 5,000 ft. KEE RISTE! Caught in lights for a short time. All kinds of flak, mostly inaccurate. No hits but this one had us scared! No fighters.”
Almost half a million M69s cascaded down from the night sky, and wherever they hit they spurted their napalm-filled cheesecloth bags. In a matter of minutes thousands of small fires from the little “fiery pancakes” were swallowing everything they touched, coalescing and swelling into a roaring conflagration unlike anything man had previously inflicted upon man, anywhere on earth, Dresden included.
A Vichy French journalist reported the scene, writing in the present tense common in Europe, “Bright flashes illuminate the sky’s shadows, Christmas trees blossoming with flame in the depths of the night, then hurtling downward in zigzagging bouquets of flame, whistling as they fall. Barely 15 minutes after the beginning of the attack, the fire whipped up by the wind starts to rake through the depths of the wooden city.”
As the sky over the city became superheated, huge amounts of air were sucked upward through multistory buildings in the “stack effect,” draining the cool air from ground level to feed the insatiable stack. As more and more ground air was drawn into the conflagration from further afield, the storm naturally spread of its own predatory accord.
A fully developed firestorm is a horrifically mesmerizing sight. 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 Tokyo that night some citizens felt that hell had slipped its nether bounds and raised itself through the earth’s crust to feed on the surface. People fled panic-stricken from searing heat amid the demonic roar of flames, the crash of collapsing buildings, and the milling congestion of terrified human beings. Some survivors found themselves suddenly naked, the clothes burned off their bodies, leaving the skin largely intact.
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.
With barely 8,000 firemen to cover an area of 213 square miles, decades of Japanese unpreparedness and complacency took their terrible toll. There were insufficient shelters and, perhaps worst of all, too few fire lanes to provide buffers that might prevent one conflagration from spreading into another. But even adequate firebreaks might not have helped, not on that night. The bombers possessed an invincible ally in the form of stiff southeasterly winds that whipped and whirled burning embers from one neighborhood to another. Wherever the fiery brands alit, they spread the flames uncontrollably.
Tokyo’s fire department fought a losing battle from the first few minutes. The fire chief spent a horrible night dashing from one area to another, trying to coordinate his insufficient resources. His sedan caught fire twice.
The firemen were gallantly ineffective with their towed water carts and hand pumps—poor substitutes for gasoline-driven trucks, many of which were stalled in the human congestion and, immobilized, melted into the street. Nearly 100 fire trucks were incinerated with 128 firemen and perhaps 500 auxiliaries assigned to help them. Those numbers, pitifully small within the greater catastrophe, further emphasize Tokyo’s woeful unpreparedness over the previous three years.
Extension ladders that could have helped suppress fires in multistory buildings were almost nonexistent, and of limited use where power and phone lines formed a barrier that prevented such equipment from extending beyond the overhead latticework.
It was no better in residential areas, where the burden fell upon thousands of pitifully prepared neighborhood associations. Small groups of families swore to uphold government dictates to swat at fires with dampened cloths or sandbags, and vainly doused blazing napalm with buckets of water. Historian Richard Frank attributed much of the massive death toll to the no-retreat policy. He concluded, “The key to survival was to grasp quickly that the situation was hopeless and flee.”
Everywhere people were thrown upon their own meager resources. Hidezo Tsuchikura saved his family and himself by climbing into a water tank on a school roof. Though a factory worker, Tsuchikura made a Dantesqu
e comparison. “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.”
Susumu Takahashi, a teenage medical student, watched the spectacle from a neighborhood overlooking the primary target area. His studies had been interrupted by the sirens but he shunned his family’s rudimentary shelter to cram for an upcoming test. When the house ignited he gamely tried to beat out the flames but soon realized the futility. Grabbing his texts, he dashed outside. One end of the street appeared a roaring wall of flame so Takahashi ran to his left, passing an immobilized fire engine with limp hoses. Firemen directed people to cross the bridge over the Kanda River, but the path was blocked by more flames. The seventeen-year-old student took responsibility beyond his age, leading a line of stragglers through a gap in the fire-choked street. He leapt charred, fallen trees and phone poles, strewn around “like match sticks.” Gasping for breath in the cloying smoke, Susumu Takahashi reached the safety of the concrete bridge—the only structure in sight that had not burned.
Not even the Imperial Bunker was immune. When the firestorm’s high winds dropped burning embers onto the emperor’s Obunko, shrubs and camouflage material were ignited, and palace guards and staff were reduced to subduing the flames with water pails and even tree branches.
Safely underground, Emperor Hirohito and Empress Kojun sat out the attack in their bunker. The empress had observed her forty-second birthday three days previously, and now they had planned on celebrating their grandson’s first. Instead, they tasted the acrid outside air that slipped through the filters and vents.
General Tom Power’s B-29 had fuel to spare and circled the spreading inferno for ninety minutes, radioing a play-by-play of the growing catastrophe. Because post-strike photos would not be available for a day or more, he had some cartographers onboard to plot the extent of the fires for immediate assessment back at Guam. He noted that it took just thirty minutes for the first bombs to spread into a fully developed conflagration. Actually, it was half that time. On the ground, some witnesses reported that from the moment the first firebombs struck, only fourteen minutes passed before “the hellfire began.”
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